Grigory Poincaré

He stood his ground, one phantom leg astride the median, javelins of grass shooting up through the mud-splattered concrete. ‘have you no conscience?’ he said, ‘you who think faith a gambol and a foist’. It would only be a matter of time before the whole shooting match disbanded, each to his own heading back from whence they came. When no one spoke, which they did mutely, he yelled at the top of his lungs ‘then fuck you all!’ Hopping from one phantom leg to the other he foisted his way down the street, the veins in his throat bulging.

The first time he met Grigory Poincaré he was hunkered over a bowl of soup, specks of meat and carrots floating on the surface like drowned men. Having arrived early he had been the first to be ushered in through the weighty oak-framed doors of the soup kitchen. Grigory Poincaré lived in a boycotter’s house with a caved-in roof. The house looked like his grandpapa’s but for the cardboard flaps hanging in shreds from the transom and windowsills. ‘I’m feeling bone flaccid’ he said, his ears red as halved pomegranates. The day of the Feast of the Unfaithful Grigory Poincaré bought half a sow and three yellow succulent melons, cooking the half sow over an open pit, the fat spitting and hissing on the red coals, and slicing the melons into smile-like pieces, enough to fill the biggest maw. For the toothless he made a boar hash seasoned with green peppercorns and black fennel.

‘i have blak marks on my nick and between my legs how can i get red of them?’ beseeched a fatly woman weeping. ‘yes’ said a stout portly man holding his head high, ‘but the Liver Is the Cock's Comb’. Her legs bowing like cobble sticks, the weeping fatly woman said a second time ‘i have blak marks on my nick and between my legs how can i get red of them?’ Sherman Arshile hanged himself in his woolshed 46, or was it 44 days after the Feast of the Blest Virgin. Poor swaying sod. Sherman Arshile, a slight man with sharp equine features and green peppercorn eyes, lived out his lonely life in the woolshed behind his grandparent’s house. Having soiled and sullied the inside of the shed, his grandparent’s refused to have anything to do with it; stowing their garden tools, potting pots, dirt, flats and clippers in the boot-room leading out the back door of their house.

Errant Knight

All stories are the same; they tell us about our own lives’. Look at me when I talk to you! I’ve smote bigger men that you! In his head he hears evil mad things. No matter which leg he stood on he heard things in his head, loud clamorous things. SERVES YOU RIGHT, a voice yelled in his ear, DAMN YOU!

“While this conversation, amusing to all except” the legless man “was proceeding, they ascended the staircase and ushered” him “into a chamber hung with rich cloth of gold and brocade; six damsels relieved him of” his pushcart pole “and waited on him like pages, all of them prepared and instructed by the duke and duchess as to what they were to do, and how they were to treat” the legless man “so that he might see and believe they were treating him like a knight-errant”. (pilfered and bastardized from Don Quixote)

The legless man heard this in the eye of his mind, playing it over and over again like an unwanted tune. 'my mind’s eye is a slaughterhouse' he thought ‘a place of mincing and dicing, chopping and splitting, rendering flesh and bone flaccid and cooperative’. Blinking he continued ‘mind’s eye my eye… there is no such thing’.

Hedge Mice

His father bought him a used bicycle with two flat tyres. The bicycle sat in the woolshed next to the gin, the saddle torn in halves down the middle. Everywhere he went he thought of the bicycle, the two flat tyres and mangled saddle with the gold speckles on it. ‘the world, my boy, is full of beasts and imbeciles’ said his father, his eyelid drooping from the burst vessel in his head. Albrecht, his best friend when he was a boy, lived under a Texas gate, the grid-work shit-bearded with axel grease. Best friends being the least worst of the worst, he loved Albrecht with all his heart. Albrecht didn’t care that he had a bicycle with two flat tyres and a torn saddle, or that his da made his commode over a trench sitting on a log, the log creaking and buckling.

The first time he met Lela she was wearing a robin’s egg blue summer dress with a loose thread. She was admiring her reflection in the grocer’s window, her hair swept away from her face and shoulders. Sad bastard tiss a shame, and wearing that threefold bard’s cap instead of a panama or a straw boater. The daring of some people. Imbeciles and halfwits! Burst a vessel in his head, eyelids drooping like shad flies. Next thing you know he’ll be hold out under one of those Texas gates shit-bearded with axel grease hand-feeding hedge mice. We live our lives’ moving forward looking backwards. Some scatterbrain from the Netherlands said that, no less a bush burning philologist than a Christian apologist. Apologists’: a quid a dozen, five for a half-pence.

Forgetting where he was going the man in the hat stood in the middle of the sideways, his straw boater doddering on the top of his freshly shaven head. ‘what now and where to?’ he asked himself. ‘some days are better than others’ he whispered lowly not wanting to invite the wrath of a cheat or a robber. ‘perhaps I am nowhere. It makes no difference really… the day will unfold as it should regardless of my protestations to the contrary. Whatever contrary, it makes little difference. It could be anything, anything at all, contraries being what they are, opposition to affableness and sociability’.

Berlin Underpants

Lela didn’t understand why beasts were so distained; they too were entitled to a pleasant smile and a welcoming handshake. Her mamma, after all, was known to wrap her thighs round the belly of the beast, the brute thrashing her round the horsehair mattress like a ragdoll. ‘never underestimate a woman’s itch’ her uncle would say, ‘they don’t know the difference between pearls and swine’.

when he turned twelve his da bought
him a secondhand bicycle with money
he saved from his job slaughtering pigs

his da was known for his precision at placing
the head of the ax into the halves of the skull,
felling the pig four legs out from the body.

pumping the tappet with his left hand he
raised the carcass over the boil, dropping
it in headfirst, his right hand obliging

the push-rod into the cogwheel,
the whirr and bustle of machinery
filling his ears with dirty thoughts.

Cranendonck Brabant and James Rodker, of whom little is known, sell oxtails from the boot of their car; a dollar-fifty-seven a tail, two links for two-dollars-five. They steal the oxtails from the offal-bin behind the Cock’s Bros. abattoir, Cranendonck retrieving and James stowing the purloined tails in his haversack. ‘for the love of God’ says, Rodker ‘this one’s full of flies’. ‘and this one’s all maggoty’ says Brabant, the two beside themselves with bad thoughts. At that moment, as if by magic, the littlest dogman appears from behind a deadfall of elms and hollyhocks, his chest puffed out like a tympanuchus cupido. Sneering he squats next to the offal-bin where the two are rummaging for oxtail. Not saying a word he pushes past the two oxtail thieves and continues down the alleyway behind the Cock’s Bros. abattoir. ‘this one’s maggoty too’ says Rodker trying to hold in his breath. ‘they’re all maggoty and full of flies’ says Brabant angrily. ‘we’ll be lucky to get one-dollar-five for these’ says Rodker squinting, the rancid odor of off-meat assailing his nostrils. ‘damn it to hell!’ says Brabant, his face as red as a gundog’s nose. (Anyhow, who in their right mind thinks about dead flies? Dare say I dare I).

He came down with the glanders, pustules and goiters forming in heaps on his neck and jowls. His grandmamma gave him Bertelsmann’s palliative followed with a tincture of Gütersloh’s digestive, the swelling diminishing round his jawbone and lower lip. ‘he’s a guttersnipe’ said the legless man, ‘and deserves what he gets’. ‘no man deserves this’ said the grandmamma, ‘not even a guttersnipe’. ‘but the damn smell’ said the legless man covering his face with his hand. ‘its worse than oxtails gone maggoty’. ‘mind you mouth!’ warned the grandmamma, ‘or it’ll be you who’s full of heaps and boils’. That winter he bought his grandmamma a doctor’s bag to tote her medicines around in, his grandmamma carrying it with her everywhere she went.

He left the whore’s glove, the one he found under the Portici portico, with the widow Zavalla, the grand-niece of Neuquén Belo. In the winter months her grandmamma made her wear Berlin underpants, the red spots on her thighs attesting to her grandmamma’s wisdom. The erstwhile Franz Biberkopf, friend to Theo Rutra and Christine Ambach, great uncle to Maria Dillenschneider and Emile Jolas, sometime acquaintance of Carl Einstein, know for his massive four-squared head, and general gadfly, sold Berlin underpants from the boot of his car.

On the Umbilicus

They fornicated on their knees, inching closer nearer the midway. ‘regard them’ said the butcher, ‘they are the animals we have been told about’. His papa wore his trousers back to front, the buttons digging into his penis. ‘papa’ he would holler, ‘your pants are on backwards’. ‘keeps a fish afloat’ his papa would answer. ‘north side wall up to the ceiling’. Of this I recall little. Beastly animals! They yell. Kill the beast! They holler. Smite it dead! He nay can sleep. Never been one for twenty winks: damn hard on the umbilicus… so it is. Never know when a lad has to go twenty with a puncher, sorry sight all that mangled flash, head bashed in pointy as a lynching cross. Last time he saw his da he was pulling up his trousers hind the Pub, nearsighted he was… no difference between an arse and an elbow. Sad state of affairs I’d say I said. And him without a tosspot. I prefers my commode sitting, beard of shit shaving the bowl. That night the man in the hat bought a pork sandwich… offal smell of halitosis soaked into the brine. Closer to the halfway, midway there by now I’d say I said. Course no ones listening, paying heed takes courage and a closed mouth. Can’t expect much from beasts and fornicators.

Æthelred the Unready

Sitting cross-legged the legless man let out a scream, a covey of ducks taking flight, skimming across the top of the aqueduct. ‘dare I dare say this is more than I can take!’ ‘shit up!’ said a voice whispering in his ear. ‘up?’ he thought, ‘I dare say I make my commode sitting down’.

Under the hedge
where my father
buried half-eaten corpses
Dead rabbits
sang in the dirt

The summer his da left for good the legless man fell down a well. He stayed in the well for 40 days and 39 nights, rescue coming in the way of a poacher and his ungainly son. Once rescued he cursed his da, shouting at the top of his dirt-filled lungs, ‘may your bowels be uproarious for 40 nights and 40 days!’ His da had good sturdy legs and two bent inward feet. His feet he inherited from his own da, who’s feet were more cudgel-like than simian. The summer he turned eleven his da poisoned a shoebox of baby rabbits, burying them under the hedge behind the woolshed. Æthelred the Unready his friends called him, noticing the flap of skin over the hood of his eye. For his twelfth birthday his da bought him a secondhand baseball mitt, the stitching round the thumb frayed and broken. Undeterred he play catch with his da, his thumb smashed at the second knuckle.

Who’s to say? His own da wore fishmonger’s trousers with chainmail knees and a strop pocket in the back. It was there, scabbard in the back pocket where his da carried his filleting knife. Used it to gut and scale walleyes and groupers. Had a straight-eye for crosscuts and deboning, knee on the tail hand round the neck. Of course he made a mess, oil and flaked scales stuck to his shirt and arm yard. Came home covered in it, flecks and burr-ends spackled on his apron. Not that he minded; next time he’d run the blade sideways through the dorsal line. Keeps a fish afloat, brine gas in the airbladder. Never can tell when its going to explode, yellowy blood all over the north side wall up the ceiling. His da didn’t mind, made a good day’s wage all and all.

General Bernardo D’états

Things seldom happen for a reason, they just are. Those things that are make up the bulk of what is, the things in front of you laughing to split a gut, bucal slips, eye twitching and overly responsive hand gesturing. Lela knew of these this’, even if it wasn’t in her best interests to do so. The summer she lost her innocence her mother bought a secondhand car with crushed pile upholstery and a smashed windshield. Her mother drove around town hollering like a banshee out the driver-side window, her daughter crumpled in the back seat pretending to be someone else’s egg.

Rancagua Libertador and General Bernardo D’états ate like children, The Feast of the Liberator ending with a bow to freedom and good cheer. Lela’s mamma sucked off Rancagua and the General in the back seat of her secondhand car, the General kneeing her in the forehead, Lela’s mamma chomping down of the bulb of his cock. Libertador, clucking like a chicken asked for more, Lela’s mother slapping him across the face, leaving a white handprint embossed in the red.

Sitting cross-legged the legless man let out a scream, a covey of ducks taking flight, skimming across the top of the aqueduct. ‘dare I dare say this is more than I can take!’ ‘shit up!’ said a voice whispering in his ear. ‘up?’ he thought, ‘I dare say I make my commode sitting down’.

Sepahan Buxton of Derbyshire

Some things have no beginning or ending, they just are. There is no arrival or departure, they simply are as they ‘is’. There is no movement as movement requires action and action choice and choice demands that we start from a proposition, a premise, then move onto a middle and an ending, finis. Lela saw only a middle; and sometimes the middle disappeared leaving nothing, no centre, core or midpoint. Midway she found herself standing in front of the Seder grocer’s, the window reflecting back nothing, no centre, midpoint or core. ‘smack her with the end of your cudgel!’ shouted Sepahan Buxton of Derbyshire, ‘and quick before she gets away!’ shouted Pest, the clamor and commotion of the crowd muffling his voice. At that moment the biggest dogman appeared from behind a hedgerow of honeysuckle and felled fichus, his hands raised flailing over his enormous head. ‘so, do you like fruitcake?’ Lela asked Sepahan Buxton of Derbyshire. In the turmoil and hubbub that prevailed Lela couldn’t make heads nor tails of what Sepahan Buxton of Derbyshire said in reply, hearing only the whirring buzz that people gathered with nothing of importance to do fell into. Stepping over hedgerow and hedge the biggest dogmen stood head and shoulders above the uproar, his eyes flashing like broken headlights. ‘so, do you like fruitcake?’ she asked a second time, Sepahan Buxton of Derbyshire doing his best to ignore her. At that moment the littlest dogman appeared as if out of nowhere, his eyes flashing like static radio dials. ‘I like fruitcake’ he said, dust flaking off the bib of his jacket. ‘Not you, I tell you you are a millisecond away from a good thrashing!’ Not knowing who had spoken or why Lela felt a shimmying in her legs.

Wassily Kandinsky

Boyars, Pest and Cheltenham

Parlously she took aim of his mal-petit head. Hasn’t a tosspot to piss in, as sorry a state of affairs as I’ve ever seen. Sloppy attire and no shine to speak of. Keeps his keepsakes in a sachet under his cot, boxful of lice and balls of hair. No mohair, just dog and lemming. Its appalling: as scandalous as a house on fire. Keep looking my dear, its just around the corner, I assure you. The light flickered in through the window, her face pushed into the midpoint of her pillow. An open window is a sure-fire invitation for bugs and flying things. The man in the hat took a seat and let out a halfhearted sigh. ‘I can’t take it anymore…! it will never end’

The next morning Lela found a letter from the man in the hat stapled on the wall over her head. ‘Best get your things together, the sky looks like its going to fall… Hurry!’ Boyars, Pest and Cheltenham headed for Gloucestershire, Boyars having forgotten to close the window in his cheese house. Lela thought this strange but looked aslant out the window just the same, hoping to catch a glimpse of a titlark or a thrush. People were always coming and going, a steady line of vagrants and louses, but today seemed different; they came but didn’t go, setting up small encampments in the parking lot behind the Waymart and the paddocks alongside the aqueduct. Sepahan Buxton of Derbyshire stood admiring his reflection in the Seder grocer’s window.

Sepahan Buxton of Derbyshire sits under the Seder grocer’s awning thinking of ways to steal women’s attire: gloves and hats, purses and handbags, stockings and hoses’, panties and brassieres, ladies’ undergarments and unmentionable’s. Yonder, behind a hedgerow of honeysuckles, Boyars, Pest and Cheltenham scheme ways to upend the legless man’s pushcart. Pest taking the lead suggesting they kick his cart out from under him; Cheltenham suggesting they crack him over the head with cudgels; and Boyars, shaking his head saying ‘we’ll manhandle the little creep… he ain’t got no legs for God’s sake!’

Amor e Iturbe

Juan Cortés de Campo, stately and plump, met the Marqués de Valdegamas under the butcher’s awning next to the Dogman Deli. Don Torcuato, standing beneath King Olaf’s shadow exclaimed ‘O, begor, I want no expert nursis symaphy from yours broons quadroons and I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want (the fog follow you all) without your interferences or any other pigeonstealer’. ‘thing’s are getting crazy round here’ shouted Don Torcuato, de Campo and de Valdegamas giving him the once over. ‘wait’ said the legless man, Juan Cortés and Marqués turning, Don Torcuato crouching in the shadows ‘this is only the beginning… it gets worse’. At that moment a dog pawning up the street stopped, raised its flea-bitten leg and pissed all over the flowerbox in front of the Dogman Deli. ‘see?’ said the legless man. Having relieved itself the dog moved on, its legs wet with piss. ‘not that I care’ said the legless man, all three men staring at him blankly, ‘but sure makes a man think don’t it?’ Arteaga Enrique Valparaiso met Amor e Iturbe behind the coxswain’s cabin. Writhing, legs mended together, they made love well into the night, her skirts cinched round the thicket of her hips.

Everything can be reduced to equal parts. “"If I had money," said the page, "I would ask senor ape what will happen to me in the peregrination I am making."” (Cervantes). The puppet-showman met Don Quixote after the strangling of the Moor; Santo and Master Pedro standing a-flank the gluey mare. Now stop that now! I can’t take it any more! He thought and thought until the thought of thinking made him sick to his stomach. Sometimes when he thought he thought that he would think until he was all out of thoughts; other times he thought until thinking itself became the thought of thinking, everything he thought he thought turning out to be a thought about thinking about a thought he would never have or think. He thought like a machine with wheels and levers, cogs and dials, but no on or off button. ‘who in they’re right mind would think such thoughts?’ he thought to himself. ‘I mean really, who!’ I mean really who thinks such thoughts, really I mean who? Lela fell into bed, the moonlight flickering in through the open window. Lela slept curled in a ball, her head cradled in the fleshy sloop of her chest.

Stamperia Valdònega

Lela struggled to stay asleep, her eyes heavier than cast-iron skillets. On rainy nights she slept facing west, on hot summer nights facing east and on cold winter nights she slept with her head under the blankets facing neither north or south. Die Zimtläden they said. Slonim das good she said. People spoke in her head. These people that spoke spoke in tongues. ‘atún de boleto de sahleedah ahdorno de pahdreh behrdeh’ said one voice clamoring. ‘pwehrtah de mostrador de facturaci’ said another. ‘Ón té Vuel Os Recogida de salidas de llegadas’ said a third drawling cacophonously. The summer Lela spent with her grandparents in the country she found a box under a hollyhock bush, and in the box she found a pair of silk women’s gloves, the fingers cut off at the second phalanx. Carefully she unwrapped the gloves, for they were ensconced in tissue paper, the tissue delicate and paper-thin, and held the gloves one at a time on the upturned palm of her left hand, her right hand outstretched steadying her torso against the branches of the hollyhock bush. Admiring the gloves, her eyes straining to see the delicate stitching and wrist hemming, Lela sighed, the insides of her mouth, for she had two, like a cow has two stomachs, strep with cankers. ‘I will buy a bottle of tanner’s oil’ she said quietly, not wanting to disturb the hobo asleep under the railway trussing. ‘Caw caw caw’ heckled a crow from its roost on the branch of a fichus bláin with dead-rot.

Before loosing his legs the legless man tested shoes for the shoemaker Oberg Moon. Each pair of shoes was tested for durability, comfort and style. On Mondays and Tuesdays Giovanni Mardersteig worked out of the Officina Bodoni office, the remainder of the week, except for Saturdays which he took off, he worked out of the Stamperia Valdònega office. Known far and wide for his Dante shoes, fashionable among the fur-clad gentry and those with an eye for quality craftsmanship, Giovanni Mardersteig lived the ‘life of Reilly’. Lela recalled seeing something painted on a plank of cherry-wood over the door to the Bodoni office. Later in life, when she learned to read and write, Lela returned to the office and read the plank over the door. “Love brings to light the noble and hidden qualities of a lover - his rare and exceptional traits: to that extent it conceals his unusual character”. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Kharms, Velasquez, Bacon

di Folco Portinari

She spent her honeymoon at Nolan Falls backcombing crablouses from her hair. She bucks and heaves, my uncle riding her like a furlong mare, her tungsten crown clanging off the headboard. The duck-liver paté swells her stomach, my uncle snorting like a soulless dog, hips tuning the bedsprings. There were four paintings in the room, a nude by Sutra Slupsk, a pastoral landscape by Sviland Rogaland, a pointillist water-scene by Prague Lavin and a still-life by Mesto Praia, the pastoral landscape and the still-life of particular interest to my uncle, who felt most art was childish and obscurant. His uncle preferred portly round women, even though, with his flabby legs and a fleshy sagging belly, he found it difficult to ride them from on top. That summer his uncle succumbed to yellow jaundice, the folds of his sagging belly sweaty with lye and calcium. His mother serving him notice ‘either you do something about this monstrosity or never set foot in the house again’. The following day he paid a visit to the Moorcock Bordello, where the fattest whore rubbed castor oil and iodine into the folds of his belly, salving the yellow jaundice, thereby freeing him of his mother’s curt admonition.

1. Tommaso di Folco Portinari (1428–1501); probably 1470
Hans Memling (Netherlandish, active by 1465,
died 1494)
Oil on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
2. Maria Portinari (Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, 1456–?), probably 1470 Hans Memling (Netherlandish, active by 1465, died 1494) Oil on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lola Fresán-Restrepo and Juan Pedro-Gutiérrez stood shoulder to shoulder admiring their reflection in the motel window. It rained that day. It rained until the sky couldn’t hold itself back, until the clouds, split in halves like melons, watered the ground and stars, it rained until her eyes and mouth filled up with water, until every step she took took her one step closer to the ocean, until keeping her head above water was all she could think of, all she could do to keep from drowning. It rained until it could rain no more, the sky bled empty, the moon a love-struck whore smitten with her reflection in the water. The following year his uncle returned to Nolan Falls, his eye on the chambermaid who had cleaned their crablousy room the year before.

Crablouse

On the wall above her bed under a photograph of her grandmamma hugging a pillow she bought at Nolan Falls was penciled,

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
(William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow)

Her worst memory was of her da eating oysters, the guts clinging to the hairs in his beard, her littlest brother making faces at the waiter. Her granny ate leafy spurge with dill and unsalted butter, her crinkly face glowing with cheery abandon. His grandmamma kept a herbatorium in the cupboard over the kitchen sink. In jam jars, each with their own label, she kept Japanese Knotweed, Dog's Tooth, Couch, Devil's and Scutch Grass, Bindweed, Black-bindweed, Bittersweet Nightshade and Climbing Nightshade, Fleawort, Felonwood, Poisonberry and its cousin Poisonflower, Scarlet Berry, Snakeberry, Trailing Nightshade and Violet Bloom, also called Woody Nightshade, Trailing Bittersweet, Burdock, Trefoil Clover and Ground-ivy, DAN-dih-ly-un, Goldenrod, Kudzu Milk Thistle and Bloodweed, Spinach Dock, or Narrow-leaved Dock, Tipton's Weed, or Klamath weed, and s(j)uːmæk, Wild Carrot, Bishop's Lace, Ragwort Spear and Bull Thistle, Plumed Thistle, Roadside Thistle and Curled Dock, also called Curly Dock, Yellow Dock, Sour Dock, Narrow Dock and Bluntleaf Dock. His grandmamma purchased weeds and grasses from the Dedham Sisters of Surry and herbs from the Trujillo Brothers of Dagenham. Barking, the dog that guards the Trujillo Brothers' shop, situated across the street form the Sofya Launderette, pisses, his grandmamma splitting a sober gut.

That summer his grandmamma read ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’ by Comte de Lautréamont, her gums bloodied and raw from biting her lip and the insides of her mouth.

“Lice of remarkable beauty that crawl like aspiring philosophers from cherished eggs; pubic hairs conversing in a brothel; sharks preparing duck-liver paté and cold soup from victims of drowning; a human-faced toad, as sad as the universe and as beautiful as suicide; covetous fingers prodding the lobes of innocent brains in order to smilingly prepare an effective unguent for the eyes; how Man. applauded by the crablouse and the adder, shits on the Creator's uplifted face for three days; devouring your mother's arms with gusto while she is still alive by tearing them off and cutting them into snippets...!” (Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror)

Freud (Part 1 of 14)

Mulvey

He awoke covered in a cobweb of his own sweat, the undersides of his arms and legs spit wet. Having awakened earlier than usual he decided to smoke a filter tip and make it a day. He exhaled a blue tail of smoke, his head bludgeoned into the headboard, the sulfur from the match smarting his eyes. Remember Mulvey? Over her bed over the headboard on the wall she had written: “Parents live on. Unresolved dissonances in the relation of the character and disposition of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child, and constitute his inner sufferings”. (F.W. Nietzsche). Strange she was that Mulvey. ‘stop talking in circles. Now stop it now!’ Her da, a merchant seamen, circumcisioned the globe collecting sexual diseases along the whey. He was covered in boils from head to toe, cankers as big as your hand. ‘circles, your talking in circles!’ I can’t stand to look at him. Bib him and get him out of here. Covered in them he was. The undersides of his legs and arms. He tried to grab hold of the glove but the glove soared higher, disappearing over the horizon. ‘in circles’. J. S. Crumlish lives in a cardboard box under the bridge over the aqueduct. He has three toes on his left hand, replacing the fingers he lost in an accident. Never know when the underneath will fall out: the worst isn’t all that bad. J. S. was overcome with grief. It isn’t what you think: really. Hit the ground damn hard: upper plate fell out. The rooftops are slippery, given the inclimate weather. Sat on top of the chimney: figuring he could tell which direction the sky would fall. Came close a few times. Worst of it was the toes on his left hand: the accident saw to that. Covered in them he was. That Mulvey: sometimes slept next to Crumlish on a scrap. Can’t say as I blame her, the weather, as it is, being inclimate.

Mrs. Breen

(The Glamorgan boy is in cahoots with the Leighton Buzzard brothers, all three, as there is but one Glamorgan boy, fighting it out under the weight-scale beneath the Bedfordshire clocktower).

He fell from such a great height that he broke all his teeth and all his legs. All those splintery bones. His da said he’d amount to nothing. Now its too late. When he started to think like this the man in the hat opened his throat and spat, an oyster of spittle cobwebbing the Seder grocer’s awning. After the Hotel Belmont he took up residence in an old folk’s home, the head matron cursing him for being such a louse.

Her shoulders and arms were covered in benday dots, her armpits a hanging garden of moles and tags. I told you to stay clear of her! Now look what she’s done, covered you in warts and cobwebbing! Little did he know that he would find peace and solitude in her arms. And those buzzard boys, what a slight on the eyes. Glam organ’s, least they have the good sense to wear galoshes. He had little patience for open throats and cobber. ‘atrociously hideous’ he said. ‘like a raisin pie gone sour’. Mona met Millie, known for her soft-shell shoes, under the Waymart clocktower to serve notice of her decision to leave the church choir. Why such inanities? The world is full of bigger ideas, surely I could do better. Mrs. Breen met Silvina Acampo and Bustos H. Domecq under an umbrella she had brought specially for the occasion. The sun that day was brighter than a geniuses’ cortex, nary a cloud in the blue sky. ‘I had thought of bringing some organ meats with me but left before I could remember why and where I was going’. ‘no need to worry, we have plenty of food’. ‘basketfuls’. ‘bushels’. ‘oh good, I felt so ridiculous, you see I am not one to forget things, and this, I dare say, was a terrible oversight’ ‘please sit down… there’s plenty of room for all of us under the umbrella’. His throat constricted then went flat, his mouth gulch-dry. I say there, you, yes you, what have you to say for yourself? It was here fault he said pointing at Silvina Acampo, she said it was okay that I be here. Nonsense! Look at her shoes, they’re ghastly. Bib him and get him out of here. I can’t stand to look at him.

Hotel de l'Univers

The Eastleigh Hampshire boys snort like ox’s. Hooking stones off the grocer’s awning he fell cock and barrel into the street, his face smeared into the blacktop. Says who, he said? ‘says us’ they said, faces blackened with blacktop. I prefer blackstropped molasses, makes the panfry go down like a shucked oyster. But not so swelled so as to cause me any discomfit. I see no end to this nonsense; none whatsoever. He believed in something greater, and the words made it so. Every morning before setting out he spit polished his boots, bringing out a shine that drew the blood out of the whites of his eyes.

His father lived at the Grand Hotel Corneille, rue Corneille 5, 9 rue de l'Universite in a hotel, 5 rue de l'Assomption, 5 Boulevard Raspail, 71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, 9 rue de l'Universite, again in a hotel, 26 Avenue Charles Floquet, spent time in London and Bognor on holiday, then moved to Hotel de l'Univers, and from there to Victoria Palace Hotel, then 6 rue Blaise Desgoffe, 8 avenue Charles Floquet, 2 Square Robiac and 192 rue de Grenelle, relocated to London where he took up lodging at 28b Campden Grove, Kensington, then back to Paris and 2 avenue St Philibert and Passy, 42 rue Galilee, then a short stint in Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland, where he stayed at The Hotel Carlton Elite (now Carlton Restaurant & Bar, Apero Variante 2 near Bahnhofstrasse), Zurich, returning to Paris where he leased a walkup at 7 rue Edmond Valentin, a two room bedsit at 34 rue des Vignes, then a suite in Hotel Lutetia, where he stayed through until the Spring, moving to 43 Boulevard Raspail, (In Saint-Gerand-le-Puy and Vichy, both of which are communes in the Allier department in Auvergne in central France) in June to avoid the inclimate weather he abhorred so dearly, then in August to Hotel Powers, 52 rue Francois Premier, La Residence, 41 avenue Pierre Premier de Serbie and Hotel Belmont et de Bassano, 28-30 rue de Bassano, Champs-Elysees where he stayed until moving to Hotel Lord Byron, where he was treated for over-exhaustion, the treatment including sulfur baths, low altitude walking and Shiva massage, and finally to 5 rue Chateaubriand Paris 75008 (a three-star hotel located in Champs Elysees, close to the Arc de Triomphe) where he stayed until he moved to the quadrangle behind the aqueduct, where he remained until his death of violent whooping in 1957. His body transported by oxcart to the Grand Hotel Corneille, rue Corneille 5 where he was laid to rest in an unnamed plot behind the aviary.

He remembers very little else about his father other than the on-suite room they shared at Hotel de l'Univers, the rest a faint blanching in his memories. It was there, amidst the thunder and lightening of his father’s life, that he first met the legless man, with legs, who was working as a bellhop and collecting ideas for a memoir he was never to write nor give a second thought to.

Dull Pettiness

That morning the sky fell head over heels into the aqueduct; taking with it a man sniggling eels, his dog, who was asleep at the time, three crows, a drake, ½ a dozen green billed mallards, 9 Boobies, 15 Albatrosses, 3 Phalaropes, 4 Loons, two with necklaces, two without, 5 Cormorants, 16 Pelicans, 2 Storm-petrels, 4 Terns, 7 Razorbills, 8 Dovekie’s, 1 Black Guillemot, 2 Northern Gannets, 3 Herring Gulls and a Common Eider, so the story says. On the north side of the aqueduct a pod of pullets were busy pecking corn from between Ms. Christopher Nicholson’s toes. ‘oh my’ exclaimed Ms. Nicholson blushing, for she had forgotten to wear socks, her feet fair game for fowl and pullet alike. On the south side of the aqueduct sat a man reading the newspaper, his hat pulled down over the figs of his ears. He cut his toenails too close. ‘dog’s nails… black pegs’ he thought. ‘must be more careful with the cutters lest I shear one off… then what, a hobbled black footed dog, a mangy cur’. On the wall over his bed was a scrap of burlap; and on that scrap was written the following:

“One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness. Mot things are interconnected, most threads lead to the same reel. Have you ever noticed swallows rising in flocks from between the lines of certain books, whole stanzas of quivering pointed swallows? One should read the flight of these birds…” Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass – Bruno Schulz.

When asked why he had it over his bed he said on account of he believed in something greater and the words made it so. ‘you’re fooling yourself, they said. ‘there isn’t a thing greater than a spit polished man’. Says who, he said? ‘says us’ they said. Nothing I know, he said. ‘but you don’t know much’ they said, ‘and what you do know is small apples’. Changing his mind he walked away, a child (a waif) hooking rocks off the grocer’s awning snorting like an ox. I have swelling glands, he said. But not so swelled so as to cause me any discomfit. ‘you you’re delusional’ they hollered after him. ‘and what’s more a fool’. Yes swelled, but not so bad as to cause me any pain.