But she's in there, I hear her howlin'. Sneakin' about all dressed up fancy for a show. Tippity tap tippity tappin' away in the dark. I even strung some of my cat-fishin' fiddy-test across the hole with the hopes she'd git tripped up but she busted right through! I gonna sic ol' Jesse on her down there. Give him a whiff off some old rag from her dresser and them just let him alone in there. That'll teach her. Jesse's a mean old brute, but he's got a nose fit for a hound.
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It was sitting there, on the unexpected chair, in front of the opening in the mirror wall, that I heard a voice.
She must have taken her shoes off and snuck up.
At first I thought it was the pipes gurgling, or a vent whir from somewhere in there, but with a little concentration I quickly began to make out words puctuated by fits of cackling.
"...and that's when he said, the worm, he said (choking back a guffaw) 'Where's...Where's my lemon tart?' (fit of coughing) --AND...( with a momentary but very suspensful calm)....KERPLOOIE!-- (hysteric fit of hyena-like laughter) the doctor creams him with the hammer!"
Strangely, I'd heard this one before which may or may not account for the chill that courses down the curve of my wounded spine.
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Had she been able to see, your countenance momentarily brightened. Remember when you called her "Happy Bottom"?
You were listening too hard, mouth hanging open.
The joke is an old one, true. We have no way of calculating its vicissitudes, we simply come when we are called.
Ta-wham, ta-wham. The doctor is, of course, stunned by the splatter. The patient isn't so much cured as transubstantiated, the worm, well, one can never tell with worms.
You'd like to think he pulls it out and drops it into the aquarium where the red-eared sliders lurk.
The way he wipes the hammer clean suggests a fatal quiddity.
You can't just sit there.
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Hi. I was able to haul my remains back in to the darkness where I've hooked, with my one remaining tooth, into a warm fold of intestine. It hurts every time I lay an egg.
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There's a place. Strange light indeed, glinting off the carapace. "It's a chrysalis," you thought you said. A husk. What of it? Where'd it go? You mean "whatever came out"? Where to?
It's like and not like the light off the sidewalk, flat and my god was that Janice driving by on her bicycle? Pushing her sunglasses up her little oriental nose? (Getting a little chubby, if so.) Did she think I wasn't watching?
Nevertheless, the light, the strange light, the dazzling obscurity of it all. If it weren't for the relentless wind the effect...
She's come by again. Slower. Wind in the hair, hard seat firmly gripped by the well-trained musculature of the badminton artist. I rush for my shuttlecocks, but stumble in the darkness of my sports closet. Whither the birdies? What fetid collection of nostalgia awaits the groping hands? A baseball! O O O Squash...that last game....you...lying on the hardwood... panting for a fault while I flipped my racquet around to finish you off with a sputtering volley from my mock submachine gun (tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh)...the exquisite pleasure of blowing the smoke from that barrel lingers even now as Janice drifts further and further away...the old wooden racquets! Sun on the laminate hoop for the first time in years! Gut strings! Those were the days! Janice! Come back! Sweet spot! Sweet Spot!
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I remember you. The olden days, before the disassociation. You were incapable of narrative. The future was meaningless, yet here we are. You say "Water under the bridge...," or "All nevers and agains..." always a fool for the system, weren't you! Nevertheless, I have been triggered. How? I cannot speculate. Bootstrapped. A priori. Anesthetic.
Now, listen. There are no animals. This is the message. None.
"Sure," you say "but what of the glimpses of tails, the paws, the faint odour of kitty litter?"
Unfortunately, your city is empty. That is why you may find it hard to continue, like in a dream where the city is empty. Have you never dreamed that your city is empty? Imagined the hollow footfalls?
We cannot account for the years. We apologize. What darkness! Your scratching had been noted, an eyebrow raised, it wasn't much, we left anyway. We comforted ourselves with the thought of the matches. We left matches you know? I even thought I saw a fire, once. A glimmer. On the other side of the valley. Was it you? Waiting?
You are not asleep. Your head is not cradled by an old tome on the desk of the American Library in Montevideo. You see? There is no bicycle. There is no world, no play, no case. Nothing. Nowhere.
Only me, and I am lying on my back on the bottom of my canoe. I cannot explain.
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And the clouds play. Merging one image with another till parted like gossamer smoke from a virgin bilge.
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There's this thing, this...particular one. It barely fits in this box. Now, I'm not one 2 no much about thee quiddity qua quintessence the very whatness of it but I nowhere
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Exactly. I thought knot. Perhaps more a glistening (tshohar, or the root gesture tsahar) than a window, but still, imagine.
Now, not being one to dwell on the determinate, the conceptualized, the transcendental knee jerk, the crack in the plaster that otherwise joins the apparent to the essential, but still.
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There's that bird. There's that fly. There's another cloud. There's my foot. There's the back of my hands, my face in the glass, there's the little letters marching way out to the end of the box. There's that whir. There's that sigh. There's that click. All yours.
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What I like the most about my latest toothache is the simple materiality of pain. The swift, inexorable tightening of that gap that otherwise taunts us, the one between concept and thing, expectation and execution, the score from the singing. It's like they're french kissing. The here and the now of it all. Unfortunately, I've only three or four left. Teeth, that is. So, it augures poorly for reality. Four more doses and then all mere gum flapping abstraction. From a purely theodicical perspective, one asks, today, not about earthquakes or inconceivable exterminations--but, rather, how a caring God could leave us with teeth. Every damned one a testimony and a test of ones faith, to fail! Every one screaming at Leibniz: "Wrong!" I confess. I've seen the instruments, please, release me!
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OK. Solid white. It's all white. Everywhere. Even the floor mouldings, the ceiling and the ever spotted and vaguely irritating wooden floor whose knotty grain produced the insufferable toothy faces.
I may have overdone it. You know, when you get that slightly obsessive beat going and you get to the end of one wall, or the to edge of some old wooden quarterroundish thing and just when you should stop, or lay down some masking tape, or whatever...you don't! You just keep painting right on and through and over, like you're not stopping until the paint runs out, or the house runs out, or some thing, just beyond apprehension, gets you. Stops you.
So, that far. Too far. Out on that groaning limb again.
The white generates the oddest shadows. In the wrong light, say, that of an unshaded trilight, everything looks bright dirty.
The shadow hand-puppet theatre is open: Welcome, on the right, the silly rabbit; on the left, the laughing fox...and, inexplicably, a third thing opens and shuts its jaws six feet behind my fox and getting larger.
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These 'third things' have a life of their own. Now, I can just sit here and watch them. I can even hear them moving in the dark. My impression is they are neither good nor bad things--just inexplicable. Independant shadows. Things in themselves. The first one tried to be frightening, but I was insulated from fear by my toothache whose exquisitely agonizing pulses (it felt like my jaw was cracking open) rendered any other sensory impression merely dull and stupid. Now that my tooth's pulled, I watch them more carefully and with growing trepidation. This is a side-effect of boredom, an attempt (on the part of some obscure region of the mind) to animate the gloom. Play on.
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1. My God, what a dream! 2. Vision. 3. The incredibly quiet spots of light at play on the walls; a liquid sunlight swirled by the swaying oak boughs and diffracted through the pinholes of the window blind, a strange, silent and infinite stillness in motion. 4. I could lie here and watch forever. 5. A faint odour of skunk. 6. Blackbirds. 7. Bells. 8. It's just the wind. 9. It's just the wind inside the broken walls.
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Those were the days. That gloomy sky swallowing the afternoon. If my memory serves me well, we were walking hand in hand through what once had been an apple orchard, the trees either dead or mutated into knarled, fruitless monsters. That thing in my hand is a broken wasp nest. Nothing in it but the dried husks of dead wasps, we'd checked to see if the queen survived and scared each other when it rustled.
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++A Windigo! A Windigo! --Yeah. A Win-Di-Go. Windigo. Never heard of a Windigo? ++No. Except you. When you say "...and then he was afraiiid of the Winnnndigooo...." or whatever it is. I mean, I try and keep a straight face, but have you looked out the window lately? We're at the bottom of a canyon, no wind, no going anywhere, and mainly you killing me. --It's supposed to be poetic. PO-ETTE-ICK. You know, artistic, mapping the contours of... ++HOO-LII-SHIT. Are you joking? It's crap. Don't quit your day job. Wait. You don't have one! In fact...GET a day job, get any kind of job, do something... --You mean something else. ++What? --You meant: "Do something ELSE." ++Oh, because you think you're doing something now? --Precisely. I'm writing. ++Writing what? Writing what! --The worm story. I'm trying to write the worm story. It remains unwritten. ++Are you joking? Unwritten! What's that? And that? What's over there on the shelf? What's pinned all over my bulletin board? That's all you ever do. It's not writing. You know that. Not writing. You need to paint me a picture. Why can't you just paint anymore? --The world has moved on. There are no more pictures. Not for me. I'm done with it. ++It's stupid. The worm story's stupid. Plus, what the hell does a worm have to do with a bloody Windigo? --Look. You started in on the Windigo-thing...I'm sorry you don't like it...that's too bad for me...and the worm story is simply part of the process, it's like a vocation, like my 'dreaming'..you're the anthropologist...what am I supposed to say? It's...it's what I do. ++Well how about doing a little more rent-paying and a little less worm farming? --It's a tapeworm. ++It makes me ill just listening to you say it. --You're the one who gave me the idea. Remember? You came running out of the bathroom hyperventilating? Something was in there... ++Just stop it. Stop it. --...I'd never seen one before. Uptil then, it was all about leechs and then Boom! You shat it into our lives. I've still got a piece. ++What? --In a jar. It's frozen. ++A piece of what? The worm? --Yup. ++That's disgusting. Where? You're kidding? Right? --Nope. In my paint fridge. It's probably dead.
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++Yeah. Probably. Moron. --You never can tell with worms. ++ "You never can tell with worms." Really. --Sometimes they can regenerate from one little chunk. ++It's got to be the head. --Well, maybe I've got a head. ++It stays inside. Latched on, somewhere in the intestines. The tail's what you've got in your sick little fridge. --So, it's still in there? (pointing at her stomach) ++The worm? I took the pills and it's dead. --How do you know? Maybe it's just growing? ++Because it's dead. They're dead. I saw them. --Dead? ++YES. DEAD. --There was more than one? ++I can't talk about this with you anymore. --You mean you actually saw them in there? (pointing at bathroom door) All at once? Dead? ++Look, I took all the pills and it killed the worms....No thanks to you. --Me? ++Uruguay. That's all there was. Meat. --You think it's from Uruguay? ++That's what he said. Eating all that awful burned meat in the middle of nowhere. I never eat meat. --The parillas? Wow. That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it? ++The meat was rotten. Christ, they probably barbequed the bloody tapeworms and fed them to us. --They can grow over thirty feet long in a cow. How many feet did you see? ++That's not how it works. --You didn't look, did you? You'd just close your eyes and flush. Prayed then flushed.
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Once a really long time ago it was, as usual, raining. Raining and raining. All the little purple flowers heads' bounced up and down on their stems, you know, when they got hit. I was sort of watching it all, but not focussed on it. I was mainly pretty snug beneath this picnic table and waiting, waiting for a feeling to bubble up, something to make sense of the occasion. You can listen to the rain for a long time without getting bored. It's as if it makes you more real, or, it makes what you're thinking more real. Pretty soon you start hearing everything: the water hitting the picnic table, dribbling onto the patio stones, landing flopflop in the flower beds, your own breathing and even when you sniff a little bit, you get hyperconscious of everything happening around you even though nothing's really happening at all. So, there you are, sitting beneath the picnic table, looking out over the football field, feeling sort of safe since you're still dry and everything's getting completely soaked around you, maybe half-watching the way the little purple flowers get dinged, and how they don't, waiting, mainly, to feel something.
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La-di-da. Plip.Plop Splish.Splash Some poeticky expression of the way the cement darkens then dries...the drying up, somehow, more poignant than...than...than something else. Sigh.
I'm lying there in the tub filled to the brim bubbles, steam knees sticking above the water islands five toes poking out in the froth mainland Nietzsche's "Will to Power" balanced barely with three fingers such that I might view the knees and toes while reading when: Kerplop! In she goes (head first...no...face first!) just when I was getting to the good part about what it means to be drowning I held it gingerly up with two fingers dripping and wondered: I really wondered a lot about you
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Waking to the groan of a truck backing up whose infernal, inhuman, insufferable beep-beep-beeping has me dreaming of the good old days, when the sound of a crumpled tricycle and a short shrill scream would barely crease the mid-morning stillness, I pray for disaster. After a suspended moment (beep-beep-beep), I rise from the turd-coloured carpet and reflect on my (beep-beep-beep) prospects: Beep(Who)Beep(took)Beep(my)Beep(camera?)Beep(Where)Beep(in God's name)Beep(is that truck)Beep(going?)Beep(Wait)Beep(it's not)Beep(a truck)Beep(it's)Beep(the)Beep(fire)Beep(alarm)
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a constant sprinkle-- Let's say I make a boat, of lined paper. A boat that looks like a hat. And let's say, before I set it adrift on the rising water, let's say we write a few names worth saving:
Off they go! (I fear our little vessel may be swamped by the downpour.) The names are starting to bleed. Like an iceberg, the "Paradiso" calves from the books lined up on the window sill and kerplunks into the shallow sea, sending out a radiating wave that rocks the boat.
I try to get in, before it's too late, but barely have I set the smallest sliver of blackened toenail on my ship's gunnel when even I, 600 years old, realize the convenant will not bear my restless weight.
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In. Dark. If I reach out my hand, nothing. "Hello?" (...a faint echo can be discerned...) "HELL-OH-OH?" This latter creates a somewhat comic side-effect: (Hell...hell.....hell.......hell.......ooooo) Perfect. I'm going to fall down or throw up. (Note: ever tried to stand up in the subway without holding the strap or the rail? Same deal, except imagine with your eyes closed.) I'm not equipped for salvation.
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Not equipped for much at all. Disconcertingly reminiscent of that book "House of Leaves", except this is real or at least primitive to the remediating distinctions drawn for his purposes (i.e. no matches). How then to characterize the labyrinth? An argument has been made, unpersuasively, for the inevitable walls constituting the contours of letters, on the scale of cities--that is each letter being the size of a large building--and so in running one's hand along the outside and paying the proper sort of attention one makes out something like a "W" or a "Y". Of course, discerning whether one limns the inside or outside of the character makes all the difference in the world, assuming one is inclined to pursue this sort of interrogative strategy.
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I've invoked the ghost of Rommel, my pet German Shepherd. Deceased. (I'm translating loosely from the German): ++"Here boy! Com'ere!" --"Yayayayaya!" ++"Good boy...hey...what happened to you?" --"It wasn't a farm." ++"Whadda ya mean 'wasn't a farm'? It was a chicken farm!" --"Nope. That's just what your Dad told you." ++"But you guarded the chickens, it was like part of your heritage, in your blood." --"From the back seat, I watched you watch me go." ++"You're all see-through and everything now." --"They gave me the needle, right in the butt, and it's just 'auf Wiedersehen' from there." ++"So he really took you to "the farm" and not the farm?" -- "The old 'bauernhof' baby. Smoked." ++ "I never knew. I imagined you skulking around the henhouse...the good life, some puppies. Wow." -- "It's all because that kid took your jeep." ++ "The green one?" -- "I bit him on the arm." ++ "I loved that jeep. I felt like a real soldier on it." -- "Once I felt my teeth sink into the elbow, I couldn't stop. It's like a bloodlust or something." ++ "I remember now. You went crazy." -- "I was going to stop, but I couldn't." ++ "They told me you'd be better off guarding stuff. That's where the chickens came in, I guess." -- "Chicken's wouldn't of lasted a night." ++"What a downer. You know I'm stuck here in this boat now?" --"So I gathered." ++ "I can't even pat you. You're like a ghost." -- "Woof. Woof." ++ Thanks.
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I was wearing my father's old running shoes. He always gives them to me when he's finished with them. They're usually in perfect condition, he's a bit of a fanatic when it comes to taking care of shoes. These ones are tennis shoes. He insisted they were too big for him and although that would make them really too big for me, I still took them. It creates a little reciprocity or stands in for whatever it was we missed when we were younger and careless.
So, I'm sort of clown walking around in the darkness now. If you've ever worn shoes too big for your feet, then you'll know the feeling, and it's multiplied by about twenty in the dark, all that empty space in front of your toes that sort of collapses out there, just ahead of where it is you're treading.
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Greylight. The pigeon of fatuity pirouettes at dawn. Greylight. Mirror-writing. I picked up a letter. I stepped on a something then bent over and picked it up. It was a letter. I felt something beneath my sole, crouched to collect it--a letter. The letter "A". I've put it in my pocket, for later.
It stands for amethyst. Amethyst. Have you ever seen some? Part of your rock collection? Perhaps ripped from the cardboard display and pocketed, taken to school, showed off?
None of this is of much use in the halflight. Maybe it's not dawn, just my eyes adjusting to the new kind of darkness. The old amethyst trick busted like a coconut. "A"! Unlikely. There's no letters for this. Another apparition seems unlikely, so I scratch my crotch in a mundane way, triplets (as usual), and hope someone has called a "Code White" out there in the superstructure, where the living is easy.
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Matryoshka. Opened and opened, she falls into pieces, hollow bells upturned that spin on the table, each death a midwife to another smile until the end, the heartwood.
By way of metaphor.
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In the empty spaces-- "In the plumbless depths."... During the inexorable minutes that separat-.... While... While drea-...while staring out...of the... bedroom window [horizontally] at a spectral black squirrel [flea infested and scratching itself to death]...I--I--I a-a-an-swered [tapping out a speedy 7/4 beat on the wrought iron bed post with a fingernail] f-f-fai--....[--] and swore.
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Sometime last night I must have fallen asleep. When I woke, the rain had subsided and my vessel seemed to be settled on dry land. Although only utter darkness had greeted my earlier inspections, now I could make out the the faintly luminescent, lined-paper hull of the boat which contained me.
This lifted my spirits and set me off on a search for something like a door or a window through which I imagined I might make my return to the world.
The world of beernuts and thunderbolts.
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Live in world of words, this means this and that means that and then it happens and no word is strong enough, they all fail to be nearly good enough, no walls left, no limits, just joy and pride and no words can ever suffice the feelings and as time tick tocks as time does from little possibility, little sleepy drinker, a smile here a smile there you become and words fail again as everything that was so clear and important becomes nothing compared to you, little piece of me yet all you, my world, my world which words fail.
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I recall, in a blurry standing-there-on-a-rock-in-a-shallow-puddle-among-the-bullrush-stalks-surrounded-by-a-chorus-of-spring-peepers sort of way the invocation to: "Call my gates 'Praise' and my walls 'Salvation'" or was it "...my walls 'Praise' and my gates 'Salvation'"?
I guess it depends on your perspective (inside or out).
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Your Jacuzzi's empty: vertebrae spasm while gravity rivets bone into steel. Elbows ache and your farts jackhammer enamel bottoming out, no more bubbles to tickle those leaden balls.
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Disappointment flows over me like a viscus, warm ooze, gently flowing into every pore, into every nook and cranny, making me feel dirty and used, let down and glum.
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