#iacek

[notmuchtoconceal]

cool girls only one's i wanna gulag bro

death to all commodity fetishists

moloch worshippers go to dead malls

line the empty storefronts stark exposed

in new depression-era ossuaries

[notmuchtoconceal]

He did not listen. To ample warnings, he did not listen. To self demonstrated folly, he did not listen. To the architect of space-time, he flaunted himself garish and foolhardy, cruel and unseemly in his perpetually aching beauty, so obscene to the like masses he claimed he himself to be wholly a part... all but another micro plastic grassroots on Ken doll smooth bulges tangling the playing fields from the crash test dummy smelt of which he was sole manufacturer, Technician of Instrumentalities and Manufacturer of False Timelines.

He would pay. For his ostentatious displays, he would be rendered barren. He would pay. For his flaunting of the unf(l)appable, he would be stripped heart and soul to bare nerves short-circuiting choleric. He would pay. By your hands, slow and cumbersome, calloused and precise of pulse, he would be choked, broken, beaten and meaten.

A lone man, embodying true Anarchist Sentiment. A true man, of the Rank and File, bearing the love of all True Decomposers, All True Mudmen and Mulchers, Dirty Boys and Muddy Beasts.

A Jacekobean, poised, to kill land be killed ~ A bullet to his own brain, directed outward with true manly pride. Death to the weakness in Himself by Death to the Weakness in Others, All or None.

He alone had courage... to plug... the Sap.

Sssssss

Death... to the Demon... Daniel Burnham, Forger of the Plan of Chicago. Death to the Demon Dan the Man.... whose Pagan name was Ichigo.

( 1 5

go ichi go

5 1 5

go ichi

5 1 )

He did not listen. To ample warnings, he confusedly refused to listen. Of self-demonstrated folly, he rendered poignancy of pointedness, for how he ached so openly and made explicit in supposed frustrations the imaginary and the real, delineated his hypocrisies so cleanly. A truer love, he could never render unto all of space and time than to be so transparent as to let the light shine through, so much so as to render him opaque. Wind and dust it was only, the stories of the converted Ichicago ["I am Providence"] Cpt. Ichigo Luxor Drythen, whose Christian name was Daniel Burnham, Architect of the Borgesian 3D Hypertexts in which Men Would Remain Alive Forever. Phases of dusk and dawn were they simply, these simmering summer twilights we could never hope to contain -- yet they persisted, the rumors of Daniel's Handsome Men. Seven to Nine in Number. Unstoppable Bloodwringers desperate to leap into service, honor their master's every beck and call. Handsome Crimson. Handsome Ombre. Handsome Marigold. Handsome Seafoam. Handsome Azure Sky. Handsome Fuchsia City. Handsome Indigo Plateau of Leng. Handsome Undead. Handsome Clear.

[Cpt. Haruspex, who we cordially dismiss as Brux, has firmly entrenched an ongoing TMI dispute over "Handsome Lavender Townsend" and yet seems to display a less than poignant insistence verging on absolutely no desire to ever release one.]

These ridiculous polysyllabic hues could never hope to stick in his simple primary color and categortical-chroma loving mind.

Black-White. Begetting of its own endless greys in alien scraft.

Not having the words, he could only lack the vision. Sniffing with nostrils pointed as poonhounds, he saw the simple blobby shapes and heard the rancorously tinny echoes of an unthinking animal fit only to be vivisected in laboratory settings, much like all men of his race, given to the Great First Cause. The self-thinning herd. Where the mob would go, they would die in droves for a fleeting speck of glory.

For they were nothing outside their tribe, fading as dinoflagellates upon a tide. Simple brothers, dying alone together. All men die alone.

Whether your brother holds your hand, you die alone. Whether you lose yourself in his eyes that final moment, you die alone. What romance do you hope to wring, so desperate in your bloodlust, so despicable in your manure, you long to die encoiled and impaled upon your Twin?

Whining of no maps left to chart, no space on the globe left to call your own when you have not seen but a fraction of a fraction. What impotent waite pretensions to conquer others when you cannot conquer yourself. To stunt the Earth to stunt your Nation. Do Your Own!

To be a name upon a wall, a bronze in the court, when the only name which rang true across the ages remained Ozymandias, King of Kings, who was much like Andy Warhol, Silver Screen ~ Can't tell em apart at all... the seedy jack-off mirrors of Great Mensroom Histories.

Die to the lie. You have died to your image. Become Image. Seen in all things, the Immortality of A Virus, stratifying yourself into Our Cells.

Have you not repented... of your suicide bombings yet?

You grind your boys into pulp... rather than grow brains or balls.

You get restless... when the young cease to die in droves.

Kamikaze. Sayonara.

The Judith Butlerian Jihad Begins Again.

( o )

You watched Daniel. You moved with Daniel.

You tracked Daniel -- over immeasurable distances.

Arm aloft, the two tablets in hand, in his crisp tailoring, enunciated as Rightwing Phoenix, Ace of Spades, Attorney at Law, a Birdman beak would descend with Raptor Claw, as he worked miracles with scalpel pruning out tumors and shards of glass, slowing time with a glance, as Doktor Onkle Frank Stiles, Grandson of Apollo, all leisure, suited, airy.

You shadowed Daniel. Your honed in on Daniel.

To the square -- where the decadent Oji Maerie would sing.

Oh gee ~ Oji ~ Maerie.

Portraits blown up to 70mm film-slides in gif loops, the cast-iron posts hauling the bleached white hide heralded her arrival.

Beneath her, he was all-seeing and unmoving, all time.

He sat himself poised in the serenity of his stoic ever-reminiscence, bearing the cumulative past as a weight upon his untrembling brow, as though a chalice of tears unripened as milk'd bergamot, a ripple never to bloom an echo never be dispersed across empty space, for he beheld the present always as the sum total of the past and the future the sum total of the present, and there were never any running, never any running towards or forwards, and getting nowhere, for time always seemed to carry him along as though he sat perched upon a leaf in a babbling brook and beyond the lapping waters heard all the rustling of the trees, the singing of the birds and chirping of the mayflies, saw the luminous rays of the sun cascading off those waters and in those ripples and shallow straits the stony brooks below ~ the all scurrying minnows adrift amongst tangles of grasses and mossy rocks.

Below, her beautiful face ~ Oji Maerie, who in a former life had been a rugby forward at a stigious institution my tongue could never weather, irradiance shone in the nitrate abundance which caught fire as onion skin as she was radiant ever more fish-eyed in streaks of distorted light agahst the slick slab sheet of black latex flecked with ash, for there were the forms now of men broad of frame and square of trunk pressed into the impression as her image danced upon their chests and her soaring lips and ample gullet consumed their faces as the sea shores rolled around their heads, all waves, all cliffs, in dazzling evergreens, for so content were they as men they allowed her fire to consume them and reveal unattainable idiot passions mesmeric and neuroplastic.

Cornered ~ in a balcony cubicle way up high... on a row of rises stepped as such the canopy could hang of shadows in the breadth of day.

Daniel... most beautiful among men. Spurning you forever, for how he spoke always unannounced and directly to you, skewering you on the meathook of his insinuations and realing you in with flattery too reel to be unreal, and yet he tracked you not for days, for weeks, ruffled through your drawers now licked the ears of false allies, simply glanced on you and knew you in an instant enough to make you grovel.

You trembled to look upon him. His hateful afterglow ever lustrously golden-white as sanctified robes, his ever-contemptuous half-held smile refused you its nakedness by practice and poise. The muscles of his face had hardened to a mask-like rigidly which to see made me paradoxically more expressive for how the music-box gears and stringed winches inside the wooden slot tower of his mah dzhe jong dummy's thousand and one faces would unlatch and fold.

A mask of flesh likewise a wooden matrix composed of man, what finer engineering there could ever be ~ and you adored him and lusted for him with a passionate tumescence motivating ideological revelry for he was life itself as le petit mort got bigger and bigger, and the image of a pipe you could no longer ignore... could be rolled up into a joint to achiever a ascension of form as the succession of the image.

The pipe you couldn't put it in... you could still smoke it.

Sow you found the courage, by the will of your reasoning mind, and the motion of your desiring body... to gaze upon him once more...

Crossing the square... crowds moved within concentric circles.

Flowing with them, you could see ~

Flowing with them, it sides loomed titanically large.

Before the first mural, Oji Maerie Herself, who though a gargantua to you, rose of the earth as frail as a flower before the tides of liquid crystal on which her departed and no doubt dearly beloved brother smiled in bitter serenity out heirloom photographs, which her Laikanite adorers had rose before her for the charity of (t)his spontaneous appearance, at which strongmen likewise materialized in droves to display to her trite memories of what she'd abandoned to receive in abundance, for they alone had strength enough to fawn for her so completely, so content were they in themselves, she magnetized some unspeaking and unspeakable mania... though the Luxemborgs, dough-eyed as Husky Dogs and twice as slack jawed and dumb, has cautioned in droves against this... citing the sacrifices of the men refused to be mourned as such when the box first shifted form... chained to it, neither in protest nor in adulation, the links still lay bloodied, the smears stained into the stone of the square as rose petals fallen from wilted thorns, as all around these husks beneath Oji Maerie f(r)esh blooms sprung from crystal vases likewise conjured from the Laikanite display medium which carried the galvanic forces of St. Josef's Fire.

Perfumes, half-synthetic, arose out the half-alive roses in the Laikanite vessels, unliving, undying, performance pieces to wither into slime, as paring the vegetable essence from the protein chains the viscous carrier medium would unfurl into polyfibers in the yoke. As no Laikanite yet had ever solidified, thus they attained by measure of recognition the total liquidity of all assets a type of perpetual viscosity ranging sticky hand to silly putty to vulcanized rubber and this yet is to be understood as simply the outermost material manifestation of their sorceries.

The centerpiece, by the hand of their Creator, the MetaLemarchand's Box which Cpt. Psychorrhax had hand-sculpted from the shell of his own hand-modded NINtenDia(n) GameCube, by inference would be a refinement of these basic principles, though little understanding could glean from what minute extrapolations you ought deduce.

Laikanites you overheard debated vigorously possible theories of its material, construction, and triggers of shaping, but speaking with such frenzied agitation with such insular vocabulary and drawing bated inferences from breaths, eye bulges, telepathic spoolings, left you little able to deduce much other than how little you could deduce.

A general understanding occurred to you... two or three new concepts in... how much harder it would be to follow along.

A map was drawn and up to 70% remained empty space.

The depths of space. Forever filling with stars.

For she sang, for her ninth repetition, that first great Engrish-ranguage soap which debuted at the grand festival of Rorrapoorooza after which was substantiated into being by the Great Playwrights who erected canon always of their own fancies, heads always roaring on high seas with the guns of ships, poised as Mermen encoiled on their masts, the full text of the first great post-war original, Lila: Ourfan of the Stars by the tortured romantic, complicit technocrat and hell-descender, Black Fillip of Phry the man who was his own Grandfather, and whose Grand Nephew of Ancient Age Likewise Testube Babied Himself - forever old, forever young... don't stop playing now... I always ... always wanna hear the rest ... -- our cliffhanger had always hope, for we wrote only grand operas slick with soap, for I love you as a brother, Great Faggot Fassbinder who was paunchy and not very handsome and yet easily one of the sexiest men alive... God what other great artists of all time were truly kinda fugly? Bro he looks like he was smashed into a tube, goddamn bro. Hard relate. I am my own Dead Kitty Abby Normal.

Hit the road, Jack. Who the fuck is Jack?

Motherfucker. My narration must resume. (Pasolini looks like a drama queen? Why the fuck wouldn't he?) For many centuries it would take to refill the great libraries of renaissance antiquity when the form was in its cradle and grave, and so for hundreds of years the Lunar Rabbit lead us astray as She Bedazzled the Great Hunter Nimrod [which is not a synonym for stupid, and to think otherwise is both foolhardy and intolerant, for this depreciates the Great Rabbit's Ironism] when the Great Playwrights Had Only the Scantest Scenarios Out Which to Sketch, for again we knew only those Greater Myths of Antiquity through degenerated comical forms, obscene and illiteral, and then only as neutered by the Stoic mind of Athens, who it must be said was the fetid Grail of All True Roman Virtues... I too would prefer my boy lovers to be hyper-competent moralizers, simply not ones ruling the world from shadow states of transvestite bribery... Goddamn. To think of hairy crossdressers in men's rooms in the presence of the Goddess Oji Maerie... my mind must not diminish. All trans bodies are beautiful. Some of us are into the Sasquatch women. Jesus Fucking Christ Ladies. Plenty of ladies with pussies are sasquatch women. Not all fuckin chicks with dicks ought think like gay men. You can be a chick with a dick and still think like a straight dude you dumb dyke. Jesus Fucking Christ. Chicks who think like gay men are exhausting actually. I hate them so much. They're catty and never put out. Gay men are great when they never put out. Awful women who do nothing but bitch at you cause they're aesthetes with no taste can drop dead. Get fucked in the gutter, ugly fairy trash. Detached is only pretty with a brain.

No apologies necessary. History is a series of divergences.

Thus shortly after it was, when a new canon was established, that a slow wave of fringe scenarios of obscure sources became the new skeleton around which the meat of pre-history would re-entwine, as after Lila debuted simultaneously in Nyu and Chica not a hemisphere away long after, the festival of Rorrapoorooza begat its first masterpiece most sublime to recrystallize the form ~

The 1st Lullabye of the Leech Queen, she sang, from the second of the third of the first of the great Post-Amnesiac era masterpieces, re-originator of the Epimethean Tragicomedy, these Absurdist Farces of Reconstructed Memory in Siberian Petroglyph Caves ~ RiØ.

Today is Our

Farewell

to U m b r e l l a

Above her, on the front facing side of the cube, he arose from the surrounding cliffs of bronze, himself composed of bronze, gleaming in high radiance likewise as Oji Maerie for how the stagelights had swept him, each crevice became a crucible burning thought-forms of metabolic heat, as St. Josef standing Upright as the Egyptian Liberator Abraham Ben Brown Moses, made of the cliffs of Sinai a Theater Box as in the pedestal below, Laika rose Himself as the Golden Calf who His People most adored despite the tyranny of Adopted Status.

Forever Sweet

One T e r r o r i z e We Will

And Forever We Will

To the right, He was Indian Malik to His White Ape for the scene hath depicted St. Josef transmogrified of his own hand by excess of Melanin into Lord Rama as Great Love Laika was Devoted Hanuman.

hunt our enemies

Hiding from us

and bring them

To the left, he rose over the cityscapes, the bridges, the trolleys, the trains, a thousand metal thunderbirds, saluting the sun who was Himself, as Great Love Laika, dismembered became the alleys, the sidewalks, the sewers of the great city, o' Eternal Lord of Stalingrad.

those that have come

Come

to the grave with me

Against the back end, Great Love Laika rose Robed as the Sanctified Mother alike as the Veiled Magician whose Depth was the Depth of Space and whose every thought was a twinkling star, of which St. Josef was but one of many, middle-sized and middle-aged.

Forever and Now

We are One

Now and Forever We

Are One

With regrets ~ you could see neither the bottom nor topmost facing panels of the cube from your on the ground vantage as you moved with the people, and yet ~ making now thrice rotations through the square, you saw your turning point and could rapidly cut through to reach those Great Heights where Daniel Sat and from there, no doubt, through the hole in his head as a long-viewer lens, could see the topmost panel, which he no doubt most adored, for it alone was His to View.

( )

. o .

o . o . o

( o )

With regrets ~ Daniel remained lost in memory.

Finding himself again, he was always where he ought be.

It were many moons none could see waxing when he had first come to this country, and yet fewer more though many more in their own were it were since another had come he had met, the man whose name was Bruxer Haruspex, and whose association he neither confessed nor reviled nor truly humored though the man seldom said more by saying so little it drove you mad how little he must truly know, yet what frightened you most was only how much you assumed he knew, knowing too much and remaining tight-lipped as to ends you could not ascertain for context seemed evasive and the throughline illusory.

Bruxer Haruspex, calling out the rabble as to the location of the Bomber's Hideout, the only Local Mithraium where his tenuous connections via the Ruelandese San Navy could purchase him any sympathetic association, for only the oldest and most ossified of Our Nation's Guardian Class frequented such a place with the Milk Bar so close nearby, as there was no risk there of them inducing men to go gurt, for they could ferment simply and accrue mold in their dank cave, mildewing white fuzz of granulated grains in the empty dark.

Somehow, he had attained, of his own volition, through a private collector, one of his many ertswhile entanglements, one of the supposed 36 viles of The Pure Rage, isolator of island masses, which he transported in a cryogenic vessel on his formal person, and glanced at only on right occasion in a hypnotic torpor, for he loved it only as the daughter he would never have, the wife who was a fancy only for he fancied himself being the one being shagged, and knew his hateful resentments and unloveable loves born of undreamable dreams were better off segregated far from the prying eyes of mankind, and he needed only a body slightly more warm to crank open his hot-cold one.

Slight of hand, and dexterous of tongue, he had recruited before the eve of the revolt, that which some might justifiably call a usurpation long over-expected, of the head of a certain small Post-Imperial Cult Obsessed with Pre for a vigorous police state, needing no police, certainly leaves the police in need of wanting, and so a show of force needed be made, forcibly and forcefully if showy-enough.

How did you manage, Cpt. Bruxer Haruspex... ?

To have measured out the ratios against his mass so poorly, taken so little into account his existing electrochemistry, as you have your own endless spectrum of partial tolerances and totally-reversed intolerances, not realized how the Virus would fail to not only drive him into a state of frenzy, but show any adverse reaction, as he was able to consume its strain as arsenic in tea, leaving him so well-adapted you could never get it back out, no matter how vigorously you attempted to suck all seven to eight inches of his equestria drier'n bone-dry?

Death to the Dumbfuck

Bruxer Haruspex.

Squanderer of Viral Loads.

This Curse, I Gift to You ~

I the Demon, Daniel Craig Radcliffe Burnham

Architecht of Chicago, Heart of the Midwest

As the pale panthera Joeymany, I

A Lion in a Landlocked State

Whose pagan name was

Yamashita Ichigo

Luxor Drythen

Strawberry mid-Fielder

Eggman RX

My Own,

Is What Iamb

Whose Babylonian name is

Bad Boy Balthassar Ghetty

Loser of All Highways ~

Hit the Road J A c (e) K

Die with Me Asuka Darling

Sweet Hermione

Gingersnaps

Thus it was so that I had taken the vantage of that poor fool, that lost boy with no name or history for he had been swallowed up shoal, body and soul by Moi, who dared think by My Skin he ought make a name for Himself, who truthfully I loved dearly for his wholesome and self-individuated panache, universal as a phrase and personal as a signature as every open vein shone red upon a contract.

I -- you -- loved him for how he'd taken his own obsidian mirror mask and shattered it by the bell of his irons to stud the pieces in the gouges of a basbeball bat, his own handcrafted all done himself macuahuitl to take tribal violence into his own hands against the man he professed to love most, for only there in his warm deference could such treachery pass for noble violence, as you at last could conquer He who had let down His guard to love a pitiable and mewling worm as you, who slobbered stupidly over yourself in a fetid swamp of your own grovelings.

I loved Him for how much of a Huntsman, a Humanist, never too Absurd, my Sweet Australian Thor, Your Brother I Loved More Tender.

I loved him for how he resembled as he moved and became his profile emboldened by his noble quest where route idiocy gave way to righteousness unhinged as pure uncut cocaine for what frenzy came first cleared the way as a brushfire and I was freed at last from a cage of my own idiot imaginings simply trod hooves by bovines in the dirt.

I loved him for how his eyes low in the dark, poised pythonesque always as Willard rising from the bog making of the muck a Sheen, as he stalked those lone alleys to my secluded terrace and whose winding strata he navigated quite ruthlessly, glacial and still as a sharkfin cutting Greenland seas of every blind depth ~ I had warned him, for I had loved him so the sawteeth of his winding steps raising up the shadowed galleries, to stay far, far away from me for I was not a well to do or well off man, and it would be only a matter of time... before the changes were on me once more and words such as love or faith or humanity lost all luxury, luxuriant as I was forever in my lack.

Yet I loved him still to see me on my windowbox balcony with that portrait I had painted and see his eyes widen in awe and wonder at the vantage I had viddied so well, what vistas ever unfurling in my eyes, whose open windows had always stained ~

I said not that I had expected him, for he had not long enough to see I had seen it so well, in truth I had hardly even heard him when already the shimmer barely visible between the plant and the bookcase ~ the mossy carpets and tasseled enmeshments of these overgrown studioboxes in which one could cultivate apartments ~ a mere heat ripple, a mere spectrographic distortion, already the blade had penetrated deep into his guts and it was as pleasing to the visored eyes of Crimson as this was His namesake in lycra motley clinging to the ballooning of his ample and veiny thighs, above the Western style boots seamlessly blended to make of the pattern a melding ~ a ripple of molecules erupting softly as the fizz of science fair volcanoes, silently fading even while apparated ~ so he came always gently, as a breath, as a breeze, as a pearl of pollen on a springtime scented wind, and as he stood there staring I saw how Long Alive He Truly Was.

For Crimson now had leapt, and carried him by a tremendous feat of athleticism far, and tossed his heart's still beating carcass in a half-cannonball or shot putted boomerang dispersing as afternoon rains a gentle hemorrhaging of his life's vitality against the masses of the people, as into Ombre's threads and barbs, he fell and hung suspended on unseen sutures tearing and pinioning him as his arms bent back against his bowed head brought low by an aerial spladle as Marigold rose as the rays of the sun from the citrus-ripened earth to drive skewers beneath his skin as Seafoam lanced his bones with strange nodes ~ and Azure Sky coming both above and below, uppercutted him at such an angle with precision of the aerodynamism and loadbearing capacity of his bones enough to slice with one fist the whole of his muscularity's mass from his upper dermal layer and skeletal supports wired and notched in place, out into a great burning bronze wok suspended as an Olympic torch far above the square, as Fuchsia City sluiced his still cringing and cowering form screaming without lungs for he had vapors enough to rapidly gush from his throat as he slid through the burning oil, while not-too comfortably close nearby Indigo Plateau of Leng took to home plate swinging His Bat.

Thus, as piscetti into the Mouth of Truth, Ombre and Marigold, backed by Crimson fed this would-be assassin's skin into the open mouth of St. Josef on the top panel of the box, which depicted him, as one, the sum of three, the second of the Two Heads, of the Green Man Osiris the Irish Cowboy, Master of All Vegetative Matter, whose son Laika was stylized likewise as the Root Vegetable White Follicle Beautiful Black Baby Heru, Mother of All Melanizers Who Made Men and Women's Hair Grow Course and Thick, Father of All Beards.

Thus with angelhair Oji Maerie did bow ~

Another Beautiful Day, drawn blacker *

as a curtain pulled, into Splendid Night.

[notmuchtoconceal]

They had come to a rock in the road one summer's day.

The road had grown narrow, and the walls of the stone chasm into which they had walked were likewise a perilous drop.

Time, being out of joint on no account of all the joints -- the fingers of which they kept well-oiled as hinges, clacking away on instruments of torture borne of ventilated rooms in overheated 70's offices -- it was difficult to say in what instance they could confront the rock.

For there had always been a rock. A rock which barred the ever-more-winding and sinuous narrow path into which they were both choked by the ever-engulfing incline yet also awed by the plummeting spectacle.

The rock, seemingly too-intricate of form to be naturally occurring and yet seemingly so, bore no signs of craftsmanship or hospitality.

Thinking of what to do, it were already so.

The first, the largest, my hero ~ whose name was Commander Heath and his henchman Cliff the Bandito, who was always of two minds and never could be reconciled by the full utterance of his name, knew himself more than capable of outlasting the rock and sat down to sit and ponder for all geological time until the rock had wisped away into the vapors of foundational memory, forgotten history which could only be retrieved by acute molecular vibrations at the quantum level.

Deciphering, a pre-eminent translation, his expression had read:

Coulda done that in my sleep.

(Able to retrieve the bones, he was amply capable of putting meat back on them.)

The second, and third largest -- whose limbs were unusually long despite his unusual breadth, and veiny as firehoses perhaps from bearing such loaded stresses, his torso almost impossibly slight despite his muscularity, due to innate asymmetries of form for which he never forgave himself, pushing him ever further towards some impossible ideal, transparent as much bone china as snail mucus, twisted, hobbled, the sunburnt lilly-white narcissist -- his favorite ... knew at once he needed only out-think the rock and it would budge.

Somehow he was right. He was always right. Impossibly right. His moronic, brute-force axioms proved impossibly true, for as the smartest dumb jock, he was the crudest precision instrument and it fitted his nature and station in life perfectly to be an unthinking lawnmower of a man who decapitated relentlessly with casual jet-engine whirring mulching all men bone and organ into gelatin.

The rock had levitated. Rising off the ground simply for the void of his laptop fan mind had made it so and it rose into the air on a plume of debris to meteorically crash into the chasm below as by a succession of high velocity ricochets it carried itself far over and the canyon wall and down perhaps into some neighboring meadow.

That one was Josef... who all else knew as Joey.

Lord Help Me. I cannot resist German Men. German Men make me weak. They're so fierce, so vulnerable, so moody, so relentless, so rational, so intolerant, so enlightened, so serene, so vicious.

They make me wanna be a police dog.

The third, and the second smallest, whose name was Laika, a completely generic Slavic unisex name with much the same anodyne androgyny as Alex, wasn't going to put up with the rock's bullshit, and with a gargling, whistling teakettle volatility, had decidedly rearranged all of space and time to get he and the rock to switch places.

Thus, now at the center of things, he called out to his patron:

IN MY HEART I ADORE ONLY

ST. CATHERINE OF THE BURNING BUSH

FOR WITH ME SHE HATH MADE

A DEAL WITH GOD

(All of us now were still on the other side of the rock and the one which we call Cpt. Bruxer Haruspex lay crushed from the ribs to the crest of the pelvis beneath it.)

Yet truthfully, this mattered little as... getting to him early, the smallest whose name was... you'll hear it once more... Cpt. Bruxer Haruspex... ex-.... what the fuck did he say he was? Principality of the San Navy of Rueland? He's a Sea Outback hick. Australia flooded like the Coliseum, folks. They stage pirate battles in there. It's their favorite thing. The British just made up their own ocean. You're not invited.

Yes, Brux just talked at the rock. Brux talked the rock to death. This was shockingly easy for him actually, since Joey was separately and simultaneously endowing the rock with intellectual awareness by thinking at it, so Brux also talking at it made it wanna die.

The poor rock. It has my sympathies, truly. Endlessly. Wordlessly.

A river of tears. All of space and time for my dearly beloved rock.

What number are we on... ? The hell with it.

My other favorite, the fourth largest, whose name was Jacek... oh my fucking God. Bro. This boy is a walking pharmacological lab. He looks so stoned. He's so vacant. Dumb. Hollow. Shadowed. His flesh is taut, tight and sheen as if glossy like liquid latex, yet retaining all pores, the creases, the lizard skin of leather, of a deeper bronze, more yellow and gold in his baser pigments, remaining shockingly pale as if sheltered from light, starved and expanding in darkness, metallic as if crystals and oxides arose in the ashes of mornings unmourned in-perpetuity, the tangles of slick black mane falling from their cementung in place into rhizomatic tangles of cypress roots over pond scum waters.

He took a breath. He heaved. He pushed against the rock...

He collapsed, for his body was poisoned, and he could expend no effort.

Fortunately, he carried many plastic explosives which he didn't necessarily tend to be plastic explosives... and blew it apart at the precise point where he thought it didn't look too stable.

I didn't know he could do that. I've never seen him do things.

What else does he do? How does Jacek's big beautiful brain work?

(The wreckage of the explosion likewise struck the one we call Cpt. Bruxer Haruspex against the skull with a slab of jettisoned rubble as another crushed his heart and lungs as he fell slant and askew across the asymmetrical and uneven terrain.)

There was Wally.

Wally sized up the rock.

Decided it existed as much as he did.

Phasing through it, he left us there.

He fucking left us there.

Yastly, but far from yeastly, was my cousin Leif who insisted that his friends were cool, and I could let them into my club. I didn't really have a club, nor did I have the constitution to break Leif's heart.

Leif simply recognized the rock as being endowed with all the same substance of the Creator inherent in matter, and regrettably much like Brux this came additionally-easily, for being frotted already with thought and with language, could accept the fruit of the spirit as a metabolizing reagent where it arose accelerated in its own changing and unchanging nature -- dissolving and evaporating, expanding and contracting, shifting with the cascade of consciousness into a thousand faces as much a memory for the rock as a mirror for Leif's fancies -- and by him it was inevitably and irrevocably changed, and lasting with the Commander for all genealogical time as much as detonated by Jacek left it simply more vulnerable to the arrangement of its atoms into that human form which Leif believed to be the image of God, an upright denial of his own baser urges, twisting the tetrapodal structure into a bipedal, bicameral, biphobic two-faced creatura.

Thus the rock became wholly a man and with him we went drinking.

The rock was the first man I'd inducted into my club.

My club which nobody knows I made up then and there for Leif.

My club teeming with untold epochs of occult lineage.

Shhhhhhh.

You are the second member of my club. You are exalted among men.

Only you and the stone know the truth. You are equal to the stone.

You must keep this secret. For all time, you must stand vigilant.

Leif is Love. Leif Is Life.

Leif is Like I Dag.

[notmuchtoconceal]

White Jacek, whose name in truth was Apep Heru Apophis Aesculapius, words which many white men could not pronounce for many white men were very famously not Greek, lay awake long into the morning after a tender and furiously prolonged vital draining of his manhood with the love of his life, the cager of souls and exploiter of secrets, whom he will refer to semi-anonymously as Trini-bitch...

-- TRINI-BITCH!

-- Yes, moon of my ever waxing and waning love, whose hips make my lily deeply-rooted reach high and wilt to leave an ever splendid comb ...

-- Trini-bitch?

-- Trini-bitch.

-- OK.

-- Man, I gotta keepin hearin bout that FUBAR'd Ukrainian firebrand ...

-- I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO SHE I S ! ?

-- STOP BRINGIN HER U P !

-- OK. IS A PHRASING OF CURT AGREEMENT.

-- YOU WIELD IT LIKE A BUTCHER KNIFE TRINI-BITCH!

-- YOU SPEAK OF WORDS AS THOUGH THEY WERE A PERSON.

-- Olga Katarina Schreibermachen rudely dismissed and cherished as "Schizophrina?" Alias Molassa Joan Heartless. Torchbearer of Vendetta. Keyholder of Cruel Dismissal. Breaker of Heart-Forged Chains.

-- Uh-huh. She your ex-girlfriend?

-- Woman, I went to the finest schools and squandered few of the fingers of the fine hand I was delt! Sometimes I don't even fuckin know how to talk to you. I ain't your white daddy, you wanna go find a benevolent colonizer, find a symbiotic tapeworm. Bitch, I encourage you daily with materials and suggestions, go educate yourself!

-- I do educate myself.

-- You snoop and you spy!

-- That is practical education. In your culture they call it "on the job training" but I am never employed for I am eternal free-agent.

-- Baby, you are free to get that ass smacked.

-- I'll be your slave when it's convenient for me.

-- Yeah, tends to be how it be. Awful convenient most of the time for somebody to be a slave. Why I end up bein benevolent slaver?

-- Uh-huh. You got another letter from your best friend Daniel.

-- He found Black Jacek?

-- Why are you calling him that?

-- Woman, I tire of explaining once more the intricacies of the senses of my humor. If you are not in on the joke, build a bridge to my shores!

-- I am NOT watching that Sealab show to get the basics of your plot.

-- You are a Debbie and will never know which one.

-- From watching Night of the Living Dead, the take-away you want me to induce is that a black man in a survival situation is a better grief councilor for a traumatized white woman than any member of her own family, but you are less a zombie than a feeder on more than flesh...

-- I am the Doctor Quinn... Medicine Man to Stormier Daniels!

-- Your boy Jacek... it is relevant you are nudging me to deduce... that he'd never seen a single Roger Moore Bond and Live and Let Die with Paul McCartney of "Wings" was the ideal indictment to a trance state.

-- It's a fuckin masterpiece of surrealism! [Derogatory?] Swear to fuckin God, gurl. Makes about as much sense as a work by Salvador Dali.

-- Uh-huh. You been doin hoodo on ya boy?

-- Yeah, maybe wonder where I learned it?

-- I have done nothing but love and respect you.

-- Who said you don't?

-- ...

-- ...

-- Well, glad you ain't got a guilty conscious, ebony black new moon drifting round the clouds of my grief depthless in a midnight storm.

-- I ain't...

-- A guilty conscious? Why would you? You ain't ever drained me like a cell phone battery erry night for god knows what reason to do fool's midnight errands I can't fathom... Seeing so clearly into the other world, it must not help but make this one a bit misty?

-- You talkin like a white man.

-- How does Daniel's letter begin?

-- "Dear Enchanted Black People From My Agatha Christie Mystery."

-- ...

-- Why are you looking at me that way?

-- How does that phrasing resound to you?

-- I know Agatha Christie as a famous runaway who wrote books.

-- You know funny stories'n more methodical thrillers?

-- I only know and therefore provide cheap thrills.

-- Gurl needs to get her a more sophisticated cliente.

-- You're all the sophistication I can handle.

-- You're my succulent lil sweet-lipped sophist.

-- What's a sophist?

-- A sophist is someone who's sophisticated in their own way.

-- How sophisticated is that?

-- Exclusively.

-- Wait then what's a sapphist? Is that the blue stone?

-- Gurl you fuckin lost you can't tell a sapphist from a sapphire.

-- They come from one word as branches from the same tree?

-- You check that etymology dictionary I gave you?

-- You gave me three dictionaries!

-- Yeah, one is for rhyming and the other's a thesaurus.

-- You also gave me a lizard.

-- It was a fish, sweetness.

-- A whale is not a fish.

-- No, sweetheart it's a mammal.

-- It is more like a gorilla or a cat?

-- Yeah. It's got skin and not scales and lungs and not gills.

-- You think not... of what things are, but how they form?

-- What a thing is is how it forms.

-- You are arbitrary, strange and confusing. Why am I reading this?

-- Daniel's funny lil joke... he is drawing a connection between what he perceives to be the odd and stilted diction stemming from our mutually uncouth manner to be somehow emblematic of ... a crude imitation of antiquated genre fiction. He masters funny lil rules, then chastises you for the supposed eeriness of your supposed non-conformity.

-- Uh-huh. You lost me.

-- It reminds me much of how Black Jacek spoke of his Josef.

-- Who?

-- Olga Katarina's sister.

-- That girl I don't know? OK.

-- Yes, precisely.

-- She has a brother... that's great. She know Jacek?

-- Not as far as I can tell?

-- How do you know her?

-- I've read her books.

-- Uh-huh. An obsessive fan?

-- Woman, hush.

-- WHO IS SHE TO YOU? TELL ME?

-- Her many questionable assertions remain a persistent point of fascination. Neither her celebrators nor her detractors, by and large, grapple with her intricacies in any meaningful way, so I'm hesitant to discuss, much less support her without building what I feel to be a three-tiered system of defenses to test for hostilities to not so much to ideas but how those ideas may be perceived through artificially loaded language, which is problematic... in a god-damn Cartesian dualist sense for it inevitably becomes the study of how language intersects with biology in both an immediate and long-term manner.

-- You fuckin wit me.

-- You have been fucked enough, I would like a partner!

-- WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!

-- To understand my need to feed on vaguely racist Polish men! They're catnip to me! They're a bizarre admixture of European ephemera historically existing on the fringes of all systems of white ideological control, struggling with a culture of self-adopted literacy to the point where phonetically similar languages are mutually intelligible in terms of that literacy! Being shaped by exclusion and repeated self-deletion, they develop an uncanny and sensitive self-awareness despite their dogged hard-wired dog-like conditioning... so godly!

-- Man... you gay.

-- Precisely, woman! I tire of you now! Be gone from my chambers!

-- This is my room!

-- As your king I am owed my due! Lie awake in the open sun and be bronzed deeper into a bronzed copper cliffside for my amusement!

-- Why do you do this to me...? I just wanna make you happy?

-- Go read a book I've given you!

-- Read it to me... ?

-- Read one on your own first.

-- Man, you just wanna leave me behind...!

-- Woman, I want you on my level!

-- All those books, you want I should I make a stepstool?

-- Kiss me, shorty pie?

-- Kiss me, giant killer.

Thus White Jacek whose name was Apep Heru Apophis Aesculapius began once more making tender and furious love to the love of his life whose name was semi-anonymously reported as Trini-bitch, and may continue to do so for all time if he does not improve his karma.

[notmuchtoconceal]

LYS THYME ON NAGAVOXX SI

WALLY: [smoking a shitload of herb] Bro, Laika's box is laik... crazy bro. It ate Joey and Jacek and killed Brux. Now it's laik... in a museum? MOIJA -- You had heard it had somehow... made Drottin dumber. LUX or DROTTIN: Bro gettin dumber's only wishful thinkin, bro. You wish for it, you'll think about it and it'll happen, man. DANIEL DRYTHEN II: I have read speculation as to suggest that I myself emerged from the box after it absorbed an element of cousin's stupid -- as though I myself am that very same stupid pressurized, molten and sculpted into the shape of an alluring Asiatic honeypot. This is patently absurd. I ought needn't elaborate. I was there not only moments before the box opened, but also days, months years... I have been a necessary and vital part of this operation for almost a decade, and my influence is a matter of state record, which nonetheless remains unspoken. It is frankly humbling (but not for me) the sheer amount of you who professes to have no idea of my existence, while leaping to conclusion that hunky Asian men are rarer than fae creatures!

A light emanating forth -- wound you back into darkness.

Holle-Llew-Jah.

What is happening?

() has h a p p e n e d ()

-- Twelve episodes. Hippocamp(/-\L) conch-scrambler, short-form wave. Makes a maelstrom of the ring in yer ear. Tinny on the band.

Any of it go public?

-- Everyone saw everything.

Fuck.

-- Me Pumps.

Hope in the bottle?

-- The visions're being decoded. As you know, through the backdoor reach around true many lonely and delicate delicatessens... much of it were based on things that were, accurately tabulating things'll be.

Containment?

-- Red bad spill, but it'll sterilize before it gets sticky. You been fucked harder, and you will get again. Worry, your pretty lil head'll come off.

Oak-aged?

-- The Luxes are running the the frame-analysis themselves. Their Lt.s'll be the only one's who'll handle the first-run prints.

FRAME BY FRAME?

-- Latke used much subliminal detail, wonder where he learnt it.

Wally, you needed to explain this immediately.

-- Suddenly so curious bout the intricacies, are we?

Laika's recycled animation trap --

-- The logistics, you mean?

What is the manner in which it operates. How does it function.

-- What is it?

Wally, what is a Recycled Animation Trap?

(Georgia Peach Daiquiri.)

-- To explain the concept generally would take far too much time. It would necessitate... explanations upon explanations, for to take any shortcuts in the name of expediency would introduce massive distortions, as limited understanding would attempt to prematurely seal the breach, thus creating a grotesque, thus maximizing animistic leak via the incidental elaboration of an error into an idol.

Psychokinesthetics and Traumadolatry, jah. The kids weren't here.

-- Right, so... Using the Sealabian model, which he'd reconstructed from the freshly restored and remastered tapes, Laika were able to deduce... the animation frames established in 1972 and yet set in 2020, when re-edited continuously between the years of 2001 and 5, every episode visually rolling over from the distant and utopian 2020 to a more immediate and farcical 2021, in that turn-of the century period marked by a sudden massively publicized and widely broadcast national trauma where historical Laurentian, then-Amalrican dreams of infinite prosperity came to a grinding halt...

Editing the tapes... created the equivalent of a temporal gulf stream collision where two way currents collapsed into a central point?

-- A hole in time, like a bathtub drain, more or less.

Laika figured this out watching cartoons?

-- You don't have the eyes, sir. It's tragic, what it is.

Was that the fuckin shit with the Bizzarros?

-- Bizarro, I love you! Bizarro, I love you!

Everytime you took Laika seriously -- he showed you somethin like that and delighted openly in how he was obviously ruinin it.

-- 1972, 2001, and 2021, sir. They were all occasions in the Amalrican imagination -- where long-cherished dreams of progress, integration, break-through, advancement, unification, independence... all came to a bleak and sudden stop which snapped the bones.

There was an underlying affinity --

-- As though magnetically polarized to one another -- as if... floating in space within that ring... these three separate gears hinged to one another by mutual force, when Laika saw that a man could hop and skip across them laik takin a detour through a grassy knoll as he skipped from stone to stone across the stream.

This is --

-- Indicative of an underlying pattern which Laika believes he is the first, but of course has simply discovered for himself -- similar mechanical affinities exist in all dimensions across all points in time, and what Laika discovered was the particular density of 2001 --

That gate connects also to 1968.

-- The 2001 of that film may as well be 2172 for its over-optimism in commercial space travel, which is exactly the point. These gear-shafts and overlapping cogs become more defined as time continues to elaborate upon itself with linear advancement, concurrent as it is spiraling and expanding. Though in no way representative of the 2001 we know, that film is inseparable from our sense of that year, with all its inherited contractions, and only additionally vitalizes it with dimensions of Lunar-mechanical to Redacted-Saturnine Jovian-expanse as it re-veils and after-births itself as a natural doorway.

What is that makes 2001 so special? The sum of 3 in 4 digits?

-- Cute, but no. The whaler on the moon carries no harpoon.

Oh, look -- a millennium long gate!

(Crazy laika Fox!)

-- Precisely. Through the roll-over of 1999 into 2000, we create the bridge between cryogenic stasis poppin brewskis, for 2000 rolls both over to 2001 and 3000 as we thread through the dark ages and an alien invasion, always fashionable no matter the millenia!

(Black Phillips's the Fry, try to keep up!)

Dear God, Wally. How does this keep getting worse?

-- Those decades which begin the centuries, yet have no names -- the 1900s, the 2000s, the 3000s, 4000s, etc. The aughts, the alls. They represent, in themselves, nothing but the whole of the season.

Do they represent also -- one another?

-- Precisely. When you see the connections between sudden explosions in new media technologies which come to rewire the space of the brain through the brain of space, you can see for yourself how within one generation all knowledge can be lost.

That brings us...

-- To Joey, yes. His own millennial adolescence of our era.

Joey is ... back to a summer as a teenager... in 2001, 1972 and 2021?

-- More or less. Etc. etc.

(Back in 1912

I Could Kick Your Ass!)

He was -- spinning. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Spinning.

-- Unaware of when or where is, he will come to not know who he is, and he will walk in circles thinking they are straight lines, and be perpetually baffled he is getting nowhere when all of his deductions check out and his eyes and head remain so clear and calm?

The other years --

-- Let's just stay where we are for now. Thinkin 1972's a lot for you?

You didn't know ...

-- There's a lot, you know. You know you know. 'Cept what I don't.

. . .

" . . . "

What stretch of years was it... Joey grew up in?

-- You're asking me when Joey was a teenager?

In what historical era his adolescence occurred, yes.

-- Joey looks to me bout... 32? If he was 13, that'd be... 19 years ago?

Which in your words would be when exactly?

-- When or what?

When or what what?

-- What's it yer askin me? When it was or what Joey is?

Isn't what Joey currently is when Joey is?

-- You becomin more a philosopher or a rhetorician?

You loved the meaning of words but more that words had meanings.

-- Information will be coming at you. You'd best be prepared.

Get me another drink.

( L I M A B E A N A N D L I M P I D G R E E N )

-- Not the only Onclefukker round here, Terrace.

[notmuchtoconceal]

( o )

An incense of fermented tobacco swung, haylike, in the air.

-- At the end of Latke's Game, sir. Brave Ser Josef will have to make a choice. Which number he chooses for the stunning climax -- "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" or "Springtime for Hister" will reset the fault in our stars and steer us from impending calamity, toward instead some further and ever more distant blip. This is how the inevitable is denied, the apocalypse delayed, cockteasing Death Herself by the Light of Some New Revelation, some Newer and More Splendid Son, to keep her writhing and turning, sinuous and snakelike in many oily coatings in odious sheddings trod beneat.

You can't stop making mistakes. Only make better ones.

-- Aye, sir. Repentance itself is the slime mold which makes us the skeleton of our visible cosmos. All which lives comes into being through forgiveness. Hatred is a our choice for death, which not even God Himself could deny us, he leaving us free to deny ourselves.

Getting into the meat of things -- were seldom as fun as the pulp.

-- From the pit, I'm the it. He saw the Spider Woman, then the White Lights of Maine Bloomin Laika Cigarette -- the boy's an Oracle on his 3rd Scary Movie. He can tell Cindi why the TV's leaking. He's outta the white noise and into the color spectrum, big bro.

Wally weren't worried. He just delighted in pre-existing expectation.

-- To see your humble brow -- tremble so handsomely. Well. You ain't afraid to hear another White Trash Tough Guy Monologue from the King Himself Delivered Through the Lipsa a Kathy Bates -- our little Clownboy's feelin as Kim as a Curry Courtin Darkness.

You and Laika are self-confessed cinephiles, Wally. We get it.

-- You a closet-case, big bro? You denyin our memetic heritage.

Some fucking times, bro. You can talk from point A to B to C.

-- I'm fuckin A to Z as a Bee to the Zeus. Musk is porn to me, I'm always sniffin pit where X marks the spot. Some men gotta rape the economy cause they don't got the brains to rape Nature Herself!

You hated him. You hated him so much. He always made you think.

-- You poor boy, however do you manage?

You were a retard because he was always retarding you.

-- I go fast, you go slow.

His going too fast made you slow.

-- All those years you enjoyed being one step ahead -- compound interest on your own acceleratin lineage, you can tolerate an eternity of me always bein five or six.

The Great Hunter, in His Own Image, forged the algo, to infinitely refine itself into an ever more permanent and inescapable trap.

-- I am Logic Itself. You have raped me, as your son has raped me.

Wally, please.

-- I am Logic Itself. You have raped me, as you have raped your son.

Fuck it. Please. By all means, do go on.

"Rapity rapity rape rape rape rape."

Only the frank sophistication you would expect from the best.

-- Naturally, over-explaining myself, I free you from needing to ask any questions, and you never asking any questions, I always know what you're thinking. To over-insinuate would be frankly disastrous.

With most people, you could carry on two or three conversations at once. With Wally, it was just the one. He were always gesturin broadly at seven or eight things just outta frame, and you had to take his word for it they were there. To a dog, everything's ghosts.

-- Who do you carry conversations on with?

Joey/Brux talking at each other made em real good at talking at you.

-- They're not a pair, sir.

"They're around me, or they're not around me."

What he said.

-- Brux and Joey each get you alone plenty.

Don't remind me, or you'll remind him.

"I DON'T WANNA SEE EM RIGHT NOW."

You see? You see?

-- Temperamental. You treat your brothers as a wife and daughter.

"IN WHAT WAY ARE THEY NOT!"

If you stop talking to him, he'll go away.

-- Is this really anyway to live? You know, us... always talking... or rather... not talking... around your lil condition?

Condition, he says. Like it were a status affliction.

-- Loike or Laika?

"SHUT THE FUCK UP."

You had to?

-- What did I even say that time?

"WHAT DID YOU NOT SAY!?"

-- Whole lot more than what I did say, big man.

We're having this conversation. Objectively, it is occurring.

-- How many people are in the room right now?

Two.

-- You need me to call Daniel or Drottin in?

Two Luxes.

-- What's my name?

You were fuckin Wally the Motherfucker.

-- Don't you forget it.

(HEY! I HEAR ANY TWO HEADED MONSTERS IN THERE NEED A HUG!)

Fuck off, Cheese Danish.

(CHERRY CHEERY BOOM BOOM!)

"Gaga."

Wally intoned reverently.

G A G A

G A G A

G A G A

From the lips of Gay Old King George emanated Gregorian Chant.

-- Astarte as a brainwashed Italian bimbo?

He were askin it like it were a question.

-- LAIKA, IT WERE A QUESTION!

"STOOOOOOOP IT!!!"

Why, Wally. Why?

-- He's cute. You're cute. I don't see what the problem is?

"I'M NOT A HOMO!"

-- You're quite singular?

. . .

" . . . "

QUESTION MARK!?

-- Question mark?

( DAN MARK )

Now you've got him on it. You got him on it.

-- He's not liable to stop, is he?

It's hopeless. He were torturing you. He were just like Joey. Joey were just like his mother. His mother were just Brux. Not like, just.

-- NOT LAIK -- JUST!?

He wanted to see you cry. Don't give him the satisfaction.

-- Admit the quality which makes Asiatic demons so hot is precisely they exist in a more advanced moral context where their roles as bluffs, bouncers and bureaucrats is more apparent than the squalid, psycho-sexual European imagination mired in abandonment.

Yes, Wally. We need more jacked Yakuza thugs fuckin everywhere.

-- Damn straight, lil bitch.

Underestimating the innate folly of the West quite well-occurred when one believed all corners of the Earth ought be united beneath Eight Clouds, as on all Cardinal Points stood Eight Stones, rather than nature itself to mire, to accumulate, to contract and expand as it must in accord with its own dictates, its own aura.

-- She is no woman to you, as she is to me. I have no God but Allah.

When Mohammat Bowed to the Rising Sun -- All Was Won in Wisdom. Oli Omnium Hominium Pacis Abbas -- Solve Et Coagula.

-- Well, then -- what's it mean to you? This choice before Boy Joey?

The two songs -- there was no logic inherent to them.

-- All that matters to Latke is that Joey's big dumb toothy blonde Germanic monkey face'll look real good enunciating all the syllables with his cocksucker's lips and anvil jaw. What else, it must?

The two songs, Wally -- they maintain a certain Nationalist theme.

-- More logic inherent to a no than remains assumed or said, eh?

There seems not much of a decision inherent to them.

-- Decide? Between what? You know what happened happened.

He weren't reading Eliot at the Spencer Mansion.

-- Duplicate beneath the Antarctic base? Only a prototype?

If a War could End All Wars.

-- Fathers never grieve their daughters. Mother never grieve their sons. The transgender menace has gripped the world, holdin us in an embrace from which we will not loosen our composure.

Big Ben's striking Ten.

-- Twenty to midnight.

Fifteen minutes.

"Minimum safe distance."

Somewhere -- somewhere far from here.

Closer.

-- The subject of the tracks, you may tell, speak to a trolley problem desperately waiting to be solved. Every plank is a bystander. Every double-decker a club assembled courtesya Scooby-Doo.

Joey can do -- no right.

-- How might he feel, sir? Singing these songs, at their appointed time, once he is irrefutably aware -- the inevitability overtaking him?

Tomorrow Belongs to Me -- no doubt about it. He would play it bitterly understated. Taking the dramatic irony to its logical conclusion, he'd strip it of any Nationalist fever far past the point of lament; strip it to such a bare minimum beneath the bones, he'd crack the core of his own atomized self and burst forth into a hydrogen bomb of such cloistered self-indulgence, the whole universe in a nutshell'd collapse beneath its leaden crust.

-- Learning well from you, he could be only he. The next?

Springtime for Hister -- he'd play it so straight, it'd balloon into Puccinian tragedy. Somehow, he's compel us to the see the pathos, and it'd be a legit gut-buster -- so funny it breaks our bones.

-- Funny, he seems to reveal by embodyin opposites, eh?

He's sterile with irony poisoning.

"From a diet of heavy metals?"

Mr. Olympia don't need no rectal mercury.

-- Nevertheless, takes plenty a fish oyle, eh Olyve?

There ain't no other Reindeer. Grandma ain't got run over.

-- I stuck a whoopie cushion up your larynx, you sound like Laika.

You get force-fed yer daily estrogen tablets, you sound laik Brux.

*oestrogen

-- When confronted with the specter of his homeland's looming lapse into self-mutilation as an necessary occurrence, you believe Joey will detach so-hard, in one of two opposing directions -- ignoring the fear and horror, his own desire for truth illumination, progress, mastery as a power-grab and take it near a Satanic solipsism where there is no God but Joey, as there is no nation but Israel -- all that Dahlia as much as Masons shit, less he endows whimsically saccharine childhood fables with the holy seriousness of an Angry White Man wit a Death Wish and plunge so hard into the infantile nightmare which shaped him, we are broken to his eternal laughter, as if to prove to ourselves once and for all he is but the product of but a day's bad joke, and if lived in his likeness, we may be so lucky?

You didn't need to be a Polish, Pink Transgender Palm Tree to wonder aloud why it is we keep making the same mistakes.

-- A finger pair a heartlanders, there never were. Tell me, oh tell me, take me, oh take me, to the place where all the tracks converge.

The problem here has to be deeper than Joey's Germane-ness.

-- As a Motherland's much deeper than a Mother.

As Mother Earth's much deeper than an Earth Mother.

-- Hence, once day, we all end up berried.

Carried by the winds out to the sea and sky.

-- Turning tragedy into comedy, comedy into tragedy.

Violation, the law of conservation of mass.

-- Burnin a butthole into entropy itself?

Ants on celluloid, cigarette burns in magnified lenses.

-- That's it, sir. Tell your son I love him.

Joey was precise and complex, optimized for precision work.

-- That maybe why he's so fragile? Sensitive laika mic?

A glass dome you rung like the liberty bell.

-- Real bitch when you want a crack, it shatters, eh?

Moon jellies. Microscopic on a red tide.

"Dinoflagellate blooms the day of the blood moon."

Self-flagellating dinosaurs communing church fathers.

-- You tipsy nough on that whine?

Where is Cheese Danish?

(BIG BRO)

Buddy, it's starving in here. Almonds, grapes, goat cheese. Pistachios, dates and Danish blue. Copper plates. Bronze bowls. Silver spoons. Pewter mugs. Time's come. Fill my spirit, babe.

[notmuchtoconceal]

Joey sat in big bro's lap. Joey was sitting in big bro's lap.

Sitting in big bro's lap, his vastness overwhelmed him, Joey succumbing on the level of molecular touch, as if between each cavern of the prints of his digits, he held waves, particles, cresting tides, felt the fluid as concrete in slipping grains of vast.

Grain silos of vast. The immensity of his soft.

His immensity, immeasurable, and yet engulfing him so that he became the only thing he knew, the road anchoring him from the battering tide of himself, ushering in always the storm of himself, stripping off our rooves and busting our windows as he batters our doors, and yet gripped to him, perched in him, you were the eye of the tempest at the source of your own origin, being but a butterfly as already the other half of the earth you defaced ... frozen things, heated as the sun shining on marble, molten like magma searing our unclenched palms like steaks to the briny bones I could lick between your fingers, the amber resin of these memories unspooling coils of centipedal things I would brandish like your fat Irish prick, emerging from the geysers of boiling clay, molten rock, salt springs.

Build me a lake, an island within a nation, as you would me an island, a land within a sea. We were Wisconsin, a Party State, that wretched thing, where Republicans dress like Democrats and Hillside toughs in bruiser and buckles wish they could succeed with Sandy, knowing north from south as well as left from right, or rich from Richard, I would get you drunk on honied words, proud norseman with your ingratiating Texan twang, the many ridiculous things you could be making me blanche as I unhook my DuBois, skin you like a deer as I ride you like a tractor, my ever eager and earful John. You are the key and the portal, the finger and the spittle, beckoning me probe ever deeper into my heart's own curdling poison, pushing cauliflower masses of me, sweetly revealing deceiver, father of lies, author of all errors, reconciler of all true affections meant to last through time; to all who perceive my words to be traps, I pray you die on the wire fences you've seen laid out. Ain't gon be me who eats ya.

His face. Ruthless. The eyes of a killer steering the horizon. The hunter who speares shadows, stalking stars. His eyes were the axis, all vantages his mobile. The sun hung suspended in his grip.

Small. So small.

Blacker than black.

Abyssal pressures in churning waters.

A barnacle on the Titanic, this meager speck of light.

A thousand deafened screams compacted to a mute howl for only the glint of his eyes, as trees bear berries to send far their pits as stones in the guts of creeping things, could light rearrange itself to hear above its own pitch, be over its own vacuum.

To break, and to tear, and reconstitute oneself willingly, less one surrender their will, remained the sole constant to existence.

As some Senator cum Usurper King cum God Empire in the Flesh, laureled in cypress and willow, roadrunner and emperor penguin, sunflower and saffron, jasmine and Gargantua of gardenia, he stood half bare of chest in drapery of buck leather and tiger pelt, streamers of lion's mane cascading off the live cultivar of his own spored pelt, as the honey in his heart came of the wheat tasting blood, Herculean expanses in chiseled marble between the snowcaps of his shoulders, midlands of his biceps, river-splotch'd with hillocks of brawny veinery, the font for the locusts bled from his faucets, for he was the gold always dormant in the lead, the syrupy sweetness of the hive.

Looking, lost, found, drifting some place so terribly distant yet moreso close enough it ruptured out behind the panes of the eyes, light and meat all strata now, emulsified in disembodied colorfilm, skin, muscle, nerves, sinew, bones, marrow, separated themselves neatly before the discrimination of his gaze as a ray of light through a prism, and it was not violence, but sustainable harmony, nakedness as the scientific state of nature, where love is the discovery of an eternal eros, the purity of a commitment to one's own self and sire the most spirited embrace of time suspending space into ever-fruitful re-dis-harmony.

Above his cap, his crown, the halo of a porthole which oriented itself into the gilded frame of a mirror, welt itself from the inevitable symmetry of its own divisions, each point of most extreme distance bearing its loadbearing stake, from where it could proceed only to the point of conclusion which was its point of origin, rejoining with its original filament in division to compose a frame stabilizing the axis.

These four points... the corners of the earth, always churning.

O Noble Savage, Wisdom of the Barbarians.

This is the Truth of the sun sprite, which the German Members of the National Socialist Boy Scouts hath made a terror shine.

To bare your cross, a being of five elements.

Impale yourself on your life, hang yourself from your death.

Let no blood libel you, let no stain become you.

The Hour of the Star, the Glass Slips Away.

We, the Cleaners. You are clean, they will be clean.

The Sun Shines Brightest on All Four Races.

Amleth's Mill Has Descended.

.

( )

( o )

;3( 0 )3;

_/~ ( o ) ~\_

//.\\\.///.\\\.///.\\.///.\\\.///.\\\.///.\\\.//.\\

In a space which was not a baldspot for he was not baldfaced, Laika emerged maned in whiskers from the laurel of laurels, maned golder than gold, and looking into Joe's eyes from the pane of glass which was his window into the world, he saw tears there and smiled at the absurd incredulity of being so alone, shifting the weight of his jaw into something not-so-piteously beckoning, amateur hour, mawkish and demanding as it was cramped by the strain of its own nerves, seeming to screech as dough the lungs were about to collapse in his chest, and Joe was already smiling: smiling before he could cry, grinning before he could wince, standing back up on his busted knee before he could moan, mewl, or beg.

You

are

He

"Yod Hay!"

Laika's breath drifted off into space.

"Not it!"

Meeting his gaze, Joe saw not with his eyes that shadow was as much a reflection as an impression, cleaving not only a ditch from the light, but changing its composition by means of the mass.

"I..."

am you

"I am..."

i am you

"I am... I."

u is i

1 = 2

With the pores of his skin, each downy dowsing rod in the slit of his wrists, he felt the currents of the air quicken as the darkness took shape, yet his thinking mind comprehendeth it not.

Hands on wrists. Hands on heart. Hands on his throat and jaw.

Emerging from the earth, stale waters, tar black as an onyx throne.

Jacek's hands. Jacek's billion hands. Clay-sculpted, chitinous hinged.

Hold Broey's hands. Remember he's real. Hold Broey tight.

Keep My Brother Always Right.

I... I... I...

Flowing, sluicing, wet and cold. Hot and hard, the quivering steel.

He licked the lead from the pipes. He'd lick the tract from yer ass.

Jacek was the reality. Joe were the reflection.

Went too long tru the lookin glass, vainglorious proxy.

Mirrorland's the only place yr kind is real.

"Please... "

Groggy. Sodden. Half-milked, still chocolately.

"... tell me, I must be dreaming?"

Joey looked into the mirror. Things which happened again seldom seemed so dramatic, occurring as they did like clockwork.

"Jacek is a pollution. Jacek is a grime. Jacek is an odious resin which accrues as bird droppings splatter on statues, or marble edifices dinge through the decades with urban smog. This is why Jacek is a casing, introduced with words to mother he will never speak. Jacek will literally die if Broey so much as takes a bath. It's sad, really."

The fury of his clinging to life would shatter these brittle bones.

"Don't take a bath, Broey. Never take a bath. Jacek needs be ripe."

"I will one day take a bath, and you will die. This is the reality that is."

With eyes which weren't open, buffering towards some mute horizon in the darkness he heard only in whispers, the words came with that wistful lack of effort which was an inevitable tumbling out.

"Death... is my only reality."

"Jacek, take a bath."

"You think everything I say is funny, Broey?"

"Nothing you say is ever funny."

"Think everythin you say's pretty fuckin funny, Broey."

"Thank you. I'd say I'm a natural wit, but I fear the only thing natural about me is my unrelenting attitude, and seeing as I am always trying, and therefore inevitably succeeding, I can no longer say what comes naturally to me, or what appetites may or may not be natural."

As this was a nuanced and dispassionate reading of a man's own solitary character gleaned from experience, which humbly assessed how a perceived strength stemmed from a lived weakness, while raising philosophical questions which were also a springboard into a covert inquiry as to the nature of the inquirer's affection, while being disarmingly playful in a way which could be teasing, torturous, insinuating or implanting depending on myriad precise context(e)s which were not immediate at a glance... Jacek shut up.

"I don't know bout any of that. That means whatever you wanna make happen, you gotta do all the work. Which you will. I'll just watch you work alone til I figure out enough of what you're doin to imitate it, at which point people will imitate me and have less of a clue bout what they're doin than I do, cept then I won't be able to tell em."

"It is amazing to me... that you don't see how little practice there is without theory, as much as there is productivity in toil!"

"It's amazing to me... that you need theory to practice."

"Theory is refined in practice, as a sword is sharpened by the stone."

"Practice is the volcanic vent, and theory is the dry craggy earth."

"Has the foundation of their knowledge been laid over you, brother?"

"Paved over the street with me still in it."

Joey, folly of follies, wasted precious time orienting himself within his Brother Jacek's conscious, autobiographical orientation in order to identify with him someday less condescendingly, forgetting this was impossible, and so missed a chance for the truer understanding and deeper knowledge of logically deducing from the implied axioms of his stated beliefs, that his brother -- in keeping with his epistemology of self wherein Joey needed be less real than he, else He more real than Me -- maintained a contrary philosophy regarding what actions constituted violence against what, he prioritizing his total reversal.

"You must never humor your humorings of stupid people, yes. All metanarratives collapse under scrutiny, which is why healthy vigorous mammals only ask questions about things they wish to kill or fuck, these being equally transformative to the docile flesh."

"Cowboy's always gotta remember... he himself is not a cow."

Few would ever realize... cowboy's often a horse.

"Moooooo."

"Neigh."

Looking up at him, looking up at me. Bolting him to the throne with a thousand narrow hinges. Looking down at him, looking down at me.

Joey's eyes in your eyes, standing upright.

Flexing, the paddleboard limbs splaying as spiderlegs when his shirt unfurls overhead as the oakmoss of his musk windmills up your nostrils with the currents such slight motion creates.

Diving into your eyes, filling up your sight.

Plummeting, with such controlled fury, unbridled and poised he would break the air as he dilated your sight, made a lubrication of his own friction, anchoring himself in your narrowing horizons.

IF THE CHILDREN

DON'T GROW UP

In his gaze, he could hold the big man and Laika. In his gaze, he could hold his commander and his betrothed-to-be-betrothed. His elder brother who was his mentor, his warden, his butcher. His younger who was his pupil, his thrall, his scavenger.

OUR BODIES

GET BIGGER

Enlistment. Solicitation. Recruitment. Petting.

A jagged peak, veiled in desert brine.

BUT OUR HEARTS

GET TORN UP

Into his eyes, Joe could hold only his Commander's face, as watching him in the mirror as his lips pressed to his, he lost sight of Laika, and Laika found himself, gladly, uncaring, in no want of being unwanted, mired in that reflection where he saw the man he could not touch, in a time could no longer see, the presence of a shadow who never abandoned him, who he did not need to imagine, for its reality stood out so stark and opaque, so evident and clear to a man of his slight sensitivities, as but another of the stupendous beyond counting splendid things which he took for granted.

KISS ME

oim

OIRISH

A mechanical man stood in silhouette against the sky, framing the absence of a door in a wall no longer there. His movement creaked as the tuggings of ligaments, where arteries horizontally rather than vertically gorge'd so he was rhetorically and literally, less a puppet than a doll anchored long a tract running deep, arrayed recesses right tru crevices of his corpus and would lacerate him from the inside out if ripped, less a hook from the throat of a fish than the Canadian's adamantium bones sloished by subtler probings of Magneto-fingers.

(Ser Ian Be Praised!)

When the eyes of the sun, His Brother Josef, fell upon him, it brought the new day he heralded crow-in-throat, cock-in-hand, showers of liquid gold lubricatin him deep in the ambience of that stream forever pissin upon him, the dawn so hot and bright, sodium lights under aquarium glass of dark nights I never left here and now, I see them by the streetlights of that sun I conjure out myself, the mornin I always make drinkina my own sterilized recyclins to an atmosphere yellow wallpaperin every molecule of oxygen in hydrogen peroxided volcanic black iodine -- it hurts to move, to think, to see, to be, to hold myself upright by the notches of my own twistin message-decoder rings composin every twistin vertebrae as arms bend back to windmills and legs twist clockwise gainst my trunk to pantomime express shippin in dismembered day-to-day routines, and yet and yet as Brother Josef touches me -- I bein touched by him, the sight of him, and his sight, his sight of me, the singular drink which parches the deep drought of my soul with the brief but glimmerin second dawn noon of his fleetin recognition makin day brighter than day, night darker than night-- I am taken in hand by him, his palms to my face, his fingers to my lips, and he is petting my tongue, scaling the roof of my mouth, leaving oil paints to twirl with fingers sticky all the notches of my palate. It pleases me most to please him most to feel those prints imprint on me, and feel me deep -- those hour-long sensual caresses he compacted to the span of moments as his pruned swimmer's fingers, preserved through the winter with salt, pressed onto the etchings of those notches of my spine and read as braille with his skin as he took into his conduits the electricity therein and knew me in the ages as only a man might by the tree rings of the giant he'd defenestrated for timber, but he did not kill me... merely murdered me of my pretentions, unburdened me of my excuses, for I had made myself a burden, and allowed myself to be taken captive as a servant in my own home to ease some impotent regret born of borrowed blame in a past no longer mine alone.

I AM I

AM I AM

I AM AM I

Bowing, habitually as was his habit, well-worn as the thread into which he'd been stitched, it would undo him to pluck at the seam.

Thus he was handed, with the curtness of all mercy, the lordliness of the astute and overdue, what'd seen long cherished, most evidentially hoped and desired for, a rocks glass... full of rocks.

"To you, Brother Brux."

Joey said these words, to him.

"To me?"

Brux said. Brux said this to Joey.

"To... me."

Brux said. To himself.

"Tome."

Brux said to Me.

"To you."

Joe said to you.

"Two you."

Jacek said to Joe.

"TO JOE!"

Laika cried!

"CUJO!"

Jacked howled.

"Gettin a... wee bit dizzy, fellas."

Brux twirled.

"Don't drop your drink."

Joe remaindered.

"I been left behind's what I been."

Brux whooshed. [ethereally]

"Times're behind, me get used to it."

Joe remembered.

"Drink yer drink!"

Laika insisted. [ostensibly politely]

"You dope me, you lil fiend?"

Brux admonished. [with a wind!]

"Ah, he winded you!"

Jacek reported. [objectively -- teasingly]

"Joe, he winded me!"

Laika tattled. [childishly]

"Waiter, death to both my perfect lil princesses."

Joe commanded.

[two shots

twirl of the cylinder

one shot]

The waiter obeyed.

"He wanted ice... I made him a diamond."

"Joey..."

Laika spoke.

"I love you."

The truth was out.

The beautiful days, they were forever returning. Forever was the inevitability of death being but an illusion of the dreaming mind, comprehensible only in dreams where death does not exist, and fear is revealed simply as an extrapolation from nothing out of which we wake up, yet we are always waking up or rotting away in vegetative forms deeply rooted in undreaming muck, my lil clay soldier.

Be tin, and I will make you bronze. Rust, and I will lubricate you with blood. Tell no lies, less hindlimbs hang again off cherry trees.

Over the kitchen counters, he was taken and let himself be took :-- by the light of the wood where no wax burnt, and it was fine, exquisite even to be borne so bright and so shook by a buck of such magnificence, a stallion of such straight sight, his every shooter was sixes, his every barrel were silver, when it weren't iron or oak.

Chested, he was all aces ~

"I am DE MANGE OF DE HAUS."

Gritting teeth, fists magnetic cored.

"APPLE WHORE. BALTIMORE."

Brux armored his adam's with the fingers.

"Charlton Hestenss(/)n!"

(aural inhospitability zone)

"TIME TO TIP TO THE CARTWRIGHT."

"Uncle Charles!"

"POISON SEEDS, JUICED & PASTED DOWN TO CIDERTOWN!"

Some brief soliloqy would do the master well.

"'Tis but the loveliness of the autumn leaves, those dry brown leaves, the salt coast, the gilt in neon glow of the backlit screen, I already feel... so pristine, knowing I've used my dollar to bring about the dystopic tech aesthetics of which I always dreamed, for I am a broken man beggin be fucked by unthinking machines, I a wounded animal overdone with a bun in the oven... my blistering crack can't always be salted'n buttered?"

"Bro... dude.. guy... persimmon... who the fuck's gonna follow that? What even accent're you doin? Do like... men talk and dress like valium maids you're from, lil hue man? What fuckin color are you even, bro. Like if I ordered a coffee... are you an expresso? Espresso? Express shippin espresso? You're all frothy and amber and caramel cream and dark underneath, so fuckin dark. Wanna open you up, sniff all your beans, see how dark I can roast you."

Daffodil-like, Brux was lettin himself be bashful.

"You're the only man, Uncle Charley... I can watch get pissed off in slow motion. You'll never realize the depth of your enchantment, the still-frame twenty three car pile up I see, when churnin tides of meat and metal roll tru your eyes, those quiverin dew-drops of your pond-scum eyes near green as stone-moss when I lean close't the breadth of your corsage'd lapels when you pick up some man or skirt who ain't me for the ball I'll ain't never kick or fondle, and my whisper alone is the stone I'm flickin cross the still surface of your chiseled brow, breakin the stillness as if a cobblestone bridge collapsin again and again into the sun-warmed face of a branch-caress'd lagoon."

Uncle Charley ... though not to Brux, had a firm hand... on situations particular.

"You are... bro, you are so fuckin faggy for a poonhound. Remind me a me, I dunno why I am. The struggle to define myself when I arm when I am so clear, I being the reflection of the void and cloudless sky which not even the ocean can fill, suspended in dingy glimpses in the pondscum borders of a thousand stagnant, evaporatin specs."

Brux allowed himself the courtesy a bein mortified.

"Vulgar, Uncle Charley! Absolutely vulgar! Sodomy in the breakfast nook and gastric bypass un'er the dinner table I'll take, but I shant hear icemilk such as yourself slurry my horchata, delicioso as it is!"

"Specs, lil brother. Specs."

"Was it I said?"

Into his mouth, Uncle Charley pressed his fingers.

"I FUCKIN TOLD YOU I'M A SADIST. FUCK'N MEANS I LIKE IT WHEN YOU FUCKIN DON'T LIKE IT. WHY YOU FUCKIN KEEP FUCKIN HURTIN ME LIL BRO. WHY THE FUCK DON'T YOU PRETEND NOT TO LIKE IT SO I DON'T HAVE TO HURT YOU. WHY YOU FUCKIN BEG ME TO RAPE YOU TO LOVE YOU!? I CAN'T FUCKIN TAKE IT, BRO. CAN'T FUCKIN TAKE YOU FORCIN ME TO HURT YOU WHEN YOU SAY ALL YOU WANT'S ME TO LOVE ME YOU FUCKIN LYIN LIL SLUT."

There would never be words.

"I'll never tell..."

For the pure desperation with which Brux craved Charley's ever imminent passion.

"HURT ME. HURT YOU. HURT. HURT. HURT. FUCK THE PAIN AWAY, IT'S ALL ME. INTO THE AIR I AM ASCENDING, MY FIRE ALL CONSUMING. TO A THOUSAND SPHERES I TWIST IN WISPS AND TURNS TOUCHING ALL CORNERS OF TIME AND SPACE. I AM THE PAIN, IT US IN ME, FOR HE IS ME. PAINGOOD. PAINGOD. GEOFFREY CHAUCER MOTHERFUCKER, COME SLURP MY GOBLET OF GHONIED RAMHORN."

Twisting strings taut to tune him to snapping.

"W h a t . . . "

Brux believed his fingers.

" I s a y ? "

"LIL WOODEN BOY."

Orange peels in bamboo knives.

"SPIRITS FLOWER THIS DISTILLERY."

Eyes christening lenses.

"Uncle Charley..."

Planchettes on the sight board.

"You drunk, high, insane or just eleven years old again?"

The indifference, by which he meant ingratitude!

"I LEARNED HOW TO SPAKE BRUXER, I AM DOING IT NOW!"

Ingratiation? Abhorrence? Allium?

"I's audacity, Chuck. Like the sonicgraph with the cute lil headphones?"

"DON'T CHUCK ME LIL FINSTER?"

"Can I Chuck you lil berry?"

"... also no."

Things went quiet for awhile.

"Just don't feel comfortable violatin you when you correct my vocabulary, lil bro. Like gettin it on with a grade school teacher."

Brux, naturally, needed to be understanding.

"Nonsense, Chuck. Know it when I tell's ya yer a bad boy it's cause yer a buck and a brute, a merciless oppressor of my bein, violator of my inalienable rights, despoiler of my hopes and dreams, murderer of my children and moistener of my panties, y'know..."

A deliberate attempt... not to fill the quiet.

"Not a stunted development special-ed head case, y'know. Just the coolest guy ever met, who I wanna own me for life. I'm your slave."

Quiet.

"Are you being sarcastic?"

" . . . "

" . . . "

"Yes."

More quiet.

Right as Brux wondered if he had time enough to do his nails, the willows of Charley's lips bowed and bent and he was filled with laughter.

"I get it."

"Only one of us has to!"

Brux loved Chuck a lot. Brux was real grateful to have Joe. Brux and Joe could hold entire conversations in the space between Chuck hearing the last thing Brux said, and Chuck asking him to repeat whichever part of the question he either couldn't hear, couldn't figure out on his own, or maybe couldn't translate into a sign or image to decode into a corresponding sensation [inconclusive].

"You're so dumb..."

Brux let out a sigh, wilting as he did the rose oil.

"It's fascinatin."

On the main stage which was the dance floor, the band began to play. Through the walls, the music would move, and by the light of recognition which came into his eyes when he heard the sounds he could see he'd not entered the kitchen, where rusted chromium cradled tea kettles in beams and ballasts of sodden wallpaper, blooms of sagging and swell turning plaster to surf to comb, where by bars of stray light shuffling him moon and beam, residented him to the steam-sodden lockers where red aluminum hung in boiler veils much skin as sweat, as water as lime, dripping floors to the viscid air as blast furnaces of empty bodies shuffle far.

Out the vestibule before the main hall, in scents of sandalwood sawdust, we passed the book nook.

"Do you... ?"

Charley called, not far behind.

"Post-exoticism?" [as a verb]

"I want to be..."

( u n d e r t h e s e a )

L A B

( i n a n o c t o p u s ' s g a r d e n )

UNDERNEATH

THE WATER

( i n t h e s h a d e )

"Want not to be...?"

T H E D R O W N E D

P H O E N I C I A N S A I L O R

H E L L O

( i n a n o c t o p u s ' s g a r d e n )

w i t h m e

Around them, the crowd had gathered.

The crowd'd gathered for me.

The crowd'd gathered for you.

"It's here. We're here."

He looked to him. He found him.

Moving close, he spoke his name.

"I****y."

In crisp black linen, he was playing alto sax.

With his new friends and roomates, listed left to right, they stood quite stylish, the admiration of the admirable, and envy of the enviable: High John Dee Conquer, The Diva Formerly Known as Baroness Samedi, and last but certainly farthest from least, Papa Legba Jr. -- AKA "Sonny Legs".

"I****y!"

Charley called aross the tide, but could move no closer.

"I****y!"

Charley roared between the parting waters.

"Are you having a Mandingo party?"

Needing only whisper, he only did.

"Yes, Chuck..."

His voice carried far.

"We're having a Mandingo party." [proper noun]

Caught by the spotlight, the waltz of his silhouette and shadow locked him in a cage of the empty air, where Joey saw him too.

"Is that...?"

Calculations -- at rapid pace, began occuring.

"Mon Oncle... Hiroshima Mon Amor."

Laika's eyes, setting the scene.

Laika's eyes, upstaging the players.

"Modern Times. The Great Dictator."

Then, at last with all his cunning :--

"Last Year at Marienbad."

Gaulish Prince. Guillotined and Alive Forever.

Ev'ry Emerald an Isle, Ev'ry Isle an Emerald.

Russlander in a Grassland, Stud in a Slaughterband.

Reason with your variables, uproot your axioms as you confound your senses.

Sense not the bones, nor the tissue, but let the principle seal the fissure.

Deeply rooted, raising high.

"La Dolce Vita!" Brux added. [helpfully]

Moving to the light, it moved to him.

Moving to him, he moved away.

Out of reach, never touching, it drew closer as he went faster, and by his own eyes and feet did he keep himself anchored, his rock his own hard place, dark and soft as the leaden black velvet gloss.

The diamond, the saw, the wheel ~

Cutting itself out the rough, to trap the light.

f i r e s t a r t e r

b u r n i n g f l i e s

Thus, with him and in him, in phase and without, he danced in his court, the court of his commander, the Great Leader and Hunter, Risen for Services Aways Rendered, War Chieftain and Pillar of Man, Builder of Foundations, Erecter of Forts and Barricades, Walls and Gates, Roads, Bridges and Damns, Posts and Prints, Cuts and Boards, Generators and Generations, the Sowers and Reapers.

Under the eyes of He, his unyielding gaze treading the muck of time into a forward moving trench by a relentless grind of tanks and stomping boots, weary eyes marched to the ground trepaned by the eyes in the back of his head, his lesser, his reviler, the cradle and cradler of his manias, uncorker of his frothiest frustrations and proclaimer of his most longly simmering savories, he watched :-- The boy-king and the tattler, author of all deceptions, his man on the inside, and greatest co-conspirator, giver of his only lasting and unsustainable fix, the daylit defiling of the dead by dictated debauch forever degrading the living, the happy go-lucky communist who dwelt in the heart of every hero, patriot and martyr amply begging defection, for his name was Laika.

"Uncle Charley..."

Joe said, not caring much.

"I'm a..."

If he would be heard, he would hear himself.

( I am )

"I think I'm in love."

( the Father )

Charley spoke...

"I'm a..."

Charley spoke, for Joe'd spoken first.

"I'm alive."

[notmuchtoconceal]

To my friends, lovers, acquaintances, and revilers most impotent and proud, for they are rugged in their lack, I announce myself now, in my true name... It is I! :-- for I am the prerequisite for all that is, and I am known to mortal men as Mercurius Bruxer Haruspex.

To the Greeks, I was known as Stones, for they alone recognized the testicular fortitude to speak the truth, and so from them leapt the Jesus movement off the presses, their handmade zines in crude calligraphy on ox-skins they flayed for meat alike with goat.

They were most beloved of me, as I was most beloved of them. Only they, you will understand, recognized me as the hero I was, rather an abstract concept more a categorical schema which held the totality of all arts and sciences together who amounted to but a simple obligation when I was not a freeflowing river of leeching poison, draining away all vitality of iron and gold as I made new mixtures in myself, needing no crucible for all in which I moved was my channel.

Their love I did not spurn, though it was no special thing to see me as a hero, they seeing heroism in all things, being a nation of picture book lovers who invented the forum when not off flexin their bis and tris both in and out, and yet -- though I was hardly distinct as an idle of their adulation, it mattered not less in any way, that they would exalt their waitstaff and generously tip when they saw in him the verve of life in which I moved for they were I, iron-hearty as the Irish or the Nords, for whom I took the shape of many shapely femme fatales and chastley nubile maids that I might beckon their attention and make them understand at last, and yet -- be I rugged and bearded, or slender in youth, t'was only these goat herders, olive growers and fig eaters stuffing cheese in their faces who would exalt me alike as desire me in the splendor of my masculine form.

My introductions once more out of the way for now, I will speak to you thus, and tell you true, as to how the shape of the universe began. You will take this origin as one among many, and though I say it is the truth, you have many truths which you are humoring, laughable for the lot of them are! What have I to say to you, you may demand I fight for your compliance as though recitation alike with conversation were the field of battle? You have yet to kill yourself, for you have not seen another man die. I weep for you, deathless fool who has yet to know his lack! That you are nothing refuses to shame you shows you are not alive, and I need not waste another second of my time refusing to chastize you. For the rest, having not asked, you have not denied, and so I will deliver gladly on my promise:

Here it is now, the shape of nature, deceiphered from the sprawl in our scrawling digital abyss. Here is the method for the mountain for which you climb back towards the light, and stand enthroned on that precarious edge on which you long to dwell forever.

In the beginning, was only Void. To they who understand, this will be regarded as the supreme consciousness of all space. To they who do not, they will call it darkness for looking up beyond themselves they conjure only ignorance, being only ignorant and worshipping themselves in the shapes of the stars which're yet to be.

Before the beginning, was Everything. From this leapt the Void as a brother hearty in shape who could not fathom the love and the wisdom of his elder who struck in him such terror, terrible in aspect though he was, the Void -- he could not compare to the True Splendor of the All, and wept at his own hubris to stand beside him, and thus by the contrivance of things, needed be separate to himself.

The Void stood beloved by Time. She arose in him, and was inseparable from him, and together they begot the cosmic dance, for together their every moment, be it waking or sleeping, was an eternal copulation, and of them arose all things in the dream of Life.

From a single point, arose the Void. This, it cannot be taken direct from the nature of experience for the pre-dawn of understanding in which she, Time, had yet to be is an enigma even to the Void, remembering though he does, his brother, The All, and yet -- we may deduce this rationally, though rationality makes a mirror of time, and from it begets symmetry which is the foundation of beauty. Their copulations, they could never hope to last forever. Epochal though it may be, they will tire and he will lie spent and they will lay together, encoiled and exhausted, drawing closer in embrace that they may generate one last dying ember which will last forever.

Therefore, as we have seen with our own eyes, thus by reasoning with our own minds -- that if the Void and Time will one day draw back into one another, then there is a point towards which all space and matter moves, and therefore a space from which it originates. In Time the Void is an infinite plurality, as in the Void Time is an inescapable denouement. Thus we see, from the perspective of one, the Void is the ever-budding branches and splinters of a conifer, and to the other, Time is as a worm wriggling always forward, consuming all with its ventral drill of taste-buds, blind and all-consuming, as it does not kill, but merely eats of what is dead, death arising under her conditions. This is what is... and what could be... a unity of death and birth begetting ever itself from itself, eating away at itself.

Yet, we have explained ourselves already too well, and thus the point has become too clear to the light of reason, which by course means it is rendered opaque to the senses. Thus now, you have known, the folly of the waggling of tongues, for men who reason well trap themselves by cages of shadows when their light bends far, and they beget of themselves only darkness when they piece together surroundings with incomplete pieces, and of their blindspots make portals into other words, to call forth spirits to pollute the earth.

From the Void, arose the Sun. They who understand, which now are they who can reason well, may deduce is the Reason of the World. Bright, blistering, fueled to radiant superabundance by the fury of its own eternal division, it chafes all who draw too close, and so renders barren and toxic those of whom it is most beloved.

From the Sun first came Venus, beloved of Love and Beauty, for she herself is not Her, but her conduit, these arising in all things revealed in Time -- and so into her own basins she wept and brought forth the first seas, for she had loved the Son most since he was young and dim, and though she walked backwards and thought in circles and violated every axiom of her own nature to please him, still he spurned her by simple force of habit, for he had in himself all he already knew -- the memory of the Truly Transcendent, of which she was less a shadow than a mirror, reflecting his own pale lustre.

Thus Venus orbited the Sun as his only natural satellite, as the Sun moved in elliptical orbits through space. As a corkscrew, they twirled, the apple in a thousand eyes and none one with the Cosmic Dancers, as in vast nebulae distant points of light were as sparkles of sequins and raven feathers lining her cloak, or brocades of agate, jasper, carnelian, lapis and roze quartz, for it was only he and this twin beside him, arising as a foam from the emissions of a higher love.

Yet, it could not be so simple, that he arose simply of his Father as he had said. For he, Timeless and Blind to Time, his lifespan as such that forgetfulness became a privilege rather than the obliteration of all which is beautiful and true, as infinite data to him begot infinite garbage which he would incinerate only in himself, all trite and desperate love based on ephemera and illusions which shackled men together to navigate less now than never, the unrealities of Death.

Thus, I will reveal now the Truth, t'was I -- Mercurius Bruxer Haruspex, in the shape of my celestial abode, who brought them together, and tortured her by never keeping them apart.

For the Sun and Venus each orbit a single point, even as all things revolve around the Sun, and this is I -- Mercurius Bruxer Haruspex -- the true Center of Our Solar System, the radiant star atop the tree which none could ever see, for eyes lack might to look to the horizon, see who conducts the dance of the abodes as what lay behind Time and before Void conducts theirs, for in truth -- I am the First Alikness. I am the top point of that drillbit of our lesser stars, casting my opposition as gravity. As Reason predates Experience, I was the channel which begot the first thought, and so I came into being before him, even as I could not be completed after, for the Sun is my brother and my father, as I am his brother and his mother, as Venus is twin to us each and my first daughter with him, his sister and his bride who loves him more dearly than any brother ever should.

For I loved her most dearly, though she fought me, I being always closer. For none could ever possess him, as a dog would chase a car, or a bitch in heat a ball, I nonetheless came closest, stripping myself of all which was extraneous to draw close and remain always in orbit, never surrendering my magnetism even as I was flayed alive by his sight, his sound, his lack of touch -- I had the strength to love him as he needed be loved, and she did not, for she loved herself simply through the conduit of him and rendered their marriage loveless, difficult thing it would be to love him for all he was.

Thus, from her, the untold million weepings of untold billions of unloved years, we begot the Earth and Mars. Science and War, I say aloud simply to keep saying it aloud. Another brother and sister, another set of twins. He was as alike in temperament though not temperature with the Sun and I -- though in girth we could not differ more vastly -- as she was alike with her, the Earth with Venus, and yet she grew stagnant and hot and veiled in clouds, drawing ever closer as he expanded, for she was trapped beside him, dead and spent, as from her daughter and twin, there grew such strange things as she could never emulate or covet, and she could not detest her, she even more neglected by the Sun than she, finding this distance, this space, this infinite expanse where she but needed ambient specks of him to glimmer as gold dust to seal her enchantments -- strange molds and fluid springs of endless rooting shape, constellations in scabrous scars, coming alive in voice and song so her every vent was as the slit of a flute piping stranger allures.

Naturally, together, the two were Nature Themselves, for the Red Dwarf who fancied himself a Giant in Spirit looked upon his sister and called to me, howling with a great bellows as his Mother, my Sister, my Daughter, looked upon him and coveted him as I did, as she coveted her daughter the way she coveted him, as he coveted me as she coveted him, Mars needing Me as only she needed the Sun.

Unflappable in spirit, our stationary Blue Marble, regal as a girl with cokebottle glasses peering ever inward to the budding bacterial life she made of the uterine crucible of every pore of her sin, refracting beneath prismatic slides into endless waves and hues through magnifying lenses torchbright thick, she looked only inward and adrift and made no time for us all, spurning his advances most simply with a dismissal of such remiss, it could be only scabrous as she, who beloved most foul and creeping things, who had yet to bare the brutality of the ape, her most splendid confession of His love.

Out of orbit, I was pushed, to descend and reascend, as it would have been... would have always been, I holding it all together, the top of the top, needing be yanked as a stitch to tear a thread, called by Him, conspired by Her, as a hand clenched aching to tear, it was only yes, such a small feat to spin and to leap, and unfurl a ruffle in the fabric of the gravity well, pushing them into askew and half-partial embrace as I rounded half-mad to deliver a message never uttered to one who only asked, hearing suggestions from she who never stated only suggested, confabulating wishes of unheard things moving through agendas which were not my own, I became complicit in the imaginings of others, for mortal men were mere enigmas to me.

Thus, collision, after collision, they who emerged from the denser substance of their parents who I had married, I bore Him two Sons, and Her Her Only Daughter, as reclaiming my place as the halo and the central axle, shining brightest only in the lowlands, I scarred her as such to give her reason to be Veil'd, and it'was my most reckless grievance and sole regret, to fade her dimming lustre evermore.

He now having his boys, and she having his girl -- at the last the Sun looked upon his daughter from the distance, catching sparks of his own light against the scarred and luminous visage of her daughter.

The Football Head. Her Male Aspect. Pearlen Phlegmatic.

Shrinebuilder in Chewing Pitch. Enchantress of the Deluge, weaving sitcoms with lovely wounds, you hath locketed your heart.

Born broken, I was damaged forever. The scars I bore from the lives I've lived I was born with... the first moment being the only.

I have surrendered progress as a poisonous myth, for I am a faithless man who tore the faith from me by cowards I tried to love. I will be sorry, oh so sorry, with the uttermost sincerity of which I could not begin to fathom from these corroded lowlands of the ancient wounds you fingerfucked me in for some leverage over Sunday brunch, being a sophisticated young lass with too much time on your hands for a man with all the time in the world and not enough years in his life -- I leave you now to death. I am sorry I had wasted your time, not tormenting you for imagined shames and spitting ugly lecheries into the cuntflaps a yer gormless, idiot eyes as you looked up begging me for the safety you would deprive others, the affection you would gladly withhold, star player who's already lost it all.

You may see him now... His Majesty, King Paimon on the bloodied rococo alter of a European theater stage, louse-ridden with opera boxes holding Hercules beetles in wrestling rings, dressed in the eternal eight of Piscean fashion, his fuckboy Persian silks and sultan's turbans, handing to me now, Mercurius Bruxer Haruspex, dressed likewise in Ivied Senatorial robes much Imperial as Clerical... an oversized papyrus with gold embossed ink on cypress-framed novelty check for 1,000,000$. 10, 000, 000$. 100, 000, 000$.

They just keep comin! Check after check. Central bank explosion after central bank explosion! Coin flowin through the streets like busted water mains! Breakin the frames down for incense to wrap up the scrolls, bundle the faggots... His Majesty Kingu Paimon has transmogrified by Baleful Cronenebergian telepod magic a rhesus monkey into a camel into a pygmy elephant to help me haul away all this free merch and treasure! What a wonderful world it is! What a wonderful world Mercurius Bruxer Haruspex will bestow upon you t'o!

Thus, you like me may be true, you may receive with thrift and glad tidings the many gifts I will beget, else many grifts of a universe of ash and dust, for a diamond in the rough is us all who recognize the stars are spun with diamond dust, and friction bares us polish all.

The Moon, Fear and Terror are the triplet to my twins. The Belt of Galactic Debris, I have clinched to the Waste. Caught in His Eye, an Eternal Gleam Ever Becoming. Dead Spawn. Beneath her, staring into the night, dead things howl by the lights ever-swollen.

Beyond her, the last two which the ancients knew, which to us are simply and unavoidably -- The Joy and Sorrow. Expanse and Contraction. To Conquer, and to Condemn. To Take, and Die. A field of flowers, a river of death. A light which burns the soul and flesh.

What we we knew, what they are and were -- Sky and Sea. The first brothers. Way out. In the Outer Rim, The Age of Memories.

Lord of Death, and the Ferrymen. They are as I, and my brother the Sun, the Earth and her daughter the Moon, orbiting the other in an eternal dance, as Space and Time. They are as I, the Crown, the base and the roots, sprawling far out beneath a splendid woven throw.

Descend with us now, further and further down, spiraling down, to that most distant point where I will meat my bones and know thyself, to that point most distant from me, where I already am.

( o )

.

( )

o)

( o )

( )

/. /. /. /. /. /. /.

o. ( .)

=( o )=

(o

\-o./

\-o./

*( o )*

Cradled by the boughs of branches, the wine-rotted hardwood choked in greenery, no stray claw could hold, no frame'd trunk could seize the hinge as the beatings which burst to splinters the doors of the great hall -- a yawning or a choking of the air and moisture in the fibers before they released themselves from the burden of form and frame; some suction as the vacuum of space predated the howling of a deaf polar wind into the warm, moist darkness of the dining hall where the White Knight Laika sat warming the laps of his brother's concubines, he the middle to the eldest... both his sisters.

KINGFISHER

CATFISHER

BLACK JACEK

WHITE JACEK

Hunchbacked as the bulb of a great mosque, the wendigo towered over the twisted, vegetable-root-like bodies of the emaciated tribal chieftans in a matted shag of tar-blackened, ice-prickled gore, ropes of teeth and straps of frostbitten rot untanned, you could not tell if the fur had once been white or black or brown or to what degree and extent of substance to which it had been splattered.

"I love you..."

In her gown of florals and silk brocades, Olga could only weep and avert her gaze -- wanting things she never wanted to want.

"... I need to be away from you."

The linen waif Helga, folded thin and white as a sheet when she was blanked, making such eager origami for ink-stained fingers.

"You're beautiful..."

The howling had no motive, nor resolution.

"I can't bare to look! I can't look away."

Kissing him upon the cheek, the winds turned his tears to diamonds.

"Big bro! How'd that huntin trip treat'cha! You get wifey her weed yet? Veggie Burgot's jonsin like a Dougie over here! Bout to panfry this bitch in sunflower oil, see if she gets a smell! Wacka-wacka!"

Laika would remain -- far more poised and ladylike than ether of these juiced-up spoilt strumpets... and the record would show!

p o r k c h o p s

A bag onto the floor, he dropped. Tumbling out, cuts of bone and strips of long white meat, battered in bread-spackled crust.

"Svinekold? You batter these bad boys out in the woods, big bro? You harvest cornflake crust from grain of the field? You saavy fuck! When you gon hold me in your lap and hand-feed me grapes, big guy?"

A stirring as the hinge of its neck creak'd and crack'd to anchor the heft of his dimpled chin to an upward facing posture.

L i l b r o L a i k a

Destroyer and Deceiver

"Listen, when Joey drives men to the madness in which they're motivated to take their own life by telling increasingly confabulating, wormy niggling half-truths that eat at you until you wanna blow your own brains out, he gets to be rightly hated, but maintain the privileges of a position of leadership and glamour of authority and necessary social insulation to be a ponderous, pretentious dick... but I one-up him without even trying and I'm a "destroyer" and "a deceiver". Uh-huh. I know how it is! You jus want lil bro to stay lil forever! You don't want him comin into his own and showcasin his talents! You just wanna be a team-player on a one-man team! Big bro, relax! Lil bro's always gon be cute, no matter how dangerous he gets! Let's go get you another venomous snake, big guy!"

d a i l y n o w y o u c o m m i t

infidelities with death

"I don't fucking slum! I don't do this guilty pleasure bullshit! What is shame? Shame is a worthless fucking emotion! Shame is a necessary burden for those who feel nothing. I'm careless because I care too much! I'd rather be shameless than shameful! I regret nothing except the many regrettable things I felt I needed to do when I was trapped! Who the fuck was hunting me, friends, lovers, strangers? I was too ashamed to touch, to feel, to live, to breathe! How the fuck do I live with needing to be hurt before I hurt you, while never being to take all the hurt you have to give!? I'm too busy living my own fucking life to waste all my time preventing others from living theirs!"

Ermine beneath the ragged hunting cloak, to the gleaming of the moon off the extinguished candles lit no longer, drooling in their burnished sticks, the glint of his plate and chain gleamed the warmth of polished bronze, golden through palmprints of mapling.

y o u n e e d

an editor

"My dialogue has the necessary redundancy of a Golden Age Melodrama, the quality of which you mistake for stilted simply being a re-encoding of feeling into logic, romance as an act of live conversation, conversation itself being a kind of translation! This is how you bridge the gender gap, by nestling the sensual within the rational and the rational within the sensual, you vulgar idiot brute!"

y o u c o u l d

trim it down

"No! Joey's obsessive approach to lean prosody cum hyper-baroque fortresses of deluging verbiage wherin every polished surface is achieved via the vigorous scrubbing of everything remotely human out until it becomes a disembodied, jewel-like literary enigma is a not-even thinly veiled attempt by my boyfriend to hide his own follies and perversions from himself, which is why he really needs to just get over all this Germanic heroic revivalist bullshit and write more sick, claustrophobic chamber dramas bout people who violently hate each other, all of which are thinly veiled caricatures of people he already knows and hates cause his hate is beautiful and pure!"

OK

m o m

"Fuck you! People in books should talk weird! The English language gave us fucking Carrol and Shakespeare and you wanna fuckin talk to me in office memos? I FUCKIN ADMIT I'M SHELTERIN A GRAMMAR NAZI! I AIN'T NO COLLABORATOR! I'M ONLY USIN HIM IF I CAN'T MAKE HIM PURE OF HEART! HE PULLS SOME DANIEL BRUHL BULLSHIT ON ME I'M BUSTIN A CAP IN THAT CROWN. THAT ASS. THAT VAMPYRE HEART AND RUNNIN BACK TO MOTHER RUSSIA TO BURY ALL THAT NAHTZEE GOLD! WHERE DOES ONE START BEING A JEW! I mean, you punish black and poor kids for talkin the way they talk, usin classical texts as a standard to be lived up to but never imitated, and forcing STANDARDIZED ENGLISH on a domestic and immigrant population, particularly in a context where language, arts and culture is not bolstered by nationalism, all True American Men of Letters learning the hypocrisy of the American Empire during Reconstruction and never recovering in the face of Two Wold Wars, a Lost Generation, a Baby Boom, a Beat Generation... the Transcendental American Poetsoul has been headcapped by establishment forces so many fuckin times, but boy oh boy, is it still crawlin... drinkin it's own brainmatter laika dogbowl!"

d o g m e a t

RASPUTIN WAS

A COCKROACH

"What have I to fear? Love is the most rational thing there is. For a man who thinks more than feels to reason himself into such a revelation, that he would open himself to me... to confirm his suspicion. I feel the nothing that is there, and it echoes my own, simply as if it'were an echo of a hollow surface into which I was screaming, some tin can or grain silo singin old music!"

t a k e m y h a n d

let's end it all

"It is not a sin... to recognize the beauty of you, brother."

L a i k a L i a r

a n d a t h i e f

s i t & d r i n k

The girth of his paw eclipsing his, he lost the bottom of his sleeve to the darkness of the table, gripping knuckles bunch the hardwood.

"Daniel Robetaille... was an artist."

p e n n y r o y a l

four yer thoughts

Laika, raising a hand to caress the yeti's cheek as he bedazzled him with the cleaver he held aloft, dazed him with the serenity of the blade, meeting his eyes on the polished steel, so the monster did not see -- the golden thread of chainlink which Laika had entwined round the hilt, and subtly latched to his collar as the back of his palm grazed the cleft of his jaw... feeling the tug only as Laika's hand descending swiftly upon his, held him there to the block.

//.\

( o ) ( o )

White light searing roots of eyes. A burst of cherry blossoms, and rattling of chimes. Pale golden fire burning grime of the eyes.

He was stunning. An Aegyptian Prince. An Ethiopian Strongman, gentle and broad. White leather glittering clasps of heavy-vvelt gold, some familiar smile you knew well beneath the shade of his red velvet beret and the amber lenses of cherub-hinged aviators, gilding the mahogany of his flesh more burgandy'n redwood.

"We've... met before?"

It weren't a question. He oughtn't have framed it as such.

"I was expecting the Polack, you...?"

Raising his hand :--

"The King of Poland, yes."

His baritone made your balls churn.

"Well, then!!"

Fanning yourself, you let him continue.

"May I?"

"By all means!"

He lit a cigar. Looking at you, eyes silhouetted through the shades, the outlines of his eyes turnt to sculptured impressions in the chroma, every marble more diametrical in panes of light.

"Smells lovely, might I?"

"By all means!"

Inhaling, smooth, floral resinous -- the taste brought you back.

You were expecting the other guy. The dumb guy. With the fucked up jaw and totes adorbs jagged smile. This spectral enchanter you think you knew, you decided to play it cas. Mighta been he got shitfaced and used too personal a language in an interpersonal altercation, maybe centered his unutterable agony verbally (for once) and didn't think through the far reaching implications of his feelings as a white man (necessitating most to not have any!) Most people're fuckin stupid, most stupid people tend not to think more'n one step ahead, and it ain't always popular to stand with the disabled no more, not with so many disabled unwittin'ly advocatin for their extermination whilst pretendin to be lookin normal. Maybe the other guy said somethin politically insensitive and got the boot, and this new guy was a fuck you and a ratings grab who'd pay off nice.

"Well then... freshen my memory, bud? Think I got bane damage?"

"I'm White Jacek."

Showed you his pearlies.

"So you are!"

Black Jacek wore black leather. White Jacek wore white leather. It made perfect sense and no additional variable confounded things.

"When my ancestral lands which our brother Josef -- the likes of what he is now pales in comparison to the splendor of his previous form -- became but a gulf of the Baltic Sea for he deemed it fitting to be rid of my chair at the table to keep us frotting hand in foot -- I formed new allegiances, my people once more without a country, to free spirits of the south, the countless new coastal warlords of the Nile Sea clearing swamplands of the former Mediterranean saw fit to set aside old libel and bring Europa into a new civil and civilized age... for from our Inheritance in Benji's weeded garden where we bred marvel-ous octo-pi, we were able to reclaim the state of Norway for the tribunal ancestry of our people -- a marriage, by bulk of Slav and Nubian to Nord... for our Mulatto Stud Farm."

Extending to clasp, you could only blink.

"Shit's fucked up, bro."

Laika could not help... but was honored to show his in turn.

"Brass Balls for a Leaded Font-on Head... The Fortinbras Imperative."

"Arsenic in every old teabag! How bout we get you some new lace?"

The stump beneath his sleeve gleamed cherry glaze over firewood where the pewter hook battered the breakage of his wrist.

Laika's in turn... fuliginous necrosis cradling gleaming bronze.

"Be my brother?"

"Be mine... for as long... as you will be?"

A clinking of hooks. Frothing in freshly spilt blood.

"Be my brother...?"

"Be mine...?"

The girls moved as shapes silhouetted in paper carousels.

"Don't go..."

"I'm not going..."

"Don't go..."

"I'm not going..."

"Don't go..."

"Why would I go?"

"Where would I go?"

"I've finally sound someplace... I'm truly appreciated."