On the Third Day, Pages One and Two
Left. Right. Left.
There’s a big, black town
It’s a place I found
There’s a world going on
Underground
— Tom Waits, Underground
Idolatrous pain worships a clumped density of energy bathed in higher frequency light, that sticks through foot as a sharp stone. Coarse profanity combed the world aloft on the agony of sin. Through the eye of a cyclone, on the wings of a Magpie, it travels to ponder the vast and diverse majesty of creation.
So much has since begun, harmonious counterpoint of hydrogens floating, rolling all over itself to rise and fall. But where to fall? Only upon this mirror, or something more substantial. And with it, the West was won.
But let’s take a quick invention of the tectonics where they are now. Tell me what you see.
Are You asking me?
Page One: The Archipelago
How will it feel under your belly, to scrape the blinds of sandpaper, so bristled with sawtooth quartz and a piercing array of banana treetops, chiseling out the name of their making on the strafing wind stealing a rasping hiss from the bulging throat of the komodo dragon?
Run-on, run-on! Jackrabbit darting into her warren of codices, just to check in on the kittens, four of them pooled in lost childbirth amoebal pockets. If we were to all peek out from behind the sofa and jumped up together in unison yelling, “Happy Rebirthday, Rodrigo!” as the piston-line of fireworks aimed at the nautical scars of confidence fire. Tag along to see where the thread really leads. Tied to the heel of Achilles and Athena’s owlet eyes. (But what then is at the other side? What other side, I told you about both ends! Yes, I mean the third side. The one for every dimension, for every forgotten and reimagined litany of gods? We run forward, misappropriated. It’s one-two-…-and fall. You could wait forever for the third limb. But you get used to the crippled waltz, just hold on to my dress as you go down. For every hollow leg, there’s a fool to be made. And there’s a vas deferens between the wickets and thickets, especially in the boar’s wood.) Two islands bow in respect. One takes the red and one takes the blue, and on opposite ends of the poles, they each launch into the air, afraid of the other.
But, like a cavalcade of ants, the staff comes suffering in a smoking cocktail, Russian of some ilk, so I recall. Where the hell did they go before there was fire? Ask the amazing Karamazov’s, who’ve swung on the lowest vine since before Nicklaus. I place my booted foot on your throat, and I demand your name. A bayonet for a toothpick? A silver stone for trepanation aeration?
Left. Fight. Left.
I sniffed the air, and You weren’t there.
Page Two: Last Dance Chicken
Auckland Fried Chicken churning in the Outback patio grill, smoked in desiccation where silhouettes of crows look just like crows to the gold-toothed Aboriginal who sang true, deep-country Led Zeppelin blues to the shivering staff in his leathery hands. He seems to be thinking of the type of soil he’d yearn to be buried in. Loamy, moist, rich with insect vermin tumbling over one another, drunk on nitrogen while begging for fungi, anything to hold the boring acids at bay. He showed the weight of the decoherence of self, clinging longer to the standing staff than his own sense of identity, because, let’s face it, what did he really have to show for his life? He might as well have been born inside the brown tar of submarine caverns shown only Woody Allen films until he took his own life with a spear of amethyst in mercy.
And the buzzing of wings become settling beetles, dung-rustled and hungry. The scorpion coils her piercer with beckoning mandibles, and the scraggly marker dash of eyes deposited brusquely with slapstick humor peer ominously into the shimmering ebony struggle of accomplishing small, twigged mounds. But who should arrive to rid the lands of pestilence? A mouse?!? Pestilence?
But this is no ordinary mouse — this is Dangrmaus! Able to leap tall embankments with a single bound, faster than a speeding wharfrat, stronger than a pack of beans! Here to save the day!
[yeeah, ya know, I used ta work widda guy once named Kizmet Kid, and fer all I know thems one a’a same. Nice guy fer tha most part, I guess. Kinda kept to hisself, so’s I rememmer, but… they got em for lightin fires or somm’n shit. Most a dem look the same ta me, frankly, but usually you can tell the diff’rence by tha stink. And this one, now that ya got me thinkin, did have a peculiar air about em…]
Weft. Right. Weft.
← Previous: On the Third Day, Two
Next: On the Third Day, Between Pages Two and Three →