I awoke today as I do most everyday, taking three deep breaths after planting my rejuvenated feet firmly and authoritatively on my hardwood floors and coolly walking to my refrigerator to have marmalade on a scone and morning tea. I heard sirens of a fire engine coming my direction and stop at my building and wondered if miss Brixton left her gas on again. I heard the feet pounding the stairs--there seemed to be a lot of them (feet, not stairs)--and I was getting a little nervous. They stopped in front of my door--I didn't know what they were doing. I went to my door to watch from the keyhole when suddenly they screamed "ONE, TWO-" and my door exploded towards me like a bomb went off!!! I threw myself to the floor covering my face and one of the firemen yelled, through a gas mask, "Don't worry, sir, we'll get you out of here safe!" Two of them grabbed me under my arms and I cried, "What the devil is the meaning of THIS?!?!" Suddenly one of them gave me an oxygen mask and I felt much calmer. I regained my wits and again cried, "What is the meaning of this?!" Once outside one of them replied, "What do you mean? We got a call--said you were in trouble?"
"A call? A call from where?"
"That's confidential."
"I can't know who called the firemen on me?"
The truck driver yelled out, "It came from this building--apartment 511!"
Flabbergasted, I retorted, "That's MY apartment!"
"Then we came to the right place!" the driver shot back.
"But I never called anyone--I just woke up! When did this 'call' come in?"
"It came in two hours ago--said a fire was starting and you were pinned under your refrigerator."
"Joe, quit giving away goddamn confidential information. You'll fuck up our POSITION!!!"
"That's ABSURD!!! THERE WAS NEVER A FIRE!!! Did you say it took you two hours to respond?"
"Yes, sir."
"How could it take so long--you're 6 blocks away."
"Why? It's not like you had a fire or anything."
"But you didn't know that!"
"You did. That's good enough for us."
Another one piped in like a harlequin in a Chinese POW camp, "Why would you call if there was never a fire."
"I never called."
"It says here we got the call from this address."
"STOP GIVING AWAY CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION!"
"It says that where?"
"Nowhere you can see. Is there a fire or not."
"Yeah, we got a call from here," that mongoloid Joe interrupted again, "from a guy with a strange British accent--kinda sounded like a pussy." He chuckled.
"Joe, I'll have your ass suspended-"
"I never called anyone. I don't even have a working phone!"
"Yeah, what happened to it? Burned up in the fire?" They all started laughing.
"No--I--"
"Yeah, right. Come on, you guys. Let's get outta here." They muttered more profanities as they walked away, no doubt aimed at my meddling. It's so infuriating. I was shamed, I was angered. All I could do was stand there shaking like a mouse in the tundra.
"What about my door?" I called meekly.
"Burn it!"
"Yeah, so we can come back and fuck up the rest of your house, dumbshit." They were all getting into the truck, laughing, as I, innocent as the day I was born, stood degraded and terribly alone. I wanted to tell them I didn't appreciate their knife-like insults, their obscenity. I wanted to call the station, the mayor, anyone who might reprimand these thugs who blow up human decency like a delinquent destroys the frog with a firecracker. I wanted to, but it felt so futile--I felt futile. I walked despondently up to my door-less apartment where Parphit was waiting outside with that dopey grin on his face and ridiculous "Bull Shirt." "Maybe my place get so hot, you thought there was FIRE!!! Haha, you silly man." I walked right by him a laid down on my bed, face down, thinking I might pass out and suffocate myself accidentally. I turned over and looked at my phone. I picked up the receiver and still no semblance of a signal as there hadn't been for days.
----------------------
Later that evening Spurlock came over with his new pet, a gaily colored parrot on his shoulder. That made me feel a little better. "And what is your name," I inquired.
"Awwk, I am free from form, awwk. Labels negate, awwk."
"I call him 'Life'." Spurlock said with that deft coolness that defies all natural chaos.
"Awwk, I am all things, awwk."
"Your poem IS essence. It is what everything is about. Every empire, every struggle, every criminally desperate act of the desperate criminal. It reminds me of every woman I ever made love to. Every one that has broken my heart, every one I've left deserted on an island when I knew they could never come with me. Ah, Lucia..." a solitary tear dropped from his eye and he smiled. "Your poem is life. That's why I him that." He never talked too much of Lucia. That was the one subject that always disrupted his otherwise river-like flow through life.
And I asked him, "What is the meaning of things?"
He replied, "Things define further what we never knew and blur the things we did know into obscurity. Yet they have no sense of otherness. That thing is what it is. It's form follows function, and function follows mind. It is the paradox of manifest thought that obscures true knowledge."
"I am depressed."
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Monday, January 1, 2007
Fever, sugar, Oprah
I couldn't stand it any longer--the near inhuman sounds eminating from my next-door neighbor's escapades with my ex-fiance--so I bought a new television. It doesn't help that I've been rather ill as of late, with fever and delusions and remembrances of horrors seen and unseen (hence the delay in writing more). I even copped for cable. What lachrymose times they are when a man has to buy artificial stimulants to drown out the sound of murder most foul--the murder of human dignity.
I fell asleep last night watching Oprah's 'Book of the Month Club' where they discussed with unqualified praise a useless piece of tripe about a negro woman who rises above opression and poverty to become the greatest funeral home director in the world or some rubbish like that. I woke up to grotesquely shaved apes in shiny underwear (why bother shaving them just to cover them up again?) throwing each other around a SQUARE ring (just like us to say something is what isn't) and screaming about how they're going to throw each other around said ring or feeling up some trollop who could spread her legs to someone MUCH better than these man-beasts. Pardon my obscenity, I get quite upset at such prevalent and decadent debauchery.
The news media is useless as well. It's interesting that as we have access to so-called information, both through the internet and through television that we learn more without learning anything. Any information is only as good as the informer, and for the most part our 'informers' are more akin to novelists than historians.
The other night, Parphit came knocked on my door requesting the borrowing of a small amount of sugar. When I answered his hair was disheveled and he was wearing the grotesque outfit of a t-shirt that looked like it had been dragged through the Australian Outback with the charming epithet "Bull Shirt" and a pair of boxer shorts with an open window...of opportunity. One is often ill-equipped to remove his gaze from the foulest sights of human existence.
"Just what do you mean by calling at this hour?" I interrogated
"This hour? It's 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I heard your TV on."
"I am ill disposed to receive anyone right now." He looked at me like a smiling child who doesn't understand that we adults are actually angry--not play angry, but really ANGRY, like we're just playmates or frat-house brothers hazing one another. He is a vacuum into which all love and goodness within a 10 meter radius is sucked in and then excreted, destroyed and transformed into a cloud of carcinogenic waste.
"Can I borrow sugar?" he asked with that same revealing coffee-stained teeth that reminds one of a communist neighborhood.
"Is she over there?"
"Who?"
"You know who."
"Oh, your ex-woman? No, I think I tire her out. She said she had to go lie in bed for three days and drink nothing but protein shakes consisting of bananas, prime rib and cocaine. I like prime rib, now!!! In India I would be outcaste if I ate any meat but now I'm in America and I say, 'slaughter away' and now some TV guy wants to give me money to say that on TV."
"Do you have no taste?!"
"Yes--that's why I like sugar."
"Well I shan't...this isn't..." and I knew that in order to be rid of him I had to give in. I gave him the sugar and told him to rid himself from my jaundiced sight and he replied: "Thank you very much. I see you on flip side, but not in my bed--hee hee."
I wrote a poem about it all today, which Spurlock is currently criticizing. I hope someone on here finds it worthwhile:
The nightingale cannont sing for the nodes
on its throat just brings
a cry like an axe in the forest
gored by a taurus
the matador bleeds the ground
the color of his cape
a red sun ten-feet around
like the flag of the kamikaze
and a spider that survived
to be killed in a whore's brassiere
The last unicorn will saw off its horn
to avoid the scorn and will silently morn
the sun rises apocalyptically
as bodiless voices echo cryptically
nonsense through prison cell teeth
that bequeath of me the dowry of my
of the last shred of innocence that buoys me
on the sea of melting flesh mixing together
to become a toxic ocean
of vile, gray, indistinguishable motion
I offer the horn, promptly ground to dust
and I see the face for the first time
it laughs and taunts, 'you're with the rest of us'
I have noticed that this was 'posted' on the same day as my last post. This is a bald-faced lie. In order to avoid confusion I published this the morning of January 16th, 2007. I had started to type my poem on January 1st and, in this web of cyber-'perfection', this site (such a disgusting distortion of the language) calls it 'posted' as of that day 15 days ago, before the illness...
I fell asleep last night watching Oprah's 'Book of the Month Club' where they discussed with unqualified praise a useless piece of tripe about a negro woman who rises above opression and poverty to become the greatest funeral home director in the world or some rubbish like that. I woke up to grotesquely shaved apes in shiny underwear (why bother shaving them just to cover them up again?) throwing each other around a SQUARE ring (just like us to say something is what isn't) and screaming about how they're going to throw each other around said ring or feeling up some trollop who could spread her legs to someone MUCH better than these man-beasts. Pardon my obscenity, I get quite upset at such prevalent and decadent debauchery.
The news media is useless as well. It's interesting that as we have access to so-called information, both through the internet and through television that we learn more without learning anything. Any information is only as good as the informer, and for the most part our 'informers' are more akin to novelists than historians.
The other night, Parphit came knocked on my door requesting the borrowing of a small amount of sugar. When I answered his hair was disheveled and he was wearing the grotesque outfit of a t-shirt that looked like it had been dragged through the Australian Outback with the charming epithet "Bull Shirt" and a pair of boxer shorts with an open window...of opportunity. One is often ill-equipped to remove his gaze from the foulest sights of human existence.
"Just what do you mean by calling at this hour?" I interrogated
"This hour? It's 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I heard your TV on."
"I am ill disposed to receive anyone right now." He looked at me like a smiling child who doesn't understand that we adults are actually angry--not play angry, but really ANGRY, like we're just playmates or frat-house brothers hazing one another. He is a vacuum into which all love and goodness within a 10 meter radius is sucked in and then excreted, destroyed and transformed into a cloud of carcinogenic waste.
"Can I borrow sugar?" he asked with that same revealing coffee-stained teeth that reminds one of a communist neighborhood.
"Is she over there?"
"Who?"
"You know who."
"Oh, your ex-woman? No, I think I tire her out. She said she had to go lie in bed for three days and drink nothing but protein shakes consisting of bananas, prime rib and cocaine. I like prime rib, now!!! In India I would be outcaste if I ate any meat but now I'm in America and I say, 'slaughter away' and now some TV guy wants to give me money to say that on TV."
"Do you have no taste?!"
"Yes--that's why I like sugar."
"Well I shan't...this isn't..." and I knew that in order to be rid of him I had to give in. I gave him the sugar and told him to rid himself from my jaundiced sight and he replied: "Thank you very much. I see you on flip side, but not in my bed--hee hee."
I wrote a poem about it all today, which Spurlock is currently criticizing. I hope someone on here finds it worthwhile:
The nightingale cannont sing for the nodes
on its throat just brings
a cry like an axe in the forest
gored by a taurus
the matador bleeds the ground
the color of his cape
a red sun ten-feet around
like the flag of the kamikaze
and a spider that survived
to be killed in a whore's brassiere
The last unicorn will saw off its horn
to avoid the scorn and will silently morn
the sun rises apocalyptically
as bodiless voices echo cryptically
nonsense through prison cell teeth
that bequeath of me the dowry of my
of the last shred of innocence that buoys me
on the sea of melting flesh mixing together
to become a toxic ocean
of vile, gray, indistinguishable motion
I offer the horn, promptly ground to dust
and I see the face for the first time
it laughs and taunts, 'you're with the rest of us'
I have noticed that this was 'posted' on the same day as my last post. This is a bald-faced lie. In order to avoid confusion I published this the morning of January 16th, 2007. I had started to type my poem on January 1st and, in this web of cyber-'perfection', this site (such a disgusting distortion of the language) calls it 'posted' as of that day 15 days ago, before the illness...
A conflict of interest
I have not slept well as of late. I feel like my bed is full of ants--often red, but sometimes black. Some large, some tinier than can be seen. Dolores, whose promise I once kept in the fortress of my bosum, has acquainted herself with my next-door neighbor, Parphit. He is a Hindu, though I'm not sure where his name comes from--I spent some time in East India, surveying the scars left by the Company, dined with Brahmins and meditated in dank quarters whose smell only affirmed the life of the Divine, so much so that I became nauseous and had to take my leave.
Both the Brahmins and the Italian mafia utilize thread, and in both cases it remains a sacrosanct object. Yet they use it for two completely different objectives. To the Brahmins it shows them to be holy men, and in the mafia it is a close-quatered execution device. The same object means different things to everyone. Where is the certainty in life? When I was a child I was sure--sure that I was standing on my own two feet when I was, when I was in pain when I was in pain. I never questioned whether it was good or bad. It either felt good or bad, and so it was. But seem is not often truth.
I hear them making love every night (Parphit and Dolores). Parphit is a capitalistic, opportunistic, immoral mound of despicable flesh. I daresay I do hate him. I hate him so much that it flushes my face like a drunkard whenever I think about him. Their heathen expression of animal lust shaking the foundations of my soul and my stucco walls. That's when the ants come crawling over me, biting me, trying to make a hill of the flesh of my belly.
I just realized I jumped into this 'blogging' without any introduction. I'm sorry to be so rude. My mother gave me the name Arvel Brushward, and I have honored her by keeping it in spite of much I long for the name Drevi--Drevi Sans-Luphor. This is my first foray into this internet super biway or whatever the youth calls it. Sometimes it makes me feel like a Pelican waiting for fish on an evaporated lake.
I spent last night with my good friend Spurlock drinking Ardbeg on the rocks and listening to him tell his stories and play his trumpet. He sits in a golden ball of central existence, never seeming afflicted in the way most of us are. Wearing his checked trilby and tweed sportcoat, drawing from a cigarette held erect and distanced in an ivory cigarette holder, he told me this story:
"I've had a lot of pets in my life but none more important to me than my pet gibbon Franz, who died in '85. He would sit at the fireplace with me and I would feed him crackers and read to him the poems of Rilke or play my trumpet. If I played something lively like 'Donna Lee' he would raise his hands above his head, start jumping and screaming along with the tune, but I could silence him like a mourner when I played 'Blue in Green.' People say animals don't think like us but they do. Within the first two chapters of the Notebooks of Maltes Laurids Brigges I could see a solitary tear like a diamond fall slightly then be swallowed into his fur like it was a treasure never to be lost or touched by another being. One night he fell asleep in my bed as I stroked his handsome brow, breathing the short shallow breaths that always made him seem like a child, and then it stopped suddenly, like a traveler who had just realized he had been going the wrong way for 12 years and thousands of miles and didn't know where he was, crumpling to the ground in despondency and becoming petrified as a monument to man's folly, never realizing that even though it was not where he meant to go, it still must have been the right way, and that was the right spot to end."
"Oh, Spurlock," I replied, "I think we are all submerged in an endless vat of pudding and the only way out is to eat, but our stomachs will never expand enough."
"That's OK."
Both the Brahmins and the Italian mafia utilize thread, and in both cases it remains a sacrosanct object. Yet they use it for two completely different objectives. To the Brahmins it shows them to be holy men, and in the mafia it is a close-quatered execution device. The same object means different things to everyone. Where is the certainty in life? When I was a child I was sure--sure that I was standing on my own two feet when I was, when I was in pain when I was in pain. I never questioned whether it was good or bad. It either felt good or bad, and so it was. But seem is not often truth.
I hear them making love every night (Parphit and Dolores). Parphit is a capitalistic, opportunistic, immoral mound of despicable flesh. I daresay I do hate him. I hate him so much that it flushes my face like a drunkard whenever I think about him. Their heathen expression of animal lust shaking the foundations of my soul and my stucco walls. That's when the ants come crawling over me, biting me, trying to make a hill of the flesh of my belly.
I just realized I jumped into this 'blogging' without any introduction. I'm sorry to be so rude. My mother gave me the name Arvel Brushward, and I have honored her by keeping it in spite of much I long for the name Drevi--Drevi Sans-Luphor. This is my first foray into this internet super biway or whatever the youth calls it. Sometimes it makes me feel like a Pelican waiting for fish on an evaporated lake.
I spent last night with my good friend Spurlock drinking Ardbeg on the rocks and listening to him tell his stories and play his trumpet. He sits in a golden ball of central existence, never seeming afflicted in the way most of us are. Wearing his checked trilby and tweed sportcoat, drawing from a cigarette held erect and distanced in an ivory cigarette holder, he told me this story:
"I've had a lot of pets in my life but none more important to me than my pet gibbon Franz, who died in '85. He would sit at the fireplace with me and I would feed him crackers and read to him the poems of Rilke or play my trumpet. If I played something lively like 'Donna Lee' he would raise his hands above his head, start jumping and screaming along with the tune, but I could silence him like a mourner when I played 'Blue in Green.' People say animals don't think like us but they do. Within the first two chapters of the Notebooks of Maltes Laurids Brigges I could see a solitary tear like a diamond fall slightly then be swallowed into his fur like it was a treasure never to be lost or touched by another being. One night he fell asleep in my bed as I stroked his handsome brow, breathing the short shallow breaths that always made him seem like a child, and then it stopped suddenly, like a traveler who had just realized he had been going the wrong way for 12 years and thousands of miles and didn't know where he was, crumpling to the ground in despondency and becoming petrified as a monument to man's folly, never realizing that even though it was not where he meant to go, it still must have been the right way, and that was the right spot to end."
"Oh, Spurlock," I replied, "I think we are all submerged in an endless vat of pudding and the only way out is to eat, but our stomachs will never expand enough."
"That's OK."
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