Thursday, June 15, 2017

I Grow Monstrous with the Leukemia of the World



  • I'm healing, fall-wise.
  • I keep thinking about running out to get between two assholes about to fight. I don't know if I would have done it before, I never had had to do it before.
  • Elric and I got into a slap fight by the B&O four decades ago, near Barnesville, parked at the station on 109. Morningstar was there, goading. That's my battle history.
  • Elric, your father told Planet about Ned.
  • I never put myself in situations. 
  • Leave the party when the lacrosse team arrives.
  • Treat people respectfully and, that failing, get the fuck out of their lives and most times they'll get the fuck out of yours.
  • Maybe, probably, I'd have reacted the same twenty years ago.
  • I don't think - unreliable narrator here - twenty years ago I'd been eager to go.
  • I was eager to go, and had fun.
  • We are being rewired.
  • And then I fell on my face having fun.
  • It's the frequency. And it's the frequency.












HIS SUICIDE

May Swenson

He looked down at his withering body and saw a hair
near his navel, swaying.
   
And now he saw his other hairs rise up.
   
He felt a hectic current in his veins.
Looking within, he saw the bubbling of his blood.
   
He cursed his fever, saying:
“It is the chemistry of prayer.
It increases in frequency,
seeding panic to all my being.
My cells swell with the liquid of guilt they fabricate,
juices of hatred eat my belly
my corpuscles make war in me as they devour each other.
My head heats in the combustion of anxiety,
I am polluted by the secretions of my soul’s decay,
while my brain wears away
with the scratching night and day
on the encephalograph of prayer.
I grow monstrous with the leukemia of the world.”
    
And he heard the hair say: “Hear me.”
And he saw it grow gray as it waved.
All his hairs he saw whiten,
and, numberless, wilt from their erect electric listening.
He saw them topple from their roots.
“How dare you!” he cursed them.
There surged a brief resuscitation to his body.
His heart took heart and pounded twice
with the health of fear
But then the plague of prayer redoubled and overwhelmed him.
    
In his feebleness he raged, and said:
“I will tear out this evil and free it.”
   
With his withered hands he tore the remaining hairs
from his body and head.
With his nails he opened his breast,
and with his fist he exploded his heart,
which erupted, a black and red volcano.
      
As his brain tasted, for the first time,
the birth of his doom,
he came a rolling tide, a floating mountain of ecstasy.
“I see you! I love you!” his eyes cried,
overflowing with his bright blood.
“You were the light of the world
that are now my gushing tears—
the kind and fiery tears of chaos, that wash my eyes
with the cure of oblivion.”
    
“He hears us!” cried his sick blood
pouring from his ears.
“Even as of old he heard our hair before it perished.”
  
With his last strength, the chemistry of prayer,
a few drops of his blood coagulated.
That clot whirled out, free, in the vortex of the universe.



3 comments:

  1. Your complicity in driving the speed limit is putting yourself in situations. Unlike ordinary fuckin' people. I'm conflicted; I almost used a word I forbade myself to. If only it meant "like an iron" I'd lift the ban and use it aggressively. Your kind is roundly appreciated and your observation about REM's trajectory hilarious, though not as hilarious as aggressively driving the speed limit. You may as well hang out and do shots with the lacrosse team. Speeding is avoiding he lacrosse team.

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  2. 1)i also drive the speed limit - the de facto speed limit, 4.99999 mph above the posted speed limit - on roads where i know or suspect there might be radar monitoring

    on the highway i conform to the traffic

    2)speaking of the vortex of the universe, here's a claim about the best way to reheat pizza - it involves a frying pan

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-4606392/The-BEST-way-reheat-pizza-revealed.html

    3)and speaking of the other end of the food processing cycle - post-digestion - i first heard of a product kathy griffin used to be a spokesperson for when she "went too far" in her boundary-transgression-as-entertainment work - it took a bit of getting used to but i am now a satisfied customer

    http://tinyurl.com/ycvbnzvy

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, skillet, with just a tiny bit of heated sesame oil. Recrusts the crust.

      Delete