She Hangs Brightly

She was gone away and now she is gone here. Once thought the slight waif, the ethereal voice, had slipped into a warmer world, softer hues and shyer people, rising to butterfly mornings and absorbing silver afternoons... not genuinely otherworldly, you understand... but spirited away to a green meadow in among the blood orange trees: her imaginarium as penetrative lights revealed her to a black mass of frightening admirers... now... telling of a life floating, sometimes violently, Through the Devil Softly, singing perfume once the lights are dim enough... waiting to stand coldly, licking her dry lips drier and consciously emitting a tortured meeeeeeeeeeow to a new generation of rot.

Trois-Pistoles Blues

Frosty hands, enveloped in froth, an impenetrable cloud that draws adverse reactions upon each introduction, reaches instead for a dulling pencil and immerses into a pleasurable sadness:

Pedals for fingers in her hands, a sympathetic smile acknowledging time,
Hunching over a wooden cross then moving from grave to grave distributing,
Until the end of her life with flowers enveloping her body, it taking twenty years for her cheeks to pale,
Fading into the land together and reappearing as a flower underneath a rotting cross.

A censored stream of consciousness

The slothful beast rises late afternoon, ostentatious and obese; sizzling bacon topless, whistling between his teeth, an awful hissing noise that fills the house with douche. I stare emptily at a computer screen, begging my fingers to miraculously type out eight pages of literary criticism on Flaubert's Parrot. My ambition is limited to aging this evening, many evenings. Bad noise permeates drywall and my ears droop. Internally I am as complex as embryology, externally I am as simple as a goose flying north for the summer. Simile is seen as inferior to metaphor, but I ask you: are "as" and "like" really our enemies (or at least our lesser friends)? Is the phonetic of simile unforgivable? Nonsense. Simile is a horse! Forgive my attempt at recycled cleverness.

The computer screen remains white. Should I turn aside the literary criticism and open the latest product on my mental shelf: literary dreamism. No; not now. I cannot dream myself dying of plague under the supervision of Camus now. I imagine that black bubbles on my scalp, blown through the devil's wand, are a tad too distracting.

I peek at my circus calender: human salamanders blow fire upwards, either a nihilistic attempt to burn down the heavens and shower in the ashes of truth, or entertain the underbelly of humanity. A poetry reading is scheduled for Thursday. I have never thought Thursday particularly poetic. Patrick Friesen disagrees.

The cursor blinks at me repeatedly, like a confused child, awaiting an answer that refuses to reveal itself.

We're like the wild roses stoned in the backyard

For Sebastian, the classroom is the place for sensual longing, or maybe even lust if the lecture is particularly vapid. Time for his PRESENTATION:

Professor: Sebastian, expound on the spiritual context that the relationship between Rachel and Nick is found in, then connect that with the theory of literary dreamism.

Sebastian: Interesting you should ask that, because I found...

Professor: Can you answer the question Sebastian?

Sebastian: Interesting you should ask that, because I found...

The deflection strategy is working well. The question is the launching point.

Professor: Okay okay. Now how do Nick's relationships in the work impact his psyche and relate this to Freud's theory of pyschosexual development. Also relate this to the whole of the work in its ethical and religious context.

Sebastian: Quite frankly, Ibsen, is a homo. I mean, why bother pontificating his views on morality when those gnarly sideburns could have put him in constant revelry?

Professor: Sorry?

Oh shit, Sebastian thinks. Not again.

Sebastian: The Nordics produce pretty girls and bad literature. What was Myrdal's excuse? He was well positioned to pick up a rush of Swedes and become a sextextual in the classroom. Instead he became an out of words intellectual in the junk yard of shitty lit.

Professor: This has gone far enough Sebastian

Sebastian: Maudlin monsters [sardonic voice] Poem dedicated to Johanna:

Peeling back her mandarin hair,
revealing the pulp of her neck;
quietly smiling,
inviting the freckles to dance
on soft ashen skin

A long and tattered French pop skirt
resting beneath knees,
but a consolation of
naked toes curling under
her soles

Sentimentalism is the end of genuine emotion.

Professor: Leave the classroom Sebastian.

Sebastian: And that's not all. Back to Ibsen: that guy had the balls to hire out his own personal Ibsen scholar.

Professor: That's not true. Leave.

Sebastian: Fuck that.

I've seen the future, brother: it is murder

Segment One

The shades come down and the room begins to darken for the final time. The light fades from a man's prematurely aged face, firm and frowning. The man locks the door and moves slowly along the terrace, thinking of his wife; the woman is lying prostrate in the corner of an aging apartment, eating cheese and slapping herself with a tasbih. "Ferdowsi Ferdowsi, it's my fault my fault my fault." Ferdowsi wishes that he could console her; he wishes that he did not loath her. He turns away from his thoughts, away from the ninety-nine bruising beads, away from the great bruise in her stomach; Ferdowsi wishes not to remember.

Ferdowsi chooses to walk the long way to the apartment, through the tattered neighbourhood south of the subway line. Along the way he sees a blue girl with ashen skin and pink ballet shoes strung around her shoulders slouching along a set of stairs. Ferdowsi vaguely understands the melodramatic nature of young girls but he speculates upon her sadness anyhow; is it that she cannot elegantly perform a chassée in front on her more advanced peers? Ferdowsi's thoughts quickly return to him memories of which he wishes not to remember. He is now thankful that the girl will only remain in his vision for a short while longer.

"Please, sir."

Ferdowsi is startled. He stops and turns towards the girl and meets her puffy, bloodshot eyes.

"Please, it will be dark soon."

Ferdowsi looks away; a tear escapes from his eye and it moves slowly along his cheek, over the crevasse of his upper lip, and into his mouth. The salty taste reminds him of his boyhood days along the Caspian Sea. After his parents had been killed in the revolution, Ferdowsi clung to the coast where a local fishery fed him their daily waste and expired bottles of doogh. He often slept on the shore, buried in the sand to keep away from the cold breeze that came in off the sea at night. As Ferdowsi grew stronger the fishery hired him as a hand and Ferdowsi learned the art of fishing aboard the MarjAneh. Ferdowsi's work ethic impressed the captain, and Ferdowsi's humble and quiet nature impressed the captain's wife, Farah.

Farah dreamed of a more fulfilling existence than that a of fisherman's wife and, before Ferdowsi joined her husband's crew, she would often stare out the window praying that her husband's boat would not appear on the horizon at twilight. Ferdowsi himself found life at sea a lonely existence and he resented his haggard shipmates who enjoyed low brow humour and only saw the rials when the sturgeon were brought up from the sea. Ferdowsi and Farah's common misery brought them together at the light house at night. Ferdowsi said that it was their love that blasted a light across the sea, and Farah would smile longingly.

Ferdowsi's nose for nostalgia has lead him away from the present and has caused him to momentarily forget about the little girl slouching before him. Ferdowsi moves his thumb along the right side of his face, wiping away the evidence of his reflection and softly asks, "What can I do?"

"Some food?" The girl's puffy pink eyes match the hue of her ballet shoes. Ferdowsi always has been a keen observer; it was this qualification that got him employed at the lighthouse at night when he could no longer bear to sleep in the captain's spare room, away from Farah.

"Is no one coming for you?"

"No."

End of segment one.

Blood Oranges

"Twenty-two may not be the start of maturity but, in all conscience, it's the end of youth."

The only thing that could of saved his brief legacy: assassination. But the blood would of stained the First Lady's gown and it was nonrefundable from designer Isabel Toledo. The blood stain would not fit the chief's motif anyway, because a blood stain is tangible and impure; his soaring rhetoric is perfect because the people cannot criticize Lockean political philosophy and the meaning of post-Puritan freedom. These were indoctrinated in them upon their exiting of the womb with a recitation from the sixth edition of Liberty or Death followed by a slap on the ass. Even more, his cold face would be splashed across the cover of tabloid magazines like Time, and a public mourning for their fallen Napoleon would always be compared to that of his predecessor, Jackie's husband Jack.

Assassination saved Jack's legacy. The hero's moral death, birthing the Vietnam War, is now never spoken of. Perhaps this is because one cannot blame him for producing a murderous child. He could not raise her, lest the child could raise her father from the dead. His shiny legacy is lauded across lands everywhere because planting a seed to destruction is all right so long as one does not water it.

The current chief is not so fortunate. The seeds are being watered. How are you doing old chap, my fellow, dear old corporation! Why certainly, full immunity for all telecommunication corporations for eavesdropping on Sylvia asking Mary the proper technique of knitting. Why hi there Israel! Yes certainly, continue new wave apartheid in Palestine! Of course, destroy Alena's school (she was always a slow learner anyway). Do you need some matches to burn the bodies? No no, I still go by Uncle Tom, not Uncle Jeremiah. Please continue the hegemonic wars, we will just withdraw some combat troops, all the other non combat troops and corporate troops can stay.

Domestically, well, admittedly, I can do very little constitutionally but my vagueness will prevail; inadequate environmental policies wrapped up in gold are the wave the future; a stimulus to an unregulated economy is practical; an increase to the military budget is necessary because we must fight rising temperatures by building a giant ice gun; and I will proudly carry the torch of hyperliberalist tradition to free us from our responsibility to the people! Because we can.

Speech speech! The people cry to me. I am not a man of the people. I look away. I am not a poet-in-chief. I can only speak the truth: my youth is gone but my maturity is in question.

Endless Balls

I pull my jalopy up to an isolated, industrial building. I leave the whale shark behind and enter the rotten rectangle through its grimy double glass doors stained with dirt and mucus. I flash my blue card to the lady in the glass box and enter a narrow room with a beat bench. An aging man rests there comfortably. I place my blue knapsack on the far side of the bench away the man. I begin to undress. The aging man turns towards me and I figure that it is time for a pisser. Half-dressed, I pull out of the urinal to return to my knapsack on my side of the bench only to see that it is being violated in the most grotesque fashion imaginable. The aging man, now naked, decides either unwittingly or molestationally to hang his towel on the wooden hook on my side of the bench and, in that process, allow his hanging balls to perch on my faithful Dakine knapsack. A pregnant paused fills the moist air. I turn my burning eyes away from the sac on sack action. I stare at the rusty tiled wall that is oozing moisture and anxiety. What is the appropriate response to this uncouth man who has demonstrated such hostility to social etiquette and hygiene? I peer back to my side of the bench: the affair is over. I totter back to my side of the bench. I avoid any sort of social interaction. I finish undressing. I pull on my dark blue trunks. The aging man is, incredibly, still naked, with his eyes shut. Is he meditating? Oh, the eccentricity of the naked man. I resolve for a ballsy move. I march into a stinky stall, wrap an inch of toilet paper around my hand, noisly return to my side of the bench, pick up the tainted knapsack, stomp to the garbage can, turn around, establish eye contact with the perpetrator, and tomahawk slam my knapsack into the garbage. I dive into the blue.

Mockcast

Part one. Part two. Part three.