4.54
Oh? (A 30 minute writing exercise)
Because I... because I already took a step out the door, because I hung the rubies on the chandeliers, because I already blew him and I couldn’t possibly be wrong again, because I chased the drifters through soot-blackened tenements and kept promising their reformation into civilized society, they will hide their cankers with latex and fill their tooth-gaps with marshmallow, Althaea officinalis, the doctors took the root and made syrup, put it into a gourd and made the vizier drink up as the night-fires raged on and the shackled devils dragged the limestone benben with all the goddamn mosquitoes swaddled in their black, oily hair, we are celescalating for a million years, marshmallow, because the word already charted a course, set on with satchel, rapier and vanity mirror over her shoulder so that the ones who travel behind her are aware of the path already trod, because it is much too late now even though the lozenge has naught to do with the mallow growing in the marsh while wisps sing, but we will graft the possibility into the resolute, because I bought and sold the 12%, because I am a sophist and you are a needle shining in the dark and because you go on around the Academus needling older men for their approval and their eyes are downcast, their peplos are blown away and you can see their red-asses gleaming as they are ultimately hidden by the doric columns and you scream and invent the epideictic speech, it could use some work but the claps thunder over you, because i’m bought and sold at 12%, because they chase me around the psych-ward with fly-swats, because I tip-toed out of bed since I feel that i’m lying to you if I’m in it, because of all the dull argentum on your heels, because you keep putting all your chips in black and red is always hit, the Casino sends you coupe glasses overflowing with Perrier-Jouët Reserve Belle Epoque 1995, courtesy of the swindlers, because you keep losing everything you own but are quite thankful to your sponsors, to the guardians, to the conservatorship keeping you sedate, because you are back from the dead now, because it is high-time you swung back, yeah, no more bones whispering under your skin, because we shorted all the stocks of all the airlines, because we snorted all the lines made by the tropics, because you are trying to find yourself in these lines but are absent, because the RAE took away all my nouns, because the OED provided too much, because I spill wine on your lapel so you buy another suit, because once upon a time there was something going on and once upon a time I knew how to dream that once upon a time there was a battle fought here, because I really wish they won at Bahía de Cochinos so I could play baccarat in La Habana, because I do not smoke habanos cohiba since I’m short on power, because all the men picking the tobacco passed out and their straw-hats fell out, the field strewn by bright green and streaked by mist carried off from Pico Turquino, shaving my neck with the Burley Cutting Knife, when the day is done and the orange and magenta speckle the window-panes of the Fulgencio Batista fanclub members, when we acknowledge our transience in the fading, lambent shadows around our boots, when we catcall exhausted women along the boulevard and finally go off into a paladar (y’know they always say fiction can’t beat reality but man just lookatat Brazilian telenovela, for instance) and go batty with saoco and canchánchara, and later on when all pretense has been dropped just plain ‘ol rum, whenwhenwewhenhehehe but what if Regina Duarte saw me drool into the mahogany bar, would she then take pity upon me and take my head on the crook of her arm? leaving my body without an operator, splashing blood from the fountain of my neck, kneeled amongst my friends who are eating tostones and making yet another scheme to murder our shift-boss and not paying mind to my corpse, would I then travel crosscountry while held by Regina? and now the crook of her arm is dripping blood and she promises to take me all the way into Rio where my pate will be buried under that god-awful cathedral while we all continue to smile because it’s been 4.54 billion years of merriment.