The Dictator Says

The dictator says: St. Ignatius used a cilice; hold your breath and expand, let go… and I do. She’s gesticulating wildly and walking toward me. She has violent intent, the dictator says.

I let go of the cudgel and float away from my honeymoon. I’m the balloon man over Captiva — a reductive William S. Burroughs doppelgänger.

S for Seward, did ya’ know?

Did you consult Burroughs’s spirit? Did you step inside the dream machine? What you sought was not forthcoming in the haze of your hallucinations. What you thought was worthy — a trip with Benway down the Amazonas, rusty metal shank in hand and a stream of clear snot running onto your lips — was instead, a dead end. A cul de sac like a new channel carved out by the overflowing river that deposited you in a billabong in the middle of the vast jungle: lost and still obscured. So now move on. Reach for that fraying vine overhead and pull yourself out before you’re sucked in by the quick mud. Dusk is approaching and something is stirring in the bush.

I am the oily fellow who travels by foot and occasionally bicycle. I have rhinestones for eyes and spangles for hair. Would you please walk along this road with me. I’ve left the barrens and seek conviviality; and you seem full of congeniality and a merry schpilkas. Won’t you be my peripatetic neighbor? Let’s just keep going — so unctuous.

Go here, then go there. Just go go go and keep going. Just keep going.

” I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer…”

— William S. Burroughs