Self-Portrait (as the Jubjub Bird and the Frumious Bandersnatch) Down South

Jocose in those dying days of Sancti Spiritus. They jostled and jointed, they foisted and hoisted, the beams up to the sky. Mountain joists of slick primer. Letters fell out of the alphabet books and pooled ankle-high in the dead letter office on the outskirts of Cabaiguan.

Chinchilla chip extractions in darkened corners, in dumpster-bin nonchalance, in the space where I guarded a jar of borborygmus while thunder poured freely out of backyard spigots. Sanguine was the toothy man from Tayabacoa, the brass splayed out of his mouth, and delayed behind his teeth the bloody antiquarian rags.

Your erudition excited me so that I cracked in carbuncles that hissed upon maximum inflation. You lanced my ruined body. I pivoted in place, a silver bayonet engaging the rage of a moribund wrist toss.

Gathering dirt bombs. Gathering dust.

“You are—after all—the very first reader of what you write. Please that reader. You may not have any other.”

— Jane Yolen / Take Joy: A Book for Writers