The Crabwise Couscous Crumbcake

Mary Arroyo wrote in her journal:

07/15/2021

Numen: a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or place

The older I grow the less life makes sense to me. Every directive, every normative “bow!” every look askance, is one more insult to endure … and I keep hearing echoes that “we all grew up on Mc Arthur … Mc Arthur milk!”

I return to the fact that nothing exists until it becomes the object of my consciousness … but what to do about the word “provender” — or the concept of diacritical encoding—neither existed until I searched them out a moment ago?

Is it something akin to a crabwise couscous crumbcake?

I mean, surely someone before this moment has strung those three words together in the English language—maybe in a flarf poem or it was uttered at an oulipo/newlipo garden party scenario designed to Last Year at Marienbad your neural synapses?

It all begs the question: what is a crabwise couscous crumbcake, and why is it installed in that spot that being force-fed cod liver oil at the age of four once inhabited in my frontal lobe?

That cod memory once displaced a bar of soap on the tongue memory— a brusquely driven far back into the molars bar of Irish Spring!

What did I say? Surely something I’d overheard. Yet, I never witnessed the person who uttered it before me being tortured by some third-rate inquisitor threatening thee belt-buckle-rain next.

There it is: crabwise couscous crumbcake.

Make of it what you will. I’ll be here for the next 7 minutes staring at this cracked section of drywall, wondering why I don’t feel like going upstairs where my rack awaits.

I am dislocation incarnate.

“This Machine Kills Fascists.”

— Woody Guthrie, sticker on his guitar