White Elephantitis

So he goes on this monologue telling me why I want to avoid becoming the white elephant at the company.

He said, “it was too revered to be a beast of burden: the white elephant earned a reputation as a burdensome beast — one that required constant care and feeding and never brought a single cent to its owner.”

He came around his desk sat in the chair next to me and placed his hand on my forearm. “Remember,” he said, “one story has it that the Kings of Siam gave white elephants as gifts to those they wished to ruin, hoping that the cost of maintaining the sacred but voracious animal would drive its new owner to the poorhouse.”

He stood up and hovered over me, and with a trace of menace said, “you don’t want to ruin me, do you? Because I’ll turn a white elephant into a sacrificial cow.”

I should have left then.

“When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”

— Margaret Laurence

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

Annihilation Haiku (7.16.20)

The mushroom cloud grows
Across the blind horizon
A dead gray snow falls

“There was just a continent without
much on it
under a sky that never cared less.”

— William E. Stafford / “At the Bomb Testing Site”

In This Hole

I live in a parallel universe of my own devising. I live most of my days in a dank cell, in the bowels of a vast complex of cells. I am allowed to write for fifteen minutes every afternoon, on the refuse recycled from the lands beyond the barrens. The pipes on the ceiling drip at all hours of the day and the walls are covered in sweat.

On occasion I hear others moaning from distant cells, but never from the cells immediately adjacent to mine. I’ve never seen any of other inmates here, only the gloved hands and truncheons of my captors. They allow me out for a day once a month. On these occassions I visit my childhood home, which is now a pile of dusty detritus and gnarled rebar. I also visit the site of my former school, which is now a massive dung heap. Really, a dung heap. A heap of dung one hundred feet long and thirty feet high now. Cattle wander about freely here since they were infected with the plague, and deemed holy beings. The inhabitants of this neighborhood have been tasked with building the dung heap into a 100 x 100 foot totem to our shantytown. The last refuge before one enters the barrens.

When I tire I sleep on a patch of rock where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex and my cell. I love my little hole.

In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend. And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity. And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.

Especially in my little hole.

“So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”

— Audre Lorde / “A Litany for Survival”

The Derelict Web

And he must hold on to the sink and stand firmly on his left leg because his right leg is useless. It doesn’t respond to his command all Henry can manage is to drag it along and he doesn’t dare stand upon it because he doesnt trust it to hold him up.

In this fashion Henry starts his day, everyday. He doesn’t know how he will go on. But he goes on, and the next bit is the worst part of every morning.

Henry?

What, already?

What does regret mean?

A metal machine skronk segues to a lower register followed by a thin glass skittering from the closet.

Nothing. Nothing but the black suit, white shirt, black tie and demon shoes. A glint catches his eye, and there in the corner a drunken spider makes it’s way across it’s derelict web toward a sidereal moth in its throes.

“Henry, you were such a good boy. So tender to the touch. Remember the day you discovered the Sassaby’s? All you said for days was, I am a sassy Sassaby. Oh, you were such a dream, Henry”

Henry rotates the bird cage, shakes it, places his ear to the felt pad on the bottom.

It’s not that Henry is on the road to perdition as much as he is in Satan’s bowels. And then it all begins again.

“Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”

— Voltaire / “Questions sur les Miracles”

The Dream: Bushwa Bill 

The god of the godless oversees this place. 

There is no lodestar here. All is coal, bituminous and gas fires. Everyone wears a sheen of black. Coal dust and gas floats through the atmosphere. The air is sharp with the tang of petroleum and machine fluids. The ground is never dry, always a thick sludge that swallows the heels of your boots and sucks them off your feet. The food tastes of petrochemicals and your sense of taste is attenuating quickly. 

There are tendrils of perfume pin pricking the air and you follow that scent to the end of a street where the bodies are piled chest high. At the foot of the mound a boy with a tank on his back is spraying the bodies with the sweet scented aerosol. A moment of beauty among the nightingales. A twist of sobriety in a world full of drunkenness. This is what you live for in this world.

What the child does is what every child his age does. The aerosol not only kills the bacteria on the decaying bodies and counteracts the stench, but also hastens the decomposition of the bodies. There are many neighborhood dumping areas about the entrepôt — just like the Middle Ages, some say, back in the days of the death carts and plague pits. 

There was no place left to put the countless dying and recently dead, the land would tolerate no more bodies; there wasn’t any free space. There was a constant coming and going from these dumping areas. People would come with hands and arms full of family members and leave lighter, empty handed. 

The gas vents punctuate the night far into the distance. The belching stacks and fires from these vents are constant. You’re happy that what little you can see of the sky, during what passes for daylight hours these days, is not the continuous fog of your childhood. 

Of late some wisps of anemic blue sky have been spotted. The weather has cooled too. There’s been some talk of a returning atmosphere, but mostly uneducated conjecture you figure. What does anybody really know about what’s happening beyond the barrens. No one is certain. Everyone that has ventured out in recent memory has never returned, and even though you’ve given thought to it, you’ve never seriously considered it. Until now.

“Hey, wake up there. Move along.”  A soldier prods you in the shoulder blade with her truncheon.

“Oh, fuck off,” you say. “Miserable pig.”

“Oy, you!” A larger soldier approaches from an angle you did not expect. “Ey, fucker, move the fuck on.” 

A blow to your temple sends you cantering down the street. You wobble. A couple of kids playing with garbage snicker and run. The others walking by avert their eyes and move in wide arcs around the soldiers. You run back to your room, unsteady at first but then gaining momentum and resolve. You hear the soldiers laugh as you run. You’re not worth their time and energy. You decide you’re leaving tomorrow night, after your shift. You’ll venture into the barrens, anything is better than this dead place.

“William, you’re bleeding, there on the side of your head. You didn’t tangle with the police again, did you?”

You head directly for your side of the room, past the sheet hung up between you and your mother. 

“William?”

“Shut up. Shut up, please. I’ve had it with you, with the cops, with The Factory and with this god damned place. I’m going to leave. I’m heading out tomorrow after my shift. I’m going out beyond the barrens.”

You tear the sheet of its moorings. “You can have this shit hole all to yourself after tomorrow.”

The call of The Factory siren next door rattles the window. The shift is changing. Doors in the hall open and close in unison, and your mother aghast and about to speak automatically turns and leaves the room and heads for The Factory. 

You stare at your broken dirty hands, gnarled from the digging, always digging. Somewhere there must be more, something different. It can’t all be like this, you think.

“It failed. The whole world failed at it. It could have been so brilliant. How strange of you not to feel sad. 

Who knew life could be so awful.”

— Alice Birch / Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.

bushwa bill’s haiku

gas fires choke the night — 
coal and bituminous blue — 
breath of the godless

“Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.”

— Charles Bukowski

I Had Me A Wife, I Had Me Some Daughters

Massive heat dome come
Down on me — I’ve run myself
Ragged — nobody knows
What I’ve done to my family.

As the Fata Morganas shimmered away — 
I dug a hole as big as could be
Dropped them in, one by one,
In the dark maw of atavistic iniquity.

Released to the night crawlers — 
Oh, Lord, please, let them take root
By the leprous shagbark hickory —
I did unto them as they unto me.

In the dead of the morning
When the tree towers above me
I’m gonna hang myself on that gnarled branch
Of the family tree.

“…this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.”

— Adrienne Rich / “What Kind of Times Are These”

Popcorn Double Feature

Various ideas for your book:

Include a scene at the rheumy palace — 

Maybe a nonfiction setting on shipwrecked cay. 

Maybe not.

Use these words liberally:

Ablation; asperity; cassocks; chasubles;  hooded cowls; astringent; incursive; afflux; minikin; Grand Guignol; rutilant; cadge; rebus; limpid; enmity; hackles; pathoformic; sabbat; afflatus.

Write, one hundred, 100 word chapters. 

End abruptly, midway through the narrative, and append a long footnote that elucidates nothing.

Add Autocorrected Texts and Overheard Conversational Automatism.

Include two single word chapters: “Isotope” and “Gunplay” on pages 33 and 66, respectively.

Include the anecdote about the Girl Scout merit badge you were awarded for “Sailing.”

Title the work: 

Lime Automatic See Thru Three Cats Aging in the He Code Other Using Nixon No-Stow Straws

Include the anecdote about Harry and Jerry not having cottage cheese on their plates at your Sweet Sixteen BBQ. And how Stone took  the big wooden spatula and rammed it in Orpheus.

Remember people are usually pessimistic about rain.

Include the scene where you make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every potential boyfriend on the first date. 

Include the line: “I’m a hipster.”

Don’t disappoint everyone.

No one was mad at you.

Remember what Dr. Greene said:

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic, and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

Include the words THE END.

“Optimism,” said Cacambo, “What is that?” “Alas!” replied Candide, “It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst!”

— Voltaire / Candide

Softcover Words

Read this “How to…” book
and communicate in softcover words
your hard cover deeds —

herding sheep and goats,
lying with packs of dogs,
theorizing  yersinia pestis theorems,
and puzzling though a sheaf
of sanity assassins.

Read about the coughing
and sneezing of the infected.
Eat stands of banana, malanga, and yuca.

And make ten thousand marks
silvery and lustrous gray —

recounting the executions carried out
by children bored of kicking
old oil drums green
and rusted brown.

“What the lawyers with the midwestern palazzo seem to think is what a lot of elite people and police seem to think: society is basically unfair, and they are willing to go to extremes to preserve that unfairness, since they’re on the winning side of it.”

— Rebecca Solnit / “Chrome-Plated Pistols and Pink Polos: The Face of Elite Panic in the USA”