The Annoited.

"By the way, if you think you don't need to read Pynchon's "Against the Day," someone needs to give you a fuckin' second smile and leave your body to marinate in the gutters of mass ave."

-My Brother (far more literate than I)

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 The Annoited 

I begin again as a parable told for the first time. 
This does not reflect my need to speak,
or the hunger pains before my next meal. 

I am a book in which foreign crows come and ago,
their adjectives burdening each instance of arrival. 
In a tree beneath a window,
black birds of the black color sing before a gathering murder.
 
In the story, I begin as a toy ship pulled

slowly across a floor,
under the table,
or as a blind man stumbling

into the crowded room. 
I am apparently sick,

so nothing can be said of my surroundings.

< begin second person account >

To suggest otherwise would be a form of cruelty. 
Instead, he would think of the known diseases of the gall bladder. 
When not in that humor, he is in another, as in the beginning of autumn,
as in the leaves returning to earth,
or the misrule that results from the strain between
personal desire and collective goodwill. 
He asks if a city, in good order, though small,
and built on a distant crag, is as foolish as this,
even if an ideal model? 
If cattle had hands and could draw,
they would shape the bodies of their gods in the likeness of cattle. 

He imagines cattle in the likeness of property,
property in the likeness of wealth,
wealth in the likeness of one’s own estate. 

Resemblances, he concludes, are therefore private. 
Behind him he hears a full-throated song,
before him he sees an emptying room, the first of many signs.

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If I was a cereal killer…………..
Captain Lord Iverness Walter de Rochforte was a thrice-decorated Navy man during the Vietnam conflict (receiving a Medal of Honor, a Purple Heart, and a Green Clover) until he contracted a dose of syphilis from a Thai prostitute, which he left untreated until he went mad, his Crunch Berries shriveled, and he was kicked out of the Navy (official reason: a "dishonorable discharge for contemplating consciousness on the job").

Embittered, I would say, and crazed, he returned to the States, took up residence in an abandoned factory in Cambridge, Mass, and gathered a cult of disenfranchised loners, freaks and layabouts, including such notorious-in-their-own-right figures such as Will "the Cuckoo Bird" Evans, the pedophilic Ludi "Trix" Grolle, and the infamous incestuous homosexual triplets, Laura ("Snap"), Alex ("Crackle") and Jan ("Pop") the vixen whore.

For a horrifying summer in the early 90s, unsuspecting families were sent colorfully designed packages with the message "FREE PRIZE INSIDE (while supplies last)!" scrawled on the front in what appeared to be either blood or Red Dye #3. When opened, the horrified recipients discovered the chopped-up, sugar-coated remains of various missing persons in the area, including noted Quaker Jedidiah Smote, young Marky McMaypo, and 300-pound former boxer Sugar Bear Williamson. After a prolonged shootout between Crunchovsky's minions and FDA officials, the crazed Captain was captured, jailed, and sentenced to 8 essential life sentences in San BooYaBitch Federal Penitentiary, where he remains to this day.

Kill count: 78% of the recommended daily allowance of murderous mayhem.

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The Annoited Part II

When asked, once, and then to define the word "collapse," 

I avoid referring to colors:

neither the rich pink nu-cu-lar red of salmon flesh,

nor the soft electric green of a puss. 

The strips of his linens

offset the appearance of red objects:

fire, coral, and the sulfer that bleeds

ink into the creases of his palms. 

I place blank clay paper in a clay pot

inscribes it with the word "Succulent."

In time, even the yellowing of the

maple leaves will be dampened by darkness. 

In time, his light will pass through the space

A room to a perfect white circle on a screen. 

In time, each color will appear at the

border between light and dark,

with or without their objects. 

But now I stumble from the mouth of the tomb

under a canopy,

trees thick as cordwood.

 
I whisper the word bellum in a tone

no one can hear. 

Belief. I will later say, is a line

between hunger and animal,

or apple and apple-colored fruit. 

Nothing, I will say, is green,

or as grey, and nothing is more so.

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HIPSTER CONTEMPLATIONS* BOOK CLUB UPCOMING SELECTIONS:

BELCH, by Will X

Will (he has no last name - or does he?), a faceless corporate drone for a company of unspecified purpose in a city known simply as City, suffers from malaise of indeterminate origin. All he knows is that his ankles hurt, he feels like he just swallowed an enormous raisin and he can't whistle anymore. One day, while waiting for a bus (what number bus? Wouldn't you like to know?), he meets a charismatic, mysterious 12-year-old, also named Will (this may well turn out to be significant), who proposes the ideal solution to his problem: a belching contest. What happens next, we can't say, but here's a hint: people end up getting mutilated humorously and the one female character in the book sleeps with everybody until her namesake, the author's junior-year high-school girlfriend, gets an injunction and those parts are edited from the book. "Nihilicious." - Readers Digest

DRAINED, by John Walter
That contemperaneous, that jaded, thirtyish grad school dropout, would-be writer and chilblains sufferer is renting for the summer - there's something wrong with it. Something in the walls. Something that fills the halls with the stench of total societal breakdown. And bleach. Which may or may not itself be symbolic, but Christ, I hate that smell. I mean, he does. The protagonist. Who is not me.

CRIMP, by Ed "Nuddles" Nudelman
Jaundiced bibliophile Mr. Ex-ed, aimless and more than a little psuedonymous, drifts into a darkly seductive subculture of people who eat stuff that probably shouldn't be eaten. Liberated at first, Mr. Ex-Ed's distanced, ironic sense of elation is shattered when, in a climactic scene almost worth putting at the end of the book, he discovers that the cult's charismatic, mysterious leader is not a figment of his fevered imagination or a projection of the dark underbelly of post-millennial America, but just a balding guy named Morris who wants his money.

VESTED, by Amy "The Hammer" George
Furry, adorable little animals are turning up in abandoned shirt factories throughout the more washed-out, recessive regions of the U.S. And they're dead. And if you cut them open, you'll find cute, defenseless little babies in there. They're dead, too. Maybe they have something awful written on their foreheads as well. It'd have to be pretty shocking, whatever it is. I'll get back to you on that.

REMAINDER, by Ludi Ludolf Grolle
Mr. Pink, a prematurely jaded substitute auditor at an unnamed office park in a nondescript locale, finds himself drawn into a temptingly dusky netherworld of mathematical madness when he discovers a set of truly improper fractions that, when said aloud, cause innocent, archetypal people to do the sort of horrifying, edgy things that go on in modern America if you really wanted to look for them. Nothing sexual, though, as that's kinda icky. The story takes a number of dark, sinister and potentially very cinematic turns, leading to the shockingly ironic denouement where thirty copies of the hardcover mysteriously, charismatically turn up on the CLEARANCE table at every Buck-A-Book in post-9/11 America.

GRUMBLE, by Laura, The Muse, Mercenary Art Assassin

Purports to be the newly-unearthed journal of an anonymous, possibly psychotic loner descending into delusions and eventually madness, but is really an old text on corn removal with photos of deformed cattle and quotes from old Skinny Puppy records interpolated at random. Don't tell anyone.

*Books may arrive every three weeks, every five, or occasionally almost a month and a half after the previous one. That's just how we are. We can't help ourselves. With his finger on the prostrate of the american zeitgeist, Evans' Contemplations Book Club guarentees explosure to your erudite musings. Not just commenting on culture, Evans invents it.

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