DEVIANT CUBES

1. If Albert Camus Had Taken a Train
Dead on arrival. The announcement shook the cold audience from their lethargic gaze. Still hiccupping for comic effect I returned to the dark alley to cover my tracks with stiff kisses. Snow is often poor evidence in this part of the city by order of law. Dirge slander prevailed over the rising costs of blueberry sympathies, prices were scalloping, less similar to the mollusks than the verses I used to sing in Presbyterian school to the potatoes all rotten my ex-wife liked to fix two meals a day, thrice on Sunday. Violin music had ceased to amaze the child in each of the misguided hipsters filtering in and out of our house still claiming to be interested in the same pasty things as the sober. Petty interests in common house pets came first in the squandered lives of these new urbanized aristocrats. Misplaced affections in my book. Vowels and pronouns in hers. Rodent fashion splashed heavy gray green bile, or is that thick gangrene bile (the light is fuzzy here in the taxi or maybe my eyes are simply taking a five-fingered discount on daylight savings time). Puffy zetetic faces spank this tree giving shaded responses to analytically buffed sophistication, and frankly had produced nothing but cracks and wise acres among this bull generation of raw couchspeak junkies. Because a mass upheaval across the globe would center these writers no more or less prepared to correct the sanitation problems facing them than an appearance on the Jeopardy Show during Tournament of Champions’ week could provide, a select few of them joined the local Guestlist Gestapo, went undercover into the nightclubs of each one’s own promised land of little return on their investment, and broke into happiness. But it was all a joke somebody said. Nobody really smiled. Yes, they would win points as bullies and defenders of the amorally elite, alas, becoming the worst opportunistic sort of chivalrous cheesetasters, but I bolted, hired a planteater, and left the fluids to fend off the fleas themselves. Even a vacation to the heartbeat of Somalexia proved a miserable failure. Lot’s wife, renamed Bra Lynx, for marquée value, changed back into flesh and blood chattering some nonsense about the salt of the earth, smoked oysters, and a nauseatingly competitive game of canasta. As a final splash of artistic flimflam and a vigorous distaste for symmetry of any breed, her Betty Rules blouse was ripped just above her left breast, some say for show of course while others chalk it up to sheer coincidence and a matter to be discussed at the weekly Me Too meeting. No clue as to the culprit though. Some literary cowtow from the other side of the lunar tracks had licked her there in the rip for three weeks straight, she smiled without ironing boards. The inspector sent her straight to Sisyphus.

2. Man Ray Eats A Sandwich Without Mayo
Looking for law and lawn in all the wrong places cannot and should not be compared to reading Dostoevsky on a summer’s day hoping to learn something useful enough to turn a dollar inwards via capitalistic coup, unfortunately for our heroes in transition. The lips galore move in a salute to Assassins Anonymous and the work they have done in the urban areas south of Detroit, a hapless ruin. Only Sophie Glass and her boyfriend Jackfred Wilson dare stir slightly the limbs agile photographers keep. (Enter past tense with gusto.) Every aisle thick with scores of rag gossipers on high horses broke rank regardless of the lack of ventilation in the tunnels. Finally in a call to arms, Sophie thought she alone heard a loud shriek like a message from the other side. “The word’s already been given, and you’re not getting it again!” Anticipation slurred the speech of all those who broke bread with the fishmongers on strike. The bluff was not taken. Anticipation dropped off the edge like Columbus should have, said Sophie, forgetting that her glass ceiling changes into diamond almost anywhere near Tom Paine she tries to shake down. Concluding their mutual witness of such namby-pamby plethora, Sophie and Jackfred shattered the dark silence with a rapid succession of sleazy infrared shots. Again the audience gasped in harmony with the pitter patter of visual demands made on each one of them as justice prevailed in the form of New Legislation made into Flesh and the two ventriloquy photographers hacked through the vines of cozy confessions this New Law required, no questions asked. Remarks of this type and talent would surely redeem them from the tight provocations their spouses dutifully employ as a mechanism for financial equality, thought Sophie in a more serious mood. Certainly at the very minimum, for household maneuvers. Sounds good? Wrong! A twig snapped and she then remembered her own husband’s final words on the blur just before she shot him completely nude, stiffy, all four and a sixteenth inches in paw straddled over a picture of Sophie Glass as a young child. Betraying her professional cool she would use these words against him posthumously in a court of law. “Kafka my darling, I need to use you, abuse you in every way, so please don’t stop talking and writing to me in your own chosen obscene way…please don’t lock me out you bastard!” They buried him in a small justified plot without fanfare, and the wife and boyfriend, greeted by a farewell gesture in court, received nary a token of affection for there was none save for the magnificently catered spread next door across from the kennel where life was cheap and these killer sandwiches were cheaper.

3. If the Shoe Fits
Tables and tables of tables and tables of tables of tables tend to forget to properly package the birthmark of their creator. This oversight will be rectified in the next edition by the egg plagiarist fat with knowledge only an actress requires. Please remit this coupon, he adds, with full payment. “Get it right the very first time,” prunes a sassy Gertrude Picklesimmer, an old friend and a recovering gene along the lines of Epidrome the fanatic. Ethiopian cuisine draws her in for a late night haranguing, her favorite activity, clothing optional, teeth required. In another chapter, curtsy Jane Getz, the Amway doll with unimpaired bust from East Anchorage realizes in a fit of high seriousness that the thoughtcrime she’d committed during her afterdinner phase taken in L’hotel Egmont was simply not curable by enforced comparitive thinking classes, if she was to remain an American Doll (unrelated to the Picklesimmer neurosis.) Quickly, she fell to the grass, pulled off her panty-hose in two swift movements and tossed them to the young Republican standing by in a selfless gesture for party unity. She gave out a loud sigh, and with her exploding right hand smeared her lipstick across her pretty face, her pushy left hand tugging at the rope she had obediently placed around her thin orange neck. “Oh forgive me father for what I am about to forget.” Then, withdrawn, she joined the stereo people, who took her life savings and doubled it on the troubled market, bridging the gap between the moderate liberals and the far-right wing tapdancers of the Reagan years still crying out for a fresh look into the morals of those less crowded by the ennuendos of the straight & narrow electorate. All that’s needed, dictates the Leader-at-Arms, is a simple majority of those who have the right to vote and swear that you’ll vote with your pot bellies this time, Kid Scissors, and yes…“you, George, may sit at my right hand, and you…”

4. Persuasion Is No Longer Possible
Dead on arrival! Thunk. The Plague Syndrome. Fear. Ugliness. Filth. Sterility. It seems we wait for crocodiles to defile us, suck us into the Mississippi while both Twain and Truman sprout buffalo wings in hopes of a superior, more incestuous vision to supply our air fragile economies with invincible Whitmanesque nurses, naughty to uncoil our moated homespun turmoils wielding killer drugs and boy killers and further relate them to the Final Quest…getting laid in a grave six feet over or under, multiplying the fast game of infinity by zero and dust over idea. Rationality gives no suck to thirsty camels. Neither beckons them homeward. Should we survive them, a brittle postulate hardly seems a hardy substitute for love in a two-way window. Here came the Beatniks with not a single plan to boil. Then the Hippies home of the shaggy truth in revolution. The Discognitos where sweat said it all. Then the Punks where boredom and displacement took a place at the table with the rest of our problems, unmasked. Then the Preppies (always primping close by whilst all the others storm in uninvited) proud to be rich and beautiful and well-spoken for. Then the skinhead revival where hatred and gentrification meet its maker. Then rush in the angriest of the angry, the Rappers, civil unrest the Messiah. Then the Ravers about nothing nothing at all. And this parade of the horribles just in my lifetime, tracing merely the high profile movements, topped out, each genre pilfered ozoning subgenres like anything else doping a molecule to spare. Change, eh? Here they came in thunderous herds to lay blame at my feet, and I welcomed them as a variation of myself. As contrapunctus night steals the hit playlist the swelling rhetorical voices all suggest the same fluctuating plot, the same arguments of straw woven into myth and mirth similarly disposed, seamless and useless except as a fashion quirk projectory flying loose in the machinery of the next breath and acceptable on that gut level in private until watching the Eternal Clock the staid gentlemen of the silver-tongued coif just laugh into a gold box guaranteed to mock us concerning this sanity of despair. The enemy.

5. Turn That Goddamned Television Off, Snotty!
The wars in Africa have passed into the streets of our nation’s capitol right up my doorstep. Riots are eating up all the quality time spent with our children, our flowers, our bitterness. Contact sports traded a hundred and forty-four thousand future draft choices of the free for instant contact death. Ringing in my ears! Reclusive, guzzling beer, awaiting my murder, humming the hymns of great speckled confusion. Yes, I’m sick and I’m tired. Proof is the existence of having to defend the fact that I’m not brown and beautiful, nor white and rich, nor yellow and well connected, nor blue and better off, nor green and cuter still, nor purple and well-hung, nor pale and a whiz kid keeper, nor any other multiple choice identification rite I can’t inhale because I’m just a poor freckle from a town far away where red-winged blackbirds reign upon the bloody marshes of a dull gray past. Dead on arrival! Ringing in my ears! This icon, this city of Washington tucked away like a puckered nipple between two states is the center of my attention span, the bloodshed of boys, and I shall fear no evil, though I walk through the valley of inconvenience and misunderstanding a glass darkly. Astonished I lie down in black pastures to annointeth my role, to scour the enigma off my soul. I choke on my resistence. And jump head first into deep waters to pluck out a thumbless axiom. There is no comfort. To survive I must so choose, and I would then call my publisher if I had one, to rub myself raw, to loosen myself from sterile explanations. Soon comes the resurrection, the comic moaned. I will just kiss my wife gently on her wrists. And pray that America wakes up from her synthetic nightmare in time to realize that street violence belongs in the mind, not on someone else’s pillow case. “You must be able to enjoy the phallic.”

6. Help Wanted
Thinking is plural. We often do when our mirrors fog. Scores ago, in the quaint southern town where we first roamed the wild plains of youth in crass innocense, a young Aunt Charlemagne once scolded us, slapping our collective face, for an expression we’d just muttered without zip code or return address. In preparation for what we later grew naturally, a masquerade if anything sweeter came between us. Aunt Charlemagne was eight years younger than her sister, and less a threat to our ambitions as a kid without wings but this isn’t news. we admitted to preferring the sting of flesh when perpetrated by the younger sister; in fact we became attached to the violence young lash in their early twenties could foster all for our sake in the multitudes of shapes and thrusts of uncertainty principles everywhere anytime to the clue of making of the fodder of joy. Of course began the impossible task of finding that enchanting angular, gripped and primed, ripe for the plunge into theory and advance, who, inspired by control, feels no hounding shame in dominating le masculine urge with whatever is the most accessible tool available to our struggling leather saint and his epistomologic quest back to the founder of his words. This is news we said.

7. Out To Lunch Naked
I recanted publically. But this repentence tasted of kerosene and five unidentifiable culprits laughing behind grotesque clay statues of stool pigeons in drag, still figgering on three icy fingers their dormant appearance to contrive. About forty seconds earlier, which seemed like forty looks, she had asked me to unhook the strap prize of her feminine apparrel. I complied without question except those few which lingered like injured love tigers silently against my tattooed chest. My graceless blurtations spinned calculus webs glory spat back into the wind no wedding bells could seduce, by golly intrigue enough during that honest infidel period of my own due process. I intuited precious unspoken dignity when a single scrapbook neanderthalic blazing emphasized a year, like sun time, like gestation, like God in heat. No underexposed image would ever be too painful, ever too explicit, choices could never be too exacting. In this accelerated culture it’s uncouth hurray to deny our vulturous past or that its predicated smell of shame was that of fire, odorless, tasteless, but raging in gymnastic marble color, vast unmentionable hues of pit and passion. Only my credentials can whisper its name—burnt cosmos. After her fruitbox heaviness secured its diplomacy, a dress of bulb-white linen fell to its gifted position upon her kindling fuss, a flesh frothing with evidence of crude conviction, of unpublished zest, lasting heat.

8. Bring Us Another Round Of Abelard
Then there was this other game turtle. She in her early eyes dark with nuance, stretched like a vanquished dancer among gargantuan fates making breeze her garland through mahogany-silk hair and other dazzling inspectables. I pulled at the arbitrating cloth, brilliantly keen in brave foul textures of the sexual armistice. The fair. The frantic. I immediately compared these symptoms to those I’d experienced with quick lather & ecclesiastical bubbles when dare I remember how fear touched herself there among the sweaties. Tightly I drew at her dress until the static pressure flushed both of us, gazing into her aura, unphotographed wormholes of beauty crushed into shapes and color escapes, clutching with a long-fingered paw my prepared destiny, my meager knowledge, my Himalayan heart where monks have stormed. She kissed me about the pointless cheeks, and grabbed my hair, then my unproven mouth, each probing tongue wet like childbrain songs long since dormant. Finally I exhaled, and reached for her marshmellow clowns with one numbing touch. I had to go for the reckoning, had to press for that unknown limitation, neither expecting to give nor receive any sweeping social advantage, only impulse. “Enough!” she sharply directed, and I quickened to a freeze, embarrassed by her familiarity of the rite. Her anger tasted of its own 120 proof. I dismayed and shuffled from the now chilly room, never to return until I had come of age.

[1996, Washington, DC ]