fracture mechanics

Jan cuts a sonnet through the dust that lay like snow over the table top. A beautiful, temporal, verse. A temporarily beautiful verse. Sonneteer, o sonneteer, collapses in a heap on the floor. Sonneteer, o sonneteer, collects ol Mary, Mary, quite contempt-orary with shaven head and French green dress, up the stairs and across the landing, into the room where music’s made. Beautiful, beautiful, Mary, just legless enough to stand the unstandable – to fuck the unfuckable. Jan, sweet slimy Jan, licks his needy sickly drivel all over her naked body – poems her a dribble of obscenity across her dusty skin; Jan’s gentle cooing descends into irreligious filth and prickardy pricking… jabberdy jabbing. Tears glooping, swashling lungs and cunts dripperdy dropping. Flesh ripped apart, bleeding, bones white and thickening shit and spittle. Fucking fucking guts, intestines, spine and pissing, books, poetry, rock n’ rolling fuckedy fucking.

Nightmareily through the night does ol’ Ylang-ylangy go. Out to snatch a body or two… but… my stone? ah, there. Lifted out the ol’ Jesuit boneyard where mOther and father are boxed and ready to go.
Daddy-mummy-me: o how that gawdawful triangulation pinpoints every fear, every love, every pain, every joy, every sickness. I am the holy trinity; I, the trilateral man: father, son and Holy Ghost – not an existential ant, but, a trigonal fly. Nastish, selfy, bloated… dead as dead as dead.
There are worms burrowing through my skin, eating away at the soft bits making me thin. The brain, where the world slows, begins and ends and is equalized and pulverized and eaten, is itself food for thought – a delicacy on that score. Thinking is where the world gets eaten and thought is gradually consumed by thought, but, it is not nourished. Thought is fat and hungry in equal measure. Thought is a feast of holes.
I cre… cre… cre… ate my words. Words are worms, the byproduct of a ruined world. Words are worms, the overripe fruit of thinking.
Look how skinny this room is. Jan must have shaved the meat off its bones. Overfed, stuffed, roomy old room, the room I was born in, has lost some weight in the thinking of it and gained nothing in the saying of it. Roooooooom. One and all infected this world with thinking and thinking infected by this world. Cancerized and sodomized this peaceful machine.
Where’s my Ylang-ylangy? Out to snatch a body or two. Funny, gone the wrong way up Princess street. Graveyard’s up the other way. Shifty little Janny-jan gone pubwise. Told me once he lost himself in the mirror, lost in the skuggwa of his own face – couldn’t connect his thinking to his thinking of his thinking of his face. I tells ‘im, I tells ‘im, “realize you did, you don’t belong ‘ere.” He says he knew it all along… all andlang… all Ylangy-jan.
Jan, gadding about all amongst the half naked half dead stinko stigmatics, will come a- lah-lahing back all off his pannikin; come a-galumphin and a-galambolin he will, loud enough to wake the rotting with his stale ol’ breath a-singing and a-songing. I’m doooooooomed. Yet, despite Jan’s rumbled tumbled drunkery, I rarely land on those shores of nod these day. Words scratching behind the ears. O how this perpetual dream never lets me sleep. A perpetual nightmare.

Jan stares at the sharply warped sliver of stone smithereen he had flyquick snatched from the flood of floor in secret before scurrying off to his one chaired hell. He pushes it carefully around his palm – slowly, gently: shh, don’t say a word.
-What an unusual arrangement of solidness; what a solid arrangement of unusualness. Uselessness. Unusefulness. Jan says, parodying Luke’s highfaluting, endlessly synonymic and gratuitously dialectical way of saying. But, Jan knows he is only partially playing at parody; for, Luke’s way of words crawls insidiously through the shallower waters of Jan’s own prattlings.
A small bird is stapled to Jan’s broken table with its chest pinned open wide to its wings; half-alive and half-dead. Jan drags his chair to the table, sits clumsily, edging his head near to the bird, and whispers:
-What do you suppose he eyes in these insides… these guts? No, not guts… flesh – skin; but dead, like meat, meat without intricacy or purpose… precisely like meat. Marbled through with nothing more to do with itself.

-More like ban is that stan,
said the bird to the man.
-Why, don’t be absurd,
said the man to the bird.

-Ssshhh. Half-dead half-alive birds shouldn’t have the wherewithal to… but… of course, bone.
Jan sits up rigid in his milky chair, pushing the fat of his thumb against the point of the slithery slither.
-I suppose… in a sort of obvious way. Stooping closer to the broke little sparrow, bones an’ blood an’ all. But, what do little half-dead half-alive birds know anyway? Jan hisses.
-A splinter of bone, or, a splinter of skin? In texture like bone, holds the world up, holds its own, Jan says, jabbing the point of the splinter into one of the bird’s opal eyes. This bastard is uneatable.
-Inedible, says the sparrow.
-My grammar need not be corrected by more dead than alive bastard birds. I Mean what I say. I can eat what I damn well please. Jabbing a little harder at the black point-of-bird’s-eye-view. It is not like bone or meat or skin or anything. It is not like anything. It’s all surface and no substance. What does Luke see here, in these insubstantial, slippery, surfaces? So slippery that thinking can slide off it in all directions.
This stone, this partial, blurry, stone is a dream but it comes alive when I think about it, it becomes solid and real when I think about it; no longer just a thought, but, something not me; something… thought provoking. No, this stone does not provoke thought, thought provokes this stone. It has no inside or outside, no surface or depth; it is pure surface, pure depth. How on earth does this sorry little thought-thing catch my eye? Where does it begin? Why? This stone, this fractional, fuzzy, stone is cold and not cold, is dry and not dry, is one and two, et sequential… Jan gets himself lost along a Lukish loop of words and not-words.

Ants congregate in the corner daily; unquenched and slimy, clenched and unclenched, chaotic and proper. Enticed with a little sugar. Come little ones, little little childlike decay and rottener than pigs.
Jan is doggish – rests his head on my lap – loyal loyal Janny Jan, but, with a fisheye brain. Nothing has happened. No-happening escapes Jan’s fisheye. He leaps to his feet and walks backwards, back into his hole, back into hell, back to feed the monster that lives down there. I have never seen it, but, sometimes I hear a grumbling a rumbling a growling… sometimes I see a flickering a flash a fire… a foot an eye a finger. He has a devil down there in the cellar: all the Fs! Sing “all the F’s!”
Peeking through stone guts can wait. The insect supra-structure scrabbling about the skirting board folds and unfolds – breathes, unbreathes. A hole falls through the deep red mahogany desk sleeping under my elbows. Sleeping. Mouth Gapping. Bloody desk dripping dropping, solid vertical blood, four-legged open artery coagulated in suspension.
I fiscaus two cubes of dusty sugar – fisceye siceye – Jan our diabolical and opposite friend – and toss them into the corner. Wawl. Caterwaul. Circumambulator. Tiny dead ants. Circumambulator. Caterwaul, caterwaul, swelling up, engulfing, pushing. Caterwaul sucking, sucking, vacuuming. Ant-circumambulatorant. Corpses: food now. Not corpses, limbs. Amputated limbs. Scapes, funiculus’, tarus’, tarsal claws, tibias, tibia spurs, gasters… the dead ants are not corpses but useless limbs, eyes, ears, mouths. The living mouth eats the useless mouth. Ants, rope-like and smoke-like; whole worlds the size of eyelids; head in a basket. Head… in… a… bask-et. Hymenoptra. Hy-men-op-ter-a. More egged than wombed. More unfolded than born – humen, humen, humen! The screaming! The screaming! O for the oblivion of oblivion to stem this perpetual flow of words that are only spent when all our vegetable thinking is done and dust.

Soft moon a-hanged and propped from seven sea to skuggi by a trillion crooked stilts jabbed into the earth’s panoptic plane of partial skuggwa. shooting light-like across the emptiness and the fullness, the fullness and the emptiness, running cheek by jowl with all-in-all. The soft moon, a rope lashed around its middle, ends tied star to star, skins half a pint of oranges over Jasna Gora and her black mOther theotokos-hodegetria: die Verfuehrung, leading to the source – Matka Boska Czestochowska: This way, this way…
Luke rests the scharfe edge of a scalpellum on the smiling polished surface of a stan, double and triple.
Bone runs deep through the veins of Czestochowa and stiffens the murderous deluge of screams like water made ice floeing from liquid prisons of salvation’s freedom into Luke’s arthritic mares come nightmares. He looks up, through the majestic ceiling, beyond the deep blue calculating-machine sky, beyond the flabby moon, beyond the planets and the sun, beyond the galaxies and bird-eye stars, over the edge of the faint echo of infrasonic beginning, back through the galaxies and stars, back passed the sun and the planets and the moon, back, back, until finally he encounters his self encountering a stone.
-Jan! Jan! I have the wrong implement! Jan, fetch the prospector’s hammer! Jan, for God’s sake, I will this cobble divide… Jan?
But will alone is all alone against hard and fast Reality and its indivisible/divisible things trapped fat, stuck in mid air, elbowing out thinking, then sucking it back in.
Jan scuttles bridge-like, hand-over-foot-like, clip clop clip clop; the delicious rattling snap of slavery from nail to heel to wood; shadows lovingly caress his face and jealously claw at his boot-heels.
-I have it, Jan sits on his feet rummaging around in the breast pocket of his pinstriped jacket. Here.
Luke snatches sorry old hamor, fresh sparkling and siolfor – pulls back, mechanical arm fashion, one-armed bandit fashion, the old stone swindler
-You see here Jan, pointing at the stone snapped limb from limb, this smithereening is not revolution, prodding its insides out. Nothing has happened.
-But I saw it, Luke. I watched it brake.
-And yet, nothing has happened, Jan. Have you been drinking?
Jan shrugs and nestles his chin on Luke’s thigh.