fracture mechanics

-There’s a ladybird in my soup!
Jean crunches an ant under his thumb and screws its little corps into the table, cursing it in whispers of violence with each twist of his opposable terminal projection. The waiter scuttles from his hole in the wall, begging forgiveness.
-A new one! A new one for Mister Fontaine! Clapping his hands together, playing the waiter. Sorry. Sorry, Monsieur! He takes the bowl back to his hole in the wall.
-I don’t know why we come here, Jean says flicking ant limbs, blood and guts off his thumb. This is a bloody awful place.
Marcel brushes his finger around the top of his glass and sighs.
-You do realize you would have been better off with the ladybird.
-What do you mean! I’m not eating ladybird soup!
-We come here every day, more or less, and every day you abuse the waiter. Don’t be surprised if little aliens are found invading your fucking soup is all.
-Ridiculous! this place is infested!
Jean crashes his fist on the head of another ant just before it can crawl to the underside of the table. Marcel jumps and fumbles with his glass of wine… eventually it drops.
-Shit.
Marcel fishes between his legs and manages to retrieve the glass and put it back on the table. Jean rolls his eyes, swings around on his chair and stares out of the window: the air is sweet and tangible.
Outside spills through the sash-window, lighting up the restaurant’s organs, sweeping all the broken little shadows away under their feet. A crooked tree dies on the side of the road where passers by are dying likewise. Salmon blossoms cough on coho clumps of crumbling pebble dash. The afternoon paints the white walls melancholy. Jean snorts, slyly snakes his eyes over the room like a blanket of contempt and gobs on the floor.
-No, no, Monsieur Fontaine, please not on the carpet. The waiter crawls on his hands and knees, scrubbing the carpet with his cuff. Please, out of the window, Monsieur, the waiter says twisting his head upwards like some ghoulish hell-thing.
-That’s enough, Jean flaps his hands over the waiter and shoos him back to his hole. He wants me to gob out the window. Did you hear that, Prousty boy, out the window of all places.
Marcel raises an eyebrow at Jean’s reincarnated soup: “Better out the window,” he thinks.
Jean slumps off his chair and slinks over to the source of his ponderings, opens the window, coughs and spits onto the street. He leans his elbows on the sill, dangling his hands through the fresh air.
-Why do we come here Marcel? What happened? When did we become so… miserable?

Musca Domestica – revolting, waiting to suck on my mortal remains. From maggot to fly, from fly to maggot. Nothing more alien than the fly and no fly more alien than Calliphora dormitories: the very symbol of insanity. Rattling its broken back against the glass, manically chasing about the place aimless and violent like the unpredictable loonies in the asylum. Of course, the fear the bluebottle is the fear of being overcome or drowned in the world. The chaos of the blowfly exposes our impotent grip on reality; or, more accurately, its chaos expose reality’s impotent grip on us.

Jean violently claps his hands together in front of his face: “missed!”
-Where’s Pierre? Marcel asks. I haven’t seen him for days.
-Check the gutters; usually drunk there, Jean answers, strolling back to his chair and deflating all over it.
Marcel rolls the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows revealing small indecipherable patterns framed by tiny rectangles expanding and contracting as he fidgets to get comfortable: “he bears all his grudges with a thousand tiny stabs of black smudges.” He methodically, mathematically, gradually, eventually, takes the straw hat from his head and places it on the table.
-He musta kept that hat on for days; slept in it if I’m not mistaken, Queen Jane says in her black and white cinema tone of looking as she sticks the bar with her pointy elbows. That fella sure makes good poems with his hair, she stretches a shattered, crenulated, smile from ear to ear.
-Ignore her. You look… BUGGER! Jean leaps up. We must leave right away.
Marcel flashes a distasteful glance at his empty glass and groans in the back of his throat. Needing no further reason or explanation he shoves his head back into his hat, his chair making Morse code as he stands and follows Jean out of the stain glassed exit: the entrance to the world.
-Your wine monsieur! The waiter runs to the door. Your wine!
-Offer it up to the gods! Jean sings back.

We held hands and she laid her head on my shoulder. I kissed her mouth and scribbled some sad word onto her face with my finger which she mistakenly took as a compliment. 

There, outside of her outside of “o me o my,” I took a knife to the cartesian circle.

-Help me cut through this thing… this simple little thing.

She couldn’t do it, but my, she sure is pretty.

Katherine sat fat goat-heeled with incredible legs stretched out on the floor. The things she reflected were dead things, dead things from small panoptic eye. She looked through lank strings of dark wet hair… looked through blood flesh and bone… through being and nothingness. 

Gargled and punched out she hung ideas on the periphery of normality, picked out all the heroic bits from the Iliad and gathered the strength to get up. She tip toed across the blade, red, mirrored and overcautious, with cat limbs; she slunk water and bloody reservoir down into a soft fleshy chair. 

Beyond conceptions and out of the window she wrapped up the green sky with nostalgic and formless orgasm.

-am i as i factorial… am i!

I get inside her mouth with rats and worms… rot her from the inside out and the outside in… we decide to piss on each other… ah, isn’t love a beautiful thing…

A thousand tiny communists pour out of the maternal hole; but one, one single enterprising capitalist, drunk and doped on self-satisfaction, has found gallons and gallons of ‘me-time’ in the tiny ecstatic moments of consumer oblivion. I should like to get that one, that little yum-yummer stuck still atop the sugar cube, open him up and take a look at his workings, find the broken wheel or cog and set him right.

                Flames are licking the green aefnung licking at the screams and the yells and the mournful cries to God to Lucifer to mOthers and fathers to children to Jesus to tables and chairs; to brothers to sisters to monsters to angels to fate and to freedom to paths and to pathos to light to darkness to life and to death. All of us strangers on the outside; all of us stranger still on the in.

                Poor ol’ Jan. Ol’ Janny-jan. Ol’ Ylang-ylang. A touch uppish, in his youth, so I’m told; a touch nose in the airish, cock of the walkish, until one day, suddenly all of a sudden, he went barking, stark-staring mad. O poor ol’ Ylang-ylang, he was locked up a trillion trillion miles from here in a madhouse on the surface of the sun; he would cry and howl at the moon for years and years and years, until, one fine pinpoint razor-sharp day, amidst the floo and the flutter of loony tunies sing singing for their supper, he had it away on his toes. A virtual shipwreck when I found him; a virtual roman ruin.

                We must leave soon – immediately! There will only be more of them outside later on, and if Janny-boy is scared now he for sure will be terrified later. Where is that tin hat? Where o where is that tinny tin hat, protector of the thought organ?

                Eyes, unwilling to look-for – eyes, falling back lazily to the army of reds waving along the skirting board. Poor lytel hedonist. No more drone droning for that one. Misplaced lytel libertine, feasting on his own freedom, will stew and be boiled in his own self-satisfaction; will rot away, rot, rot, rot, away!

                -Where is that damn hat?

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 forces.
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 flint 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 thought can slide off it in all directions.
How on earth does this sorry little stan 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, and three and four…  and 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.