MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND

Goldbarg’s Variants

§ 5.

I love this political dawn. From the chambers of their political sleep, political children wake from dreams of political bread.

Having children is so arbitrary. They might move my heart, arbitrarily, in this arbitrary dawn sans bread. Go back to sleep.

An unsure world hates them. This unsure conflict between gain ill-gotten and loss undeserved. I’m unsure of my words.

Again with the old scuffle! Old words of hate. What world would you give to keep them from hating you?

As if a discordant god could clean all those discordant Theban circles off these discordant walls.

Or the fruitful hell of my own fruitful spirit sweep clean the fruitful walls of fruitful Thebes.

Prepared limbs induce a paunchy waddle. The swollen face, also prepared in advance, pivots with a humorous dropsical motion.

Long face, long limbs, long torso. The turgid languid movements of a long humor.

Life’s about slicking back your hair and making a slick cask, flagon, firkin, gallipot, or keg of it. As much about forking it out as drinking it in. No joking.

Are you joking? Flunking out of ISOCPHYS might have amused that guy you were stalking, but I’m all for junking this frankly amusing theme and jaywalking right across your amused mocking of my drinking problem.

Some other confused time its confused front might have endured the confused weight of it.

Such a sad time it must have of it, hanging its sad head beneath the sad burden.

Wonderful piercings everywhere. A wonderful bonfire on the wonderful banks. Wonderful art. Wonderful torches piercing the pitch black gaps between the trees.

Pitching a ten is a simple art and can be done basically any and everywhere. Just avoid pine tar, river banks, piercing thorns and twigs. Build a simple fire. There, not here.

A golden cradle is a golden world in the golden center of which the child, voiceless with fear, reigns as if struck by a golden cramp in a sea of gold.

In another world across the radiant sea, a radiant country’s dysphonic dictator cranks out his radiant credo in a creaky voice breaking in the middle of his most radiant words.

Slow punches of the slow champions. Beating and grabbing, slowly, so as slowly to get the better of their rage.

Compassionate fists, you mean, from the vantage point of those compassionate champions’ fury. Within compassionate reach of their compassionate blows.

The clenched signal dying there in the clenched eye of the clenched little flame.

It would be supportive death. Another way to signal the supportive flame we see in each other’s supportive eyes.

Each other’s difficult eyes support a difficult reflection of what each of us perceives as a more difficult version of “me.”

The moral round socket props each moral eye in the moral echo of what each perceives as moral in the other.

Infinite eyes guide you to that infinite relationship between what you are and what you’re called.

So you’re convinced that someone is convinced that there’s a convincing relationship between act and name?

I’m convinced that our guide’s eyes were —

It’s too early to dwell on him. After all, I didn’t live anywhere near his early hook or claw.

I, for one, am steamed. Don’t dwell on your steamed-up neighbor, you say? That steamed hook of a hand with its steamed nails against your skin — I can’t help but dwell on it!

All those slack-hung faces in the space between castle and ledge on the side of that slack-hung mountain.

I see our pragmatic author as a multitude of pragmatic foreheads repeating themselves in the pragmatic spandrels of a pragmatic chateau on the pragmatic flanks of a pragmatic mountain range.

The bells of the Sagradu have just struck four in the morning.

I think there’s an almost astrological power in those liminal pronouncements of yours that seem to skirt the astrological limit of what’s tenable and original about our task.

I must admit that our undertaking is a bit vague. But the outlines of even the mightiest of starts are often vague.

Strange how the world can be so boring at times. The air is boring. The animals are boring. Our blood is boring. We are boring.

We are weak creatures with blood too weak to imbibe this weak air. The world is strange.

I won’t deny that the soul of him opposite me stirs an opposite something — a spark, a flash, an undeniably luscious star — in my own soul opposite his that makes me want to —

Don’t deny our common soul, our common star. Stay with me.

The round voice of a round poet might cast a round shadow around me.

Possibly. But I don’t really know what’s causative about the shadow — but I think you might mean timbre, right? — of that poet’s voice.

Familiar thoughts convulsing like twigs of a quaking plant overpower you.

The convulsive tropisms of that plant’s frozen twigs. Frozen thoughts overwhelm you.

Black fate loves this black place in this black city where we make black-boned love.

This city’s cheap. Making love is cheap. I love this cheap place, Château Methuen. I love her cheap bones and the cheap chance to love her.

Can you pluck with red eloquence the red lands of my birth?

Aesthetic speech is a form of pluck in any country, whether you were born there or not. In terms of aesthetics, I think you dropped a word or two.

Did you find it beautiful to get kissed hello by that beautiful little girl in the beautiful valley? The two of you looked so beautiful in the doorway of the beautiful little hotel we found near the beautiful mosque. Her father was beautiful too.

I’m not so sure the faithful would still find a real mosque behind the Ala Akbar Nod’s electronic façade. Though since you insist on it, that glimpse I caught of the budding valley of flesh nodding between shawl and shadow was, I found, as electric as the neon flash. But the rehearsed bliss of her posed bisous was so artificial as to seem, well, electronic. Just like the albergo run by her father.

The way stupid neighbors have of making a living through violence and extortion will result, first in stupid wounds, next in stupid ruin, and eventually, in stupid death. I say burn down the whole stupid neighborhood.

It’s not he who lights the fire who profits from arson, but rather that surprising neighbor whom the fear of death so surprises as to force him to make a living through violence and destruction. Injury and death are, not surprisingly, the toll that living levies on his surprisingly substantial life.

Nonsense. Weird people in a weird land. Weird pug lying in a puddle of weird blood.

Imaginary blood of that imaginary mopsi. Imagine what sort of person could have pushed pregnant Ada down the stairs.

Imagine our author as a puny blond slave inhabiting an imaginary world of nonsense.

I want to suck you till you’re as rock-hard as a howling mastiff, then temper that fury with my rock-hard teeth, there, and there, and there. Rock-hard mountain of my mastiff-man. Rock-hard volcano losing all control in the vortex of my mouth.

“Verhy guyd,” said the grammatical vicar through his grammatical teeth in his grammatical vicarage high up near that moanzy aerie on the mountain top where somewhere a jackhammer was pulsing grammatically and two bull mastiffs were going at it with unchecked, though grammatical, rage. “Verhy guyd.”

I’m here, master, in your navigational sight which gets me so navigationally horny by navigational day and navigational night.

Night is a critical time for me, consisting as it does of a critical refinement of what your navigational sight deems “horny” and what the critical day of my own critical sight regards as mastery of the critically “here.”

Marital margins light the banks of the marital river. Marital water reflects the marital light. Marital smoke, marital fire, marital unity.

In light of the external unity of smoke and fire, the river’s banks are the external margins of the water’s external light.

A life enraged by the invisible cupidity of eternity.

Eternally globular life seethes with globular greed.

Our way charts a bitter route through the bitter talus.

An originary route at the base of the originary cliff.

I heart the queer frog who hearts queer me.

A frog’s heart has one less chamber than ours. It’s hereditary.

Are you the black one with the western eyes?

No, I’m the western one with the black eyes.

Are you the western one with the black eyes?

No, I’m the black one with the western eyes.

Periodic things have power. That power has the potential periodically to harm others.

That’s an essentialist thing to say. The power of evil is potential and essentialist. Others have power.

Strange that he, atheistic, loves me so positively.

Positively strange that you, atheistic, love us.

They, atheistic, love positive them. Strange.

Deny that I’m your cunnilingual guide to this cunnilingual rump of this cunnilingual animal that’s cunnilingual me.

Cosmic haunch of a cosmic animal. I can’t deny you’re my cosmic guide.