MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND

Goldbarg’s Variants

§ 9.

Such fun rage when he’s mad! The fun word squints in his face, yet in his mind there gallops an absurd chimera of —

How would you know what grilled word would spook the roasted centaur of my smoke-filled soul? I blink, and the remembered embers rage.

And take a puzzling turn to drink at the puzzling trough of eternity. By which I mean that enigmatic gap between me and them.

That’s an interesting take — the intriguing relationship between self and other. I’d turn it around and say, rather, that eternity’s an appealing pinfold into which they, like so many amusing beasts, are compelled to stray, drawn by the attractive saltlick of I lodged here in the center —

Borne on reluctant legs, their timorous mouths bask in the unfamiliar richness of it. The cautious calf muscles tense, for in the delicious mineral taste of sin, semothing almost hostile dwells.

Shall I be your rhythmic sinner? Work my rhythmic mouth up from your rhythmic feet, along your rhythmic calves and thighs, and let it dwell there, between your rhythmic legs?

I’ve heard it said, though I can’t confirm its veracity, that in this, the body’s most private, yet at the same time most communal space, the whole terroir of being is so tightly packed into a single ripe drupe, that the bane of the bite will leave me insatiable for more.

Strange torments indeed.

Hard power guiding hard eyes to a horny body. Horny looks in hard faces.

Prudish looks in priggish faces. The prudish power to please a priggish person. The priggish power to guide prudish eyes to them.

Racy me and quiet you raving quietly through the strangely quiet sandy forest.

Strangely passive: feet, sand, forest, you. Passive and strange.

Solitary valor of the solitary city. Solitary courtesy denies it.

The exhumed city denies such valor. Exhumed courtesy.

What a glorious time we might have had in the glorious mud of that glorious swamp! What a miserable time we made sure to have in the miserable mud of that miserable swamp!

Yes, you might have been pristine in that moldy swamp, one moldy time when the mud was pristine, and we were pristine, but for moldy moldy me.

We shimmy and shake among the high adepts of the high cloister. From this highest point of Melos e Artes, the high frantic poignant view of harbor, sea, and city.

Excited man o’ war gin goons, frenzied lay brethren of the fermented grain, sea-faring adepts of the epileptogenic fruit. Excited view, excited sanctum in the spasmodic bustle of Melos e Artes.

Rocking privilege to wrap that lovely rocking stole around one’s throat.

That shriveled stole around their shriveled throats? Love must have shriveled your senses. To see something sidereal in such a shriveled stole!

They wound him. Our guide tarries. Abrupt delay, abrupt wound. What pluck!

They make a social delay out of it, what otherwise might have been solemn. Pluck indeed! Social guide, solemn wound. Social wound, solemn guide.

Like a slack whip scouring the flanks of a gaunt dray horse, the lanky train strikes through the gates of the lank suspension bridge, and we hurtle across to the lanky other side.

Black train whips along across the white bridge. Jackstays flash past on both sides of us, cabin lights reveal alternating bands of white and black, bridge and night.

Funny way of funny faith. Funny entrance as a funny confirmation of funny salvation. Funny living vessel of the funny elect.

The ways of any living faith, no matter how funny, are psychical. The entrance is psychical, and the psychical elect’s living vessel of salvation is a psychical confirmation of —

Nonsense. We pity him as we would any animate friend struck by vital misfortune. And recite some sentimental mumbo-jumbo invoking quick peace, o sensitive king of the biocosmic pleroma, o receptive ruler of the zeozoëtic universe!

Generally, we conceive of misfortune in so catholic a sense that the general pity we feel for our common friends matters no more to us than the generic lord’s universal peace, whether mundane, sublunary, cosmic, or, indeed, universally spiritual.

The strong scorpion constrains its temper at the strong point between strong tail and strong forked claws. A strong hard void of balance, quickness, power.

Though a mere concept tethered to no empirical reality, I’ll accept that the ideal void might temper itself according to some ideal point of poise and action, intangibly pulsating on the ideal scorpion’s abdomen located at some medial position equidistant from its ideal chelae and its ideal aculeate telson.

Moéu’s mother’s father, evidently, was the son, or noäu in Huerta-Fukari, of a master ninsrata, which evidently means “stalker of the lazy geese.” She grew up in the evident shadow of the island’s main moanzy aerie. Though you wouldn’t know from looking at her.

Splendid! Splendid!

Hateful you makes light of despised me. Malevolent breathy sighs of malicious pity malign your bilious blood.

You’re nervous and I’m nervous. Your breaths are nervous, my pity’s nervous. How lighten the nervous burden of this bad blood?

Sad litanies of a sad people in this salubrious valley. Truly a sane pace is sanctuary from a sad world.

Hypnotic people in an all too human world. The human pace of the hymeneal litanies in this human valley is truly hypnotic.

Sans any feel at all for the sawdust epoch at our feet, he tramples the sawdust share of it my ancestors bequeathed me as a sort of, well, sawdust, filling the cracks of the present, soaking up the incontinent flux of the future.

In arid times a humid portion for those humid progenitors of the arid void of perception.

Did you tear off her skirt like you did mine — oh, the brutal haute coupure of it! — when one of those quaint ladies — and kinky I bayed undying! — swooned on hearing your quaint verse? — “ani y du,” ink by dyke of yore I glom, “im hollow Herzmilah vengan nos corps muets, although mi glossa ist echt kaput!” Or did you, in the quaint words of our author, simply stroke her tariff and fist her freak toroidal antenatal oinkus?

You mean her nulliparous oidos cum oikos? In any case, je n’y narre ni révèle rien — nary a word more on the topic, internal, quaint, or otherwise.

A religious throng circumambulating a pile of religious stones at the riparian extremity of hate.

Double, or concentric, circles of religiosity, in fact, of an intensity bordering almost on hate, the inner throng doubling back on the outer, yet forming a continuous, opposite-flowing vortex on the rocky riverbank.

This secular hell orbits clean around me, my own secular gyrations form the greased hub of your attention, of his, of her.

Me? I’m silent. Turning silently round and round the tight sleek silent lustrous hell of her body.

I’m a tall person, moving like a tall flame in this tall world. Answer my tall vibrating movements, why don’t you!

I cotton to your soft and fluffy shakes, lady. A cotton flame that flares and rushes into the personal vacuum of its extinction out of this rotating cotton-ball world.

With an inmost frisson as of palm leaves rustling to an inner current of moist heat, I involve my intricate mantle of intimate space, my sylvan bop-cleft of inveterate inveiglement, with this intransigent man’s —

Some inordinate odd number of palmwidths’ deep, it seems, I intromit my undulant manhood into this obdurate odalisque’s œdematous place of frissons frousses frémissements, firing my fancy bolt’s pelvic missile into the Olduvai Gorge of her Velpeau’s fossa, her magnificent obductive lap’s worth of mantled Ordovician slug muscle —

Are you ready, world? My heart is ready, my mind is ready, this image of you and me, and me and you, together, ready, is ready — now, now, now!

In the standing memory-image ot it, time, the world, my heart, and you, are standing still, and time again is standing still.

The large-barred claws of these lazy geese, and cold and real, grab us — back to cold work.

Work, for us, is understood, my lascivious lazy goose. Its propensity to barge larcenously into any occasion, a splinter ever under the nail of pleasure’s grip. . .

Paradoxical feet. Paradoxical speech. Paradoxical air.

Curried feet. Curried speech. Curried air.

Yawning departure for a yawning shore. Who, I ask, his pluck undaunted? Your brother Aran, yawning, strong, unrobed.

He’d neither stay and pluck from that amazed crack in fertile Tron’s Ground, nor go, nor turn sand into song, nor truth into some amazed traducement of rivalité, fraternité, partialité.

Don’t you want to write a big sprawling épopée romantique (ER) that would find some big literary means to bridge the big years from your mythical ancestral Gauro-Bothnian girtablullu and how cette grande horde dépaysée sired by ditto eventually found its big way to le Département de Wyoming Indigène (DWI) there to interbreed with another big tribe (gir berek) who have a similar foundational myth involving a race of gigantic primitive scorpion-people!

That sounds more like a selfish roman interminable (RI) selfishly exalting the utterly selfish foundation of Trons Groun en WY (as we say it). I mean, the means that any people finds to bridge the years and the seas and the alien glebe from primal horde of hunter-gatherers to post-industrial plebocracy [sound techs (STX): insert big tribal ululation (hurlement de gir berek) here] serve selfish ends, i.e., survival. Perhaps roman self-serving (RSS) would be a better term for it.

But surely the mere fact of living has a certain pastel grace about it? Among all the pastel misery this perverse pastel universe we call God has inflicted on us — surely the pastel flame of burning life bespeaks something we might call — mercy, virtue?

Somewhere beneath the surface of misery the shy god lives, a shy flame of mercy burning in the cave of self.

Sobbing over the rambling circumlocutions, the divagations of wanton jottings anent this nonsense demanding I say “me” to the hand I see scribbling, “this is mine” to the wandering scratches stabs formicating photonic scat of the sciomantic dumbshow the minds slavers all over the whimsical quiddity of ontic immanence.

You’re starting to sound like me! Rational lament for the handmaiden’s intuitively reasonable notes re. the dispassionate ecstasy to be derived from the intelligent, perhaps even sensibly realistic, use of the hysteron proteron.

In the protrusive potamian device portending affect, thought, intent, eyes of some nonchalant color start to bulge and unseal themselves out of the insouciant necks of orbicular pouches. Hot glass eggs still weeping the oil that quenched them.

Separate qualms, indeed, do move my facial sigil. Nor would I deny that the labial sphincter sealing the neck of my buccal pouch displays an agnathic pout of disbelief. And, yes, mes yeux livides, écarquillés, do tear as if they’d rather abscise from their cranial stalks than endure their wounded optical amour propre.

They’ve mastered the merits of suppository baptism. The suppository portal of suppository faith.

Such detailed faith commands a detailed baptism, the detailed merits of which render control of the detailed gateway that much more effective.

A personal thicket of hate in the very center of the field on which the personal beasts of our contrary natures clash — dont aucun côté veut n’y céder rien.

The initial conception is an astral field in a thicket of night. The initial beasts, a conflation of predator and planet, their contrary natures being but the observed rotation in opposite directions of such asterisms as populate the northern versus the southern celestial poles, respectively. Thus do both gods and demons hate the light of day.