Chet and also in this issue: Uncle Alphonse's Son and the Redemption Song.

Somewhere between his and her pillows between Chad and Chud lies Chet, and his propensity for presumed proficiency alternating with stupefication is the prevailing dirge of the world in its word:

I wandered the yard like a plastic grocery bag in the wind, and we could see, peering over the shoulder of the newly christened prow of spring, that the belated March gales had at least set upon us.

Chet the pet, as Uncle Alphonse would say after he had laid waste to the community's defenders of a gentlewoman's honor, "I got one more bullet in the gun" as he Saturday-morninged at the small engine, coming upon that last knight of decency unawares. Not even a Baptist preacher could level that kind of hurt, I tell you, as he whomped the man until he was literally too exhausted to swing on him again. His cousin Shingle held the pistol, Alphonse having said to shingle, "hold the pistol", and did the slow-walk into the weary face of the man he knew only on appearance, not a name. They may as have well have been lovers from the Mars Company Dance Hall, for all it was worth, giving each other physical examinations in the rear of a beater. "Hold the pistol", it was, "and I'll whip on this here upstanding Devil's Hat boy until I get tired."

He had urinated something the color of Fanta--reasons unknown, and it was, as we say, declining years, as if to say it was past his prime? or more aptly it was in the height of his pride, that he had no discernible prime whatsoever, only complaints that trailed the way home behind him, breadcrumbs the odd squirrel would get, such that Alphonse would never find his way back, not lost, but carving his own trail in the inexcrible light of his pride. It lit through making spider webs look like jewelry, making keyholes glow, giving a renewal in sepia to any that met its gentle beams, and kind of, as usual, f*cking with biscuits on my own pan.

And as it came to the popular line of talk, Ciclope had a son, which was just like a cake of sh*t flecking off a little piece, and it in a convenient towelette so you could pinch it, like a fallen potato chip, or hair follicle, and toss him in the garbage--I thought of the microfiber as its own after-use bag for easy disposal, sort of done-up like a mumbly of Egup. And it was, as the Baptist would have it, an emblem of one's shame; I remember counting a televangelists sexual misadventure in his pride, his enumerated offspring. What more than an illegal immigrant holding his for-sale bag of oranges for offering to motorists along Hairline Drive?

ballad of the one-legged poet

'sconce the longest reaches of a decade

rue over that lost alabaster leg of ivory

remarkable to the extent that truth be beauty,

beauty be truth, as the poet once said,

O I sing! the poet once said,

deserting the desert,

circling the lochs

marauds less upon the moors

circles less the glazing

'sang his gentle hour

strutted into the river of time

as it it was the gallant

the valiant offspring

carry that particle forward

for in much idiocy designs emerge

confusion, flux, the legend

of existence, facts in queue

of him, of his sired

sludged into the flux

din of the coffee can leg

in rue over his lost alabaster leg of ivory

and its been more than a decade,

two, in fact

slogged through deserts

compassed the lochs

circled the moors

and endlessly tries

and endlessly tries

on the sunrise side of Ostara.

My little brown cigars have a fiberglass barrier between myself, the divine, eternity, protecting each, preserving none.  It is in enmity that a complacent, peaceful oblivion fills the eternal void: a vacuum that surrounds us, compelling us, also wringing logic from the ether in order to create an artwork to be admired, and recognition not compulsory.  We admire the thing all the while though we be in frustration that it accepts no human reason: it is only an artwork to be admired. It is a thing to which we reference the term "existence".

My protagonist thusly reasoned this to himself, stupefied from the teleportation(it could be he stood to close, or yet hexed into forgetfulness) of a magician: a magician was in abeyance to his master, and that one's master in abeyance to his own master.  It was like climbing rose petals in hopes that in the nexus of those would be a central nugget.

One must be bigger than circumstances, not to outwit the whiles of existence, but to pierce the fog with the sword of the mind: inquiring realities exist congruently beneath the heavens. Ethereal effluvium that one might brush aside with the harsh glare of thought.

Fat Tuesday 2026

Were there no white people in heaven, or at least no Baptists, deer hunters or golfers, for the quasi-judaism of it permits no others: a heaven for Baptists with its exactitude and pageantry, and a “regular heaven” where one may choose his mayonnaise, everyone else. Meanwhile, Baptists sit holding at a stand still the swell of all humanity, from acknowledging things froward and beyond their peculiar Judaism.

And only their divination is given to the folds of cognition, with the Pauline gifts.

Why, a man could spend decades of his life studying a subject, but all for naught: baptists only listen to blue collar tradesmen and stock reports, but not in that order of import, for they would sack the blue collar for the sake of the stock market.

Why, a man could spend decades of his life studying a subject, but all for naught in the face of one who has contempt for education, but claims, perhaps to either private educate or home educate their children.

Why, a man could spend decades of his life studying a subject, one denial undoes so much good, one denial from those whose nascent memories are not good–

O to forget as they breath they sin, or is it as the non-members of them breath as they sin, or sin in every breath, as the Baptist quasi-Jewish deity angrily pitches waffle fries at very human indecencies, knowing provision of only sustenance and cursings ad infinitum.

Why do I descry in diatribe to deride one group’s free choice, and for the perverse sake of everyone else’s free choice? Is it recompense for the disillusion of their avenging of their angry, jealous God? Do I fuel a fire? Nay, I say, neigh. Those arbiters of everyone else’s choices, denied their free choice? Be it not for me to say.

Be it not for me to say.

Jesse Jackson kicked his football, or such was announced in the freshly lighted hours of the day: Fat Tuesday, a celebration to which I know not his esteemed opinion: be it bacchanal, reign of Dionysus, or freedom’s joyous singing, I know not.

Hell, them Baptists are rarely aware of God, anyway, when there are others, a scattered few, who know all is God, despite that the most wise of the Jews called all “nothingness”, and one of them wrote that he saw God’s literally personified ass.

The wanderer who does not belong slowly hand over heel climbs a radio tower.

Words of mythos, psychology, and sociology slice through the haze of a fog without a sea, myst without moisture, evening without day, morning without night, and of course, the always available facility of sight without mind or mind without sight, in their deadly tete-a-tete across a varying dreamscape.

It was Fat Tuesday.

Not that fat people needed a particular day: it seemed something of people’s reason, anyone, for one day, engorging and enlarging themselves among scintillating fares of liquor, expensive soul food, and the breastes of womans in the bold glowing street among streamers, yellers, dancers, debauchers, nervous policemen.

Through the hoar it seemed drowsy reflection of the fatigued, weary universe: the universe looked ahead, and based on our plaintive history, the chaos of present days, that universe may have been uncertain where to start first in all placement, ordering and assignations of the universe entropic. I wouldn’t want to either, and yet, was there a need of an organizing force, a super agent, and the scrawl of watercolor that I presumed my person:

It did not match my movements; it was something else, like reflections in a haunted house: moreso it moved its nub appendages, nubs all one could make out, as a nib of what could be a finger was too far into the gradient of a blank day to discern.

Any day suffices a fat person, suffering one’s guts a constancy of shame in its diet of opinions, perceptions, and always one’s loathing, of the thing not what they are, what they might see in a mirror, but what they believe of other’s opinions of themselves: breasts of woman, both the uncoiled society persons and reclining watchful unengaged savages.

From Frankfurt, Manassas looping through one side of Birmingham jail straight through to the other, bouncing off the Sierra Madre, seen by many and understood by none: balconies were for dictators, ticket holders, and the others were the fuck-all raindrops of God trying to drown mankind in a slow, sure oxidation, knowing full well, hateful old bastard, those in the coliseum had their twilight grottoes and seclusions without conclusions or intrusions of our polite institutions.

Tuesdays, for fat people, was only an excuse not to order from the menu.

One person’s Melchisedec could easily be another person’s idolatrous heathen divining weirdness from the skies.

 

gateway to spring.

"I came among these hill, when like a roe, I bounded over the mountains, by the sides of deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led..."

I and cousin Marie thought to sled the long and winding hill, but how all of nature flung the door wide on a prosperous spring, that year! We had trout and fries at the roadside, live music, and cold, bottle beer.

We volunteered to pick up litter on the roadside, in honor of our church, and declined the Crick-honoring roadside sign that would hold us to an ongoing promise. According to the standards of some, it was our springtime, each of us, but we both thought it really wasn't, that our clocks had gotten into time pretty well, then.

In youth's idiocy, we could claim a self righteous justification, in the church of ego, falling asleep with the bottle, the peculiar late teenage methods of breastfeeding, irresponsible motorcars as if we were Wind In the Willows,  but no longer was the way, as it was some dozen years into our legal adulthood. Where we were able, we behaved badly, there were no nuts stored in our knotholes. And then we felt the sting of time on our persons, "How To Write A Blackwood Article".

"Nature to me was all in all. The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, the mountain, and the deep, gloomy wood, their colors and their forms, were then to me an appetite: a feeling and a love, that had no need of a remoter charm, by thought supplied, or any interest unborrowed from the eye. {Such an age} is past, and all its aching joys are no more, and all its dizzy raptures."

"For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity, not harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue."

Animals That Wear Clothes find not a need of self-emptying upon the hour of his hopes, for such shall have neither consumption, nor ownership, but a protracted bliss of alignment, and upon himself, instead of in a falsetto, the sauce of his freedom and the curse of the future: 

"...he turned to me and heard my words, then he brought me from the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set me feet upon a rock, gave me securing footing and established my going. Into my mouth was put a new song, praise unto God, in hope that many shall see and in awe, respect, trust, swear allegiance, and keep steadfast in the truth of the Lord..."

Crag, fog, glade, and the former moonglow.

Curses as to which we are born, it is our best duty to tame, direct as of a swollen river, and in maturation, we might then stand upon a crag and look to the glade as masters of our own burdens(while the most insistent of muses bare onto stray ships their own millstones; "many are called; few are chosen"). To be industrious with our own possessions, our own inclinations, our own mistakes formed as of clay in our hands into something peculiar and beautious in a universe which provides a rather full menu of outcomes for the industrious, willful: to wit, "fortune favors the brave". Yet there are antiquated bridges and farmer's fields where the brave died to the last, and only now in retrospect might earth-bonded scribe recordations impute meaning to the memories rained upon the earth.

Moonglow onto snow did I see, a clarion celestial light of freedom with the questioning of such, a balm to my soul.

Presumptuous ungrateful animals that wear clothing, all powers of reason fixated on a conglomeration of the low drowsy moan in brutish satisfaction interbred with the beauty of a cool magic hour in the early splendor that amounts each together in an energetic myst or fog.

A voracious mind tends to ignore order and consume chaos. I read. Such as it was on the original steps into Thoreau, among the warming of the day, the light rising without and within my rooms as thought does challenge all perception and deception in regard to nature, brushing the far edges of eternity. A profusion of confusion, confusion about the extent axial points of the primary confusion, and the exercise purest, unbound contemplation.

February Eve(Imbolc)

We were in the belly button of one Winter Storm Gianna, with low temperature records sliding down her alabaster belly, and we too deep in hibernation ourselves to worship her beauty.

It was water's indolent night, the roadways erased in the land, called into blankness, and our stares were sleep-deprived, haggard, some annoyed, petulent and our wonder, our wonder.

"I have seen our river when the landscape being covered with snow, both snow and ice were almost green as grass. Some consider blue to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid, but looking directly into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be different colors. Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view." -Henry David Thoreau.