The identification of “the one severed bard-head” with Ike himself is persistent and completely understandable. Of course, one can hear in the cacophonous buzz that emanates from Ike’s head an echo — an analogue — of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s enigmatic dictum “the myths think themselves in me.” Also, the bards’ recitations are garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible. Ike’s continuous self-narration is garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible. They are analogous. But are they one and the same? Isn’t Ike’s self-narration (and, of course, this very speculation, these very sentences) instantly and retroactively incorporated into the epic The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and dutifully transmitted from generation to generation of chanting, drug-addled, blind “severed bard-heads” who maintain their trance-inducing beat by banging their chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda? An infinitely recursive epic that subtends and engulfs everything about it (i.e., everything extrinsic to it), and that has, for tens of thousands of years, at any given moment, been subject to the impish and sometimes spiteful corruptions and interpolations (or the out-and-out sabotage) of XOXO, presents a phenomenon that’s difficult to get your mind around. The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head
REAL HUSBAND
He abhors celebrity
And yet covets immortality.
What is the meaning of the paradox?
What are its latent properties?
REAL WIFE
These portions can seem hopelessly corrupt.
XOXO is winning the battle to ruin the book,
But he hasn’t won the war.
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
I’m a severed bard-head!
I can’t stop reciting what I started!
This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!
Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
When you need one!
REAL HUSBAND
Some scholars have recently compared
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack to Abacus 2007-AC1,
The mortgage investment vehicle which
Goldman Sachs VP Fabrice Tourre created.
REAL WIFE
And which he described,
In an e-mail to his girlfriend,
As a “Frankenstein” creation,
“A product of pure intellectual masturbation,
The type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,”
Which has no purpose,
Which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’”
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
I’m a severed bard-head!
I can’t stop reciting what I started!
This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!
Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
When you need one!
REAL HUSBAND
“Going into the forest to gather wild garlic”
Is a euphemism for those times
When Ike stares off into space,
Listening to the voice of a particular
God who’s speaking to him.
REAL WIFE
Or when he thinks
The writhing Goddesses are
Ogling him and masturbating,
Or when he thinks he hears
The distant whine of a
Drone aircraft circling overhead.
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
I’m a severed bard-head!
I can’t stop reciting what I started!
This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!
Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
When you need one!
REAL HUSBAND
Ike had a dream about La Felina.
There was something dangling from her snatch.
At first Ike thought it was a tampon string,
But as he came closer
He could see that it was a fortune.
REAL WIFE
He pulled it out and read it.
It said, “To propitiate XOXO,