— Mona, Mona, hold on tight. And down we went, again, against the mountains and the cushions, against the death, there.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
There, in the mountains.
— There, again, the record’s scratched.
— There, again, in the mountains.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
— What does it mean?
— Where you feel freeeee.
— I didn’t know she spoke German.
— She butchers it.
— She knows more than you.
— How can you say Paco Pepe doesn’t know German if he is a philosopher? He did his doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche.
— How’s his accent?
— Undetectable.
— Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
— What does that mean?
— I already told you: there, where you feel free. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee.
— Did you see a lot of things?
— Yes, thank you very much, many bright things whirling, wild and open in a rollercoaster.
— With a shower of rain, we stopped in the colonnade.
— I never liked Eliot. So unsensual, unappealing, repressed. I mean, being in the closet is all right, if you come out, someday. But he never came out. And then he wrote:
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
Burning
He really was burned — repressed — and that’s why he says: O Lord, Thou pluckest me out.
— What does pluckest mean?
— O Lord, why are you plucking me? He plucked religion because the Lord plucked him. His sexual desire was so repressed that the Lord plucked all of his plumes. Plucking a poet’s plumes is like plucking a vampire’s fangs. Or a witch’s broomstick.
— I would have never written:
— Do I dare to eat a peach? Shall I part my hair in the middle?
I would have eaten the peach. I have eaten plenty. And why is it so difficult to part your hair in the middle? Nervous nellie, scaredy-cat, pussy cat.
— O Lord thou pluckest meeoowt.
— Meowt. O Lord thou pluckest meeoowt. O Lord, you’re plucking me out of the closet.
— She doesn’t understand anything. She’s like my aunt. I asked her what “son of a bitch” meant.
— Son of a beach, she explained, are Americans whores who come to Puerto Rico and have sex on the beach, and their bastards are called son of a beach.
— Now, I really understand. I’m really plucking the meanings like daisy petals.
he loves me, he loves me not
he loves me, he loves me
— O Lord Thou pluckest me out.
Burning burning burning burning
— I figured it all out. I seduced Jabalí with this poem. With it, I’m now going to conquer the world. You see, want some more? Well, help yourself. How many orgasms does it take to make you happy? What they usually do is excite your desire and your longings. If I had it once, I want to have it a thousandfold. More, more, more — you have to give more, more infinitely more, more to a thousand platitudes, nothing is there where more is, except your desire to give more, or a greedy, greedy feeling, that can never stop, once it emerges, a little bit, a tiny-weenie little bit, it starts complaining and whining, it becomes unbearable, you don’t know what you want, but you certainly know you want more, more, more. I know what I want. I want more, more, more.
— A quarter to the left, first panel, a quarter to the left, 2nd panel, a quarter to the left, 3rd panel, a quarter to the left 4th panel. And then, all of them at the same time, a quarter to the right. And there you have it: musical fugue.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
— You speak German too? I’m impressed.
— Nah, I memorized it. The first time I heard it, it felt like a tempest, and I walked naked through the midst of the storm. This poem will be part of my life. I closed my eyes and memorized it, recovering my desires and long lost past.
Wandering solitudes resting on my breast
Dolls posing on my palms
Dancing are the dead,
Singing beautiful psalms.
The dead, those friends of mine who wrote on yellow pages. Meaningful words that make you understand the magic words:
Abracadabra. Open sesame.
Keep your mouth shut if you don’t know what you’re talking about. And don’t cross the street if the light is red. But how can I remain silent saying what I feel even though the feeling I give may be different to what I wish it had and to what people say it has. I keep telling myself: I’m not mad. I’m lucid. To hell with the truth. A fit of despair could drive a person to shoot himself. Or fall into Jabalí’s traps.
— Here, said he, is your card.
— Did you take it?
— Of course I did. Look. He fooled me. I believed that those were pearls that were his eyes. I had a terrible cold. Now I cough like I have done all the way up to here. The cough I hear when I cough is a thunderbolt. A snowball. And the phlegm. It clears my throat to cough.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant,
had a bad cold.
So you can imagine how her voice sounded.
Nevertheless
is known to be the wisest woman in Europe
with a wicked pack of cards.
She’s a witch, don’t you see, she could be one of the witches in Macbeth.
Double Double Cauldron Trouble
Trouble is bubbling. Watch out. The witches of Oz, and Jabalí is roaring his throat, ahem:
With a wicked pack of cards.
— So, why did you succumb to the cough, or to the wicked deck of cards, when they were shuffled, you should have known, what they meant, when she said:
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
That’s you, my darling. She was beckoning you.
— Don’t point at me.
— It was fire that she wanted.
— And fire she got.
— Fire, Mona, fire.
— Doubled the flames of seven branched candelabra.
— And I was demented. The wicked pack of cards continued shuffling.
Here, is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel.
That drove me nuts. To hear that the wheel was roaring its klaxons. Blowing its horn. Oh, my God, what do I do now? How can I survive this devastation of my whole being? Where am I going to be tomorrow? How can I prove my point if I have no point? Not that I had a point before. But at least, you know what I mean, I knew where I was going. How much longer will I have to suffer the consequences? What you did to so-and-so still resonates in my contradiction. Maybe I’m just some critter feeding off a vegetable like you, but you didn’t contradict me when I said it — you didn’t object with your own contradiction — my reply flew by our daily bread without a single objection until it stopped here, where they objected with all sorts of ifs and buts — but your contradiction resounded like a bullhorn in a diaphragm of sounds — in your reply was all the bicker and bite that’s been hounding me ever since. I don’t want to know anything about you. But by not wanting to know anything about you, I’m denying myself a part of me that is yours, yours alone, and that’s buried in the depths of my ignorance. I’m leaving. How can I leave my melancholy behind? You say nurture what grows outward and bury what grows inward. And what’s already buried — I ask myself — is it dead or just buried because I don’t want to see it — I throw dirt on it so it will die once and for all — but it keeps throbbing like a heart in love and beating sublime notes and even though it’s buried because I didn’t want it to show, it grumbled, groaned, pushed up a mountain and erupted with all the might and glory of a volcano. I’ve tried to kill you by burying you alive, and for a while there I stopped thinking about you because I thought you were dead. You had left me in complete darkness, with no trace of those white lights circling the halo or the crown of laurels on my head — no traces of them or those names that used to possess me. Then idle fame came, which always comes when adjectives feel emptiest, and without a sound it pointed out my name. And then you came back with a nobler name to sit on my name and to name me with other names and addresses. I want you to know I never left you. I always saved a place for your name in case you ever wanted to possess me again, and I’m sure that after possessing them the way you possessed me, you were thinking of possessing me again the way you possessed them because having possessed them after having left me, you would possess them with my emptiness, and then me, with all their winds and memories. And now that you settle me, possess me, point me out with five fingers, and kiss me with five mouths like fish, you won’t leave me, not even for a second, and I don’t mind having you around because I like to take what you say and write it my own way, interpreting it in the style and shape you give it. Oh, let’s stop idealizing and romanticizing. It would’ve been nice to know where you were, and how you got in, and whether it was me who threw you out of the house, of course it was me because I was sick ’n tired of being misunderstood, of being told I might as well be speaking Chinese when I write. I wanted to make sense. I wanted to feel the common denominator. You never really left me. You acted as if you were gone and made me feel your absence. Oh boy, did I feel abandoned. Some people think you’re too subjective — and that’s why they bury you alive — to see if you’ll die of grief and leave. And some even say you’re bad luck. But to me, you’re the greatest woman alive, the most beautiful man of all, you’re my poetry. You wake me up when I have to get up and put me to bed when I have to sleep. But you don’t give me what I want. You always give me something, but I can’t say what you give me because you don’t give me what I want. I don’t want what I want. I want what I want. I don’t know how to ask for what I want. I know I’m missing something — something is missing. I know there is a rocket packed like a pill — and no one is going to make me swallow that pill — it goes down the hatch like a rocket through space — I know where it’s supposed to go, but it’s lost in outer space — it lost its way without a trace, round and round the dial goes, where it’ll stop nobody knows, blasting past the speed of light, blasting sticks of dynamite, blasting away all the lies, burning them to crispy little fries in an itty-bitty vat of big fat lies — liar, liar, pants on fire — all your plots have gone haywire — all your schemes have backfired — tumbling into the quagmire of a bottomless pit, without a backbone, sounds of the hounds of the tongue, and the lochs of the tongue, empty, full, rife with life — so to speak — with a couple of kisses on the forehead and one on the cheek, which makes three altogether leading to four, a kiss on the behind, the cheek backdoor, where a blast of cold water up the ass knocks a couple of men flat on their ass, flat, but not dead because they live for the blast of ten shots of sherry down the hatch, galloping faster and faster with Rocinante and Clarín, the court jester and the king of laughter, at last, I say nothing against the here-ever-after — I want to laugh until I cry and my tears run dry because my tears are the same whether I laugh or cry, but my words are different every time I fall on my ass and write from behind, frontward or backward, left or right, all that matters is how you did it and whether it did it right and whether it ever reached the tip-top or the rock bottom, assuming that there was rock at the bottom, maybe there was nothing at the bottom, maybe all the bottoms were falling for nothing because there was nothing to fall for — they were free-falling over nothing and they were to free to fall freely into this free-for-all — all for nothing — and some of them thought they’d eventually get to the bottom of it if they keep plunging deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit where there was nothing to fall on except their asses and their faces — they’re up to their asses and faces in bottomless pits and they’re squealing with laughter as they come tumbling down like cartoons from the stars and they’re laughing at those twinkle, twinkle, little stars, flickering like swarms of fireflies, like little diamonds in the sky and they’re magically turning shitgreen like hotshit, I swear I was falling on my ass in this bottomless pit of jinglebells and dingle-berries when suddenly I flipped back over, or onto my right side, it doesn’t really matter which side because the right is to the left of the right where the left is writing what the right was just saying because both sides are falling on their asses at the same time because they’re both writing with the same tongue, left or right, against the grain of Christianity, backwards, I swear I was falling on my ass, when suddenly I pulled a tongue out of my ass, as if my ass had a tongue to thrust in and out, thrusting in and out where my ass kept falling on its ass, it kept thrusting in and out, in and out, forwards and backwards, faster and faster — first one there wins the race — last one there’s a rotten egg!