I tHE mONKFISH I*

I am a not so skillful skill-saw, tongue and groove, a monkfish with cloudy sebaceous eyes. A lung-sac; I am anemic and sickly. I am all of these yet none of these, none of them or that or this. I am a distended gallbladder, a cheap simulacra of a simulacrum. I am Plato’s dugout candling my way deeper into the rectos of philosophical perdition. I am gunmetal blue, somehow bluer. I am a scalawag and a cheapskate; a switch of Joshua used for caning and scolding mistakes in logic and new math. I am a colophon and a curlicue. I am the tattered hem on the scurf of a whoopla’s dress. Most of all I am postmodernity taken to the nth power, or to L or Q or 5. I am unreasonableness and bad manners, tuber-root and famine. I am Godot’s tree and (Stephen) Dedalus’ minaret. I am Hemingway’s retch and Fitzgerald’s sanguine eyes. I am pancreatic sarcoma. I am the gyp that clods the soft tissue in between your toes, the hangnail that scratches your face when you take off your shirt, the poltroon cement in the tiles of your soaking-tub. I am New Math and Old English, Chilean milt cloth and Sunbelt ecru. I am quite tired (more so exhausted) and must find sleep before wakefulness finds me. I am the castrate (O) with the tonsure bare head and mill-hooves and mead. I cannot go on, I will go on, yes, I said yes, I will yes…