Friday, January 05, 2007

Tropic of Parasite

Efra deloused Caulker with a wire brush and a bottle of Jives, wrapped him in swaddling cloth and laid him to bed. He pulled the bed linen over his head, tucking in the corners to ensure a good swaddle and sleeve. A jaundice moon cowered the sky, a no-man’s-land, the tropic of parasite; shit sandwiches and false rumours and Efra lost in the vacancy of his thoughts, his hat pulled down over his eyes, two black diamonds cut in halves, and Caulker wrapped in swaddling, Jives and tuck, a gibbous moon sick with junk.

Green is the colour of Absinthe and wormwood, crème de menthe and Chartreuse; a leg rankle with gonorrhoeal pirouettes, syphilitic with fester and blain, gangrene green.

I am tired; I have not been this tired since my expulsion from the parturition hole some forty-eight years ago, February 27th to be exact (which I seldom am). And the doctor masked in green linens, spectacles taped to the bridge of his nose, forcing the speculum into the ovum hatch, me skimming like an otter down the birthing canal arms flailing for dear life. Perhaps this is when the compulsions started, the origin of their unmasking. Afloat in the clemency of the amniotic sac, fingers gripping the umbilicus I felt an ease and comfort that has thereafter eluded me; a foetal oneness, a meta-ontological parity, a oneness with self and other. I can count on nothing but logarithms and integers, vectors and fractions, into’s and out-of’s, pluses and minuses, algebraic nonsense (all of it).

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz