spookfest 2004

(on the spookiness scale, this is a 7)

You asked friends what books you should read; they said 'all of them'--but lucky thing you decided against omniscience.

Crackle-leafy and dry like a Tuscany bread loaf, I munched silently on the underwear on top of my armpits. I likened onion buns to the leftover disciples of the modern age, and the reactionary drivel was no good; the total despicable mess I was in. I was destroyed in so many ways today; I was torn apart from the insides, it was an elision of aesthetics into a heterogeneous paragraph.

I hemmed and hurried through the porticoed city, and the cheese-shop owners were up at 5 am mounting wares on wicker tables just sprayed down by illegal immigrants toting bottles of disinfectant, annulling bacteriological threats of rotting wood and rendering the flesh safe and sound and in compliance with all the proper federal health regulations recently enacted under state by-laws.

Yellow to the core, a coward at the base, the evil shirking he performed, passing weapons of mistrust on the way to heaven. I flew to New Zealand just to shake hands with my saviour. I flew all the way to the outlands to hear what he had to say. I stepped out of the plane into the windswept balm of New South Wales.

You were toasted, left to die inside an oven, a boy burned to a crisp for no reason except hate. But hate is good enough reason for many; it is part of what makes us human, and sad you can’t eradicate hatred as surely as you cannot defeat love.

Evanescent and delighting in truth about words we speak, he sounded forth like hosanna, the choir resounding on the balcony above. The architecture of his mind was a masterpiece but the tall women, lacking in joy and full of a cold beauty, they surrounded, despised and shamed him into obedience.

Haranguing the masses at the edge of the cliff, tipping the cow despite its lowing, as the figure eight is fit for showing. Lords and ladies trip over wires, explode in time, undress along the Thames; the latin poet of the great first-century BC passion, he spoke of love and hate with breathtaking parsimony.

Cutting the ribbon at a suburban mall, we call Saint Paul over to bless the sidewalk; he comes down from the Lord’s right hand, and we claim heaven sends angel-men to better the ends of humanity. In certainty we exult, quelling revolts that threaten the agri cult. In the distant eaves of a locust tree there are men who clamber and cut out the thrown river of sin and the women, swimming out there in a cesspool of duress. We are the cancer we cannot cure.

Every day is an ocean of uncharted depths. Every whisper is the untold story of the hidden people. Speak we in a soft tone. Cast into darkness for impiety, we lack homogeneity and are derided by experts at every changing of the season. But we speak in a soft tone.