Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

34. AMONG THE THINGS I HAVE HERE:

Among things I have here are the following : a NEW way of putting things a new attitude about the who's and where's and what's of people and what they do a new storyline purporting to review this entire life a new view of the cosmos and the understanding of it a deeper insight into biblical lore and metaphor and the deceit and transference of all the mythology which has underpinned it all for two thousand years at least a new storyline about Jews and Jesus and their situations together a new viewpoint towards civilization and LASTLY NOT LEAST an entire and new sense of direction FOR I am a mime and I dart and weave I am an elder and I hear all the tribe's confession I am the scribe who writes their notes and I am the extra-terrestrial just visiting here.

33. IN AN INSTANT - REALLY!

Myopia extends to the ends of the waterline and after that point my vision gets blurry I can’t see a thing everything looks like a seaman’s watery fog the sky seems like butter and nothing has any dimension but none of these people would know that - sitting deliciously unawares of everything else as they chatter and eat and gaze out and speak and most of what they seek UNFORTUNATELY for the world around us is MORE more of everything more of it all – they want new homes the newest buildings the larger boat to get to the walkway from and then (I’d suppose) they’d want to cruise to the greatest vacation island they could find FOR IT’S ALL but pleasure in their mind and they haven’t yet reached the END of illusion in that NONE OF IT is theirs and none of it is real and they’re just swimming in muck drowning in foam lazing in their languid beer but none the worse for wear and with my eyes I practice a sight with my eyes I become my own William Tell and picture them falling (straight down to Hell?) in a monstrous commingling of fashion and grace and then IN AN INSTANT as profound as anything else William Blake himself pops up and starts saying something ‘Nobodaddy’ this or that I can’t remember understand nor even recall for that matter and as quickly as he came he’s gone and I’m left alone once more to struggle on the shoreline of some old and beating heart with questions and conundrums I can’t answer - how far to the promised land and how distant REALLY to eternity is it ? but silence is my tablecloth and a poverty is my cloak so I sit down at the water’s edge as if it were a moat to some land-locked wealthy castle I can’t reach.

32. GOD IS DEAD MOTHERFUCKER:

Nothing ever mattered back then to me more than a five dollar bill so I never stood around to debate the merits of what it was people were doing or not doing and I neither cared nor knew either if what they were doing was legal clean sound moral safe or wise (for none of that was my part) and I soon caught on that the less you say the better off you are and I learned also real quickly what end of a girl was the business end and I learned that from watching and observing everything - action debate deterioration danger death and destitution - and there never was no Prince John to cover my bridge or no Lady Jane to wipe my ass with love and comfort or wallow in the same grief I was wallowing in so EVEN AT MY AGE one just had to go on and quit slobbering and one of the funniest things I remember too is when some one of those black jazz guys came roosting through the stairwell yelling "is Mohammed in the building? is Mohammed in this fucking goddamn building!" and it was funny to me because it was 1968 the dead of Winter cold as Hell itself and probably darker and I'd never before heard of anyone named Mohammed and it made me wonder what was going on all around me because I did often see black guys along the street handing out a newspaper called 'Muhammad speaks' or something like it and it was a sort of special world-of-blacks publication to which white people were never really especially invited to partake so I never quite knew what it was and here this tall cool black jazz dude was screaming along the stairwells about Mohammed and where he was while all I ever wanted to know instead was WHO he was and now looking back that all seems funny to me and another thing I can say with certainty was how baleful TASTE was back then - taste being a sign of class and class being nothing I was ever living amongst and the only old movies anyone was ever watching on the little TV screens I saw was always the same sort of stupid 1940's crappy movie with an Irish priest or two and some poor down-and-out church or parish hall about to go under and some newfangled sad-faced priest comes in and whips up the boy chorus made up of schoolyard Irish nobodies to win the people over and save the church and the little old discredited priest becomes the hero all over again and WHEW FOR SURE! I never understood a'one of those movies and was glad of it and I'd be willing to bet just as well that just as many lives were ruined and sizzled by that sentimental crap as by any of the scrappy realism I was seeing and living and if strength is breeding and character the result then well just as somehow Good can come of Evil so too can a certain type of Salvation come from broken dreams bad hands horrible memories and dignity's loss and no one ever razzle-dazzled me with anything more lethal than a sword and a command and sure as I was to survive everything else I was able o defy the Death of Reason and Logic and - in point of fact - the Death of God his very self (as Time the Magazine had once fatuously postulated some time before).

31. I SAW SOMEONE JUST WALKED BY:

It’s just like lights out in a coal mine or something of that nature wherein you can’t understand the ‘why’ of why something was done but it’s all history and they say history’s behind us so I keep packing up and looking back but the past isn’t half as much fun the second time around OR IS IT ? and in a way it is ! no snap-happy fact-checkers or buff-haired proofreaders telling you what is or what wasn’t and to Hell with all that so I keep my head down and notice the sidewalk or I lift my head up and notice the sky or stare straight ahead and observe well the whole world around me for EVERY PIECE OF IT is a piece of something else and the narrower the narrow-vision the farther afield it all seems anyway - so I walk unencumbered and unrecognized by all but little do THEY know I am their brother and their God their Savior and their pupil and the only glimmer of recognition occasionally comes forth from some young girl’s eye or some older woman’s gaze - like they KNOW something’s up but they won’t let on and in fact the feeling I get is that THEY ALL KNOW who I am but the joke is that I’m unaware and they’re just watching me do what I do all the while in full knowledge themselves of what it’s all about and about my ignorance of it - like playing dominoes with selfhood or solitaire with the present or some Russian Roulette with the man who makes the bullets.