Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

98. SING A SONG OF SIXPENCE AND COTTON FULL OF LIES:

I’ve tried five hundred things - painting on air singing aloud drinking gallons of water staging dances in my head backlighting the sunset overlapping the dew calling out names genuflecting at trees walking on water leaving my droppings fist-fulling aspirins dousing the flames - and nothing (I swear) has worked YET THIS LIFE HAS GONE ON - and now - ONLY NOW YOU WANT ME TO TELL YOU MORE! we’ll then here goes I’ll find a reason to talk of my semester in the wind my picture at the hanging my dangling edge of dangling edges but the first thing you must know is the time when it was (July August ’67) these specifics accumulate and the names overlap and if you ask why (I’ll smack with the strap) - his name his name it was nothing his age it meant less and all that shit - a purloined breviary from the Northern Dispensary where Poe once schat and the small bricked steps were where I sat and slept through the days and smuggled some pipes and ran with some dope and drank black-red wine after breaking the glasses at the Sheridan Square tables Lion’s Head Bar ’55 and every other incessant nuisance wherein the homosexuals hung and music on Thursdays WELL MAYBE there was jazz and be-bop folk and folk-rock clap and claptrap and pure shit too as the postulated potentates of every stripe and fixture came down from their own encumbrances and wallowed in the mixture and that’s when I first heard of Poughkeepsie and Memphis and the Starlight Lounge Romany Marie's and The Kettle O'Fish all real places which were real people who stood cheek to jowl mostly dying ONE AFTER THE OTHER they submerged their own peculiar art in foul-smelling postules which broke and spread and the Limelight Primelight Finelight girlies who learned to dance naked under protest but were convinced of the buck and convicted to fuck they all sidled up to the barter and traded places with elves and the candle-sniffing dogs if ever there were they ran from place to place seeking out new quad-dual-headlamp hemi hot rods lower than low and more pathetic than dirt (and these were only place names among the stars) for as they died they died - as simple as that as simple as the Hudson Hornet Studebaker retired any scat-singing Ed Sullivan mind-plant that ever could be Tom Sawyer came a’callin’ and a’lookin’ for me (should I answer or just nod ? was my question to Todd) and Lady Beaver-Pelt herself came from the scrambled egg department of mindless entertainment singing like Peggy Lee and Charles Darwin mixed whilst all the while over the gold-gloved pyramid the other lanes rang with music and song and the belled cat bellowed and kept it all going but ME I sat back relaxing figuring to simply watch and see what occurred but instead of all that I had some brown rice and tried our for plays and readings and the morality tales of the theater lane brewery pig-faced audacity swapfests - which only oh then were so rampant and BY JESUS it was hot everything was- the weather the heat the white sky the fire the dirt and the long sleep of midnight with some stillness to try (and I did it all once and again).