Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

183. MEGO MINO AND ALL THAT IT MEANS - (Ben Franklin & Philadelphia, 2003):

Words from an attic of stone - an old broken down house set off from the road on the side of a thoroughfare now long disappeared - one wherein the cantilevered herds of nuns and parsons of a hundred different days often assembled to rejoin their kin on the fields of there and then : candle'd messages in ghost-like scrawls and conjured tricks of spirit and flesh TOGETHER MAIMED : for (it was decided) once that 'all things illusionary are as real as we make them' and this is the story of a billion different lives : farmer plowman fiddler doctor lawyer seamstress mason builder dyer killer priest soldier painter piker cooper or nurse: ['Oh Lord I was walking with but a candle of my own'] - Mego Mino and all that it means : Benjamin Franklin himself would never know the difference : Doctor Electric ('who's going to be the next in line?') and visiting his grave in PHIL-A-DELPHIA one sees nothing BUT a bare stone in a lonely churchyard near a busy road 'and the tour buses roll by STARING morosely at the loose-fitting world' on their way to the Liberty Bell and I still hear his rowdy echoes and bawdy lines resounding down liquid and lost corridors of grime - 'the greatest monarch on the proudest throne is oblig'd to sit upon his own arse' UNIVERSAL SMOKE DOCTOR designer of chimneys 'old conjuror' the most dangerous man in America whom I see right now arm in arm with Tom Paine both somehow dancing the minuet of pain across the throttled land as seen in retrospect with ungiven rancor and idled promise bliss invention caress unfaring similacritude of every Pennsylvania daisy and roadside rose seen wiggling in philosophical winds : 'The Monarch Erected By Wisdom' which title was supposed to have been their combined and co-written biography but it all had to wait for Dr. Franklin's new invention of the thinking typewriter which he never finished but died first and that was the end of that with the nasty rain through the roof leaking water upon the desk they shared their papers upon and RUNNING ALL THE INK together the real true jumble LOST became their masterwork AND NOW A HIGHWAY RUNS THROUGH IT and Major Porter Doctor Lutz Guy Magnet and every other person who'd ever visited the Assembly of Air and spent their time there THEY 'all would know of the ancient airs and most precious words and all those things which have come before' and in his 53rd year Ben Franklin was no different than me (except I could listen to Shostakovitch while he could not) and then CONSIDER THIS: by Robert Lowell "Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones and fenced their gardens with Redmen's bones; embarking from the Nether Land of Holland pilgrims unjousled by Geneva's night they planted here the Serpent's seeds of light; and here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock the riotous glass houses built on rock and candles gutter in a hall of mirrors and light is where the ancient blood of Cain is burning burning the unburied grain" and if I didn't know any better I'd feel that was meant for the ages the lapsed Pilgrims themselves huddled now and folded into US ourselves handless and wingless and broken by our own plow as we are and rimmed and shouldered by the side-winds of doubt and loss and only reason only logic bereft of the elixr'd magic powder of GRACE and love and SUNDERED as we are and broken by possession addicted to mobility we pass our bright blue houses without lament and notice nothing of what has gone and all that we have lost 'FOR YOU were once darkness but now you are light in the Lord so WALK as children of light' - and that was from Ephesians as retold by generations around the hearth and the Pilgrim Fathers then too thought of themselves as seeds of light escaping the darkness of Europe to bring the light and the Lord to the New World but 'such is Amerikey' they say in the hills and hollers of Virginny and Maine SO WE LET THEM and what is (I mutter) 'unhousled' if you don't mind me asking ? 'a word some might recall from Hamlet from the Ghost's cry to Hamlet that he was sent to his death 'unhousle'd' that is without the chance to partake of the Eucharist in a Final mass' - and yes THAT ANSWERS THAT all over again doesn't it.