Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

205. THE TAXMAN WAS HEARD SAYING - (with W.C. Fields):

William Claude Dukinfield 1880 aka Charles Bogle Mahatma Kane Jeeves Otis Criblecoblis he once asked Charlie McCarthy the ventriloquist’s doll whether Charlie or the banister got the most splinters when the doll slid down – interesting question when actually asked but no known answer has ever been recorded – KNOWN to us as WC Fields which does not have anything to do with Water Closet even though it has been mentioned a few times and recorded by legend and film to be some sort of sacrosanct star outlasting each of the others from that day and he once called Chaplin merely a ballet-master and he said a lot more too but none of it worth reciting for anyway what is the film world but an industry of affront or something for late-night revelry when people with nothing else to do decide to stage an unencumbered vigil to some moving-picture-sham fantasy world they inhabit so DON’T ASK ME I was never one of those and I’d rather till the soil for tulips and bloodied roses than for anything as feeble as film-world crap IDOLATRY from the masses made up mostly of asses and too many words between them all ! and I’d rather dwell in Heaven where the larkspur sings forever but nothing else I do can undo what’s already done so I won’t/can’t live my life in regret and salvage or as an art of decline in a world already dwindled but these are all MYSTERIOUS THINGS into which I enter and amidst which I dwell willingly and happy with no other alternative ‘cept some grander death-to-be and all the while between scenes there’s nothing much going on just a big fat silence like some sad wind in the dying trees some far-out burnt ember of landscape and premise all wasted and fiery or the loud crack of the forest all burning down at once in a spreading nightmare of death’s destruction murder and mayhem itself advancing ridge to ridge while I sit here on edge and dripping with sweat – the sweat of a late-night reverie of darkness and image GHOST IMAGE of ten million things from youth to lost promise to dead fathers and a million other things all everything alights at once the birds the bats the weary opossum and all its kin in a natural-selection overwrought frenzy A DIVERSION of something to something else and ANIMALS never escape TO somewhere rather – it is said – they escape FROM something (which all makes very sudden sense to me) and even as I try I cannot fly and have NO wings with which to try but Earth-bound hostelry such as this is bears no loss of pain or pleasure IT’S JUST all the same to me and we IN REVERENCE TO THE GODS OF AGES PAST do over and over what comes as simple effort – to breath to eat to continue seriously on and if that one big step taken brings anything forth I’d like to finish that journey but all around the thistle-flies are swarming like a pack of lies and nothing lands that I can see but such icebound glory FREEZES me and the storefronts are mingling with fire trucks screeching and an ambulance unfettered too rushes by as the woman in the white van slows down to mutter aloud ‘STOP SIGN’ she saw it and motions behind (but innocence yet stays where it was befuddled and with nothing to say or do any longer) and in a place where NOTHING MAKES SENSE they still take the rents and all payments in twenties and tens – or at least so the taxman was heard saying.

204. SOME SHAKESPEAREAN RHYTHM:

Needless to say I’ve hardly ever understood what I’ve seen or witnessed and by the sounds of things that’s a pretty good omen because most of the people I’ve ever watched who were so sure of themselves eventually ended up walking around like zombies glazed and frozen with the contorted expression of a person who really isn’t sure they wish to go on living and that came to mind as I walked along the old apartments in the mid 20’s where every west-side kid seems to be a trouble-maker the ones around the projects anyway over by the old seminary and that wide office building that once housed The New Republic or one of those 1920’s magazines started by Malcolm Cowley or somebody like him - whose name I really can’t remember - and anyway there really was a time when you couldn’t even leave a car in this area for twenty minutes untended before someone somehow would be upon it and the windows would be broken and any contents of value would be gone – it all happened to me once I remember quite well delivering letterheads and envelopes as a printing order 10,000 of each to Air France or one of its subsidiary companies and no sooner had I left the car to make the first of the delivery than the car was set upon and the front vent window broken so a hand could get inside and as I was walking back to get the remainder of the order I realized that all those pieces of paper blowing around the street were my pieces of paper and my envelopes and sure enough it turned out that someone had broken into the car and gone through the material I was delivering perhaps thinking to themselves that it was something more valuable and the boxes they’d taken out of the car for perusal were I guess rejected as nothing special and let to blow all over the streets and that was what I was seeing blowing around so in that case I guess the joke was on me and I should have known better but that was a long time ago and much has changed since then and even then I realized immediately how stupid I’d been not to consider that occurrence so I simply got back in the car and put the little vent window back in place - it having been popped off its little pivot - and started up the car again and went off undeterred and I told the print shop nothing and simply placed another order for 2500 pieces of each as if the customer had simply reordered some more and nothing was ever said as it looked at if they’d signed and received the entire order and that was that but the point I was making was how the streets around there were once the denizen of a lot more dark and dangerous breeds than are being produced now and it does seem a little that people are more milky-white and almost genteel now besides the fact that an amazing changeover in the area has brought in a large influx of very ‘finely’ styled young gay men and women which makes a big difference there and now with many of the new art galleries and such moving in along with the fashion and leisure industries and the restaurant crowd it all seems so very different that even I have trouble now finding or deciding where evil dwells and it is a quite different strata of what passes for society which now runs things - windows filled with graphic displays or entirely artsy and succinct motivations geared towards aesthetics and grace/beauty and the flamboyant leakings of a structure’d sub-group replete with all its own trimmings and YES the streets are bright and happy and the overall feel is at the least lighter and happier but that in itself is not the entire premise for the safer feel for if safety dwells it would seem to dwell – wouldn’t you think? – in a location where men parade with men linking hands and women interlock with others of their same ilk and the narrowing of taste and pleasure and the sensual beauties of the location brought about by this all makes for an if not ‘safer’ than at least more tolerant place in the sense that there is ‘less’ tolerance of the off-kilter the vile or the bad and the evil or at least the kind who once preyed upon ordinary regular people and where it is all these people have gone I’d not know not today or ever for the world is certainly a strange and fumbling place but in it OH! stories abound and I’ve got more than a few to fish out for you and people to go with them so sit back or genuflect whichever as you wish and let me go on as I might ripe and fragrant with my own tales and twisted stories of brokered intrigue and bartered bribes of wish and of deportment : ‘some Shakespearean rhythm of talk led me back to this guy who was sitting down to a small meal alone a salad in a plastic bowl with one or two boiled eggs thrown into it and he was slowly eating his little meal in the open-air beneath a cold sun as no one listened to him but the words off his tongue were pretty great not so much the content but the way they were spoken’ and it was but only for a moment that I heard any of this for it almost inaudible and doubly confusing but another person near me was talking like that and I guessed he was describing the scene before him and as I looked I realized he was talking into a tape recorder of his own and was simply recording vsights and descriptions of what was before him as he sat there ‘and this other fellow comes by with a few flowers for sale and he suddenly kneels down next to the person who is eating the salad and I then see the flowers are dropped to the ground and the two are embracing’ and it was evident as I both listened and watched at one and the same time that what he was describing was actually occurring and I felt myself like at some weird movie with a narration provided by another outside observer or someone else who was viewing the same scenes I was but was adding words for narrative effect and YES it all seemed to work pretty perfectly.

203. ENEMY:

The enemy’s in my wattle – “the gangster is the man of the city the one with the city’s language and knowledge with its queer dishonest skills and its terrible daring carrying his life in his hands like a placard like a club and for the gangster there is only the city and he must inhabit it in order to personify it - not the real city but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important and which is the modern world…the real city one might say produces only criminals while the imaginary city produces the gangster and he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become” - that's going to make the old gang mad : the queerdom and the overlap the insecurity of the blase and all the rest and of those once-selfsame men I used to know - and their wise and wondrous girls and ladies with their magnificent drawls and shawls and fantastic swooping bodies and the very 'free' giving that somehow managed bodily to never end while materially just as much going on and on too - to all those I say 'Salud' in the old European way of downing a pint or a shot or something they drink but it's invisible here (I never touch the stuff these days) and memory anyway is like a carpet that's been stretched over all things all the old rooms all the nooks and crannies of the proverbial previous life where everything glistened and water shown and anything done once was worth doing twice ADMITTEDLY I'm glossing over a lot of things but HEY! who really cares because nowadays the gangsters rule the roost money's a fucking joke and everyone's striving to make a deal and then - after they screw it up - become their own barrister too.
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We bring our mothers and our fathers to the river to drink - serving some turgid water along the ends of malaise and mud and malfeasance - all those things they raised us with : 'we were only doing what we saw as coming natural; things were so different then" : that is what they say right before we drown them in their baptism of ends and means in their dunking of results and retribution : 'Now' we say 'Now we have reclaimed the land and replaced the poison factories and broken away all the asphalt and paving and taken down the hideous factories the dark satanic mills where all these fathers spent their days' - and then just as they were we are finished ourselves and as dumb and stupid as they ever were and we find ourselves somehow stepping with even more exuberance into those same horrid footsteps they used - and although it tried over and over again the truth is the old woods are never really cleared and turnabout actually is fair play.