Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

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.