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.