The Mune MonologuesBy Thomas Townsley
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“If it were spelled “mune” it would not cause madness” (Jack Spicer)
I.
At night I whisper to Lazarus. I hum along as the new moon practices its dirges. The trick is to cry anodyne tears and accept defeat as colorlessly as possible. “All roses are faux roses”—let that be your creed. What kind of darkness comes with handlebars? Who clings to a dream’s kite tail? These are the questions for which questioning was invented by pre-Orphic well diggers in the Herbaceous Era. Please direct all queries to the Yes Man.
The truth is, I’ve been carrying your dark groceries for too long. Yet even now, I’d like to watch you chewing gristle. I’d place my thumb just so. I’d let you stand naked in the lawn sprinkler, throwing croutons at magpies, knowing full well that thirty-seven kinds of rain couldn’t wet you. Still, my Jacobite longing will not be assuaged. Like the octopus outside my vestibule, it has three hearts, only one of which is incapable of carrying a tune. So be thankful German engineering only goes so far.
Be thankful, too, that those Latin cognates died in your throat like rats in a rain barrel—and remember, that leper in chiffon could be your doppelganger’s uncle bringing corn pies home from the fair. I still recall how the scent of hermeneutical varnish permeated the noumena, as Mother suspended six kinds of meat in aspic. That’s how we celebrated Lent in the Seventies. Such grim determination: no one would out-Leviticus our lunchboxes! The world’s fontanelle had yet to close. Blue candles had yet to be invented; maybe they never would be; it was none of my business, really. I was crouched behind an obsidian mountain, watching your shadow draw zeros and ones on pale parchment. Your incognito lips reminded me: some veils are meant to have zippers; some buttons are born to bleed. But why must your whispered “no’s” constantly lave my cochlea, leaving a residue of moon aloe? Thanks to you, my scotopic vision is 20-20. Thanks to you, the night is drained of metaphors—I watch them recede with their twirling parasols and humming stigmata into someone else’s thought experiment.
Meanwhile, the dog star rages. My Merkel’s discs stand at rapt attention. Shall we dine al fresco? This bear trap once belonged to Friedrich Hegel; now it belongs to the bear. Some say that the mythological imagination is in remission; I say that the idee fixe is on vacation. Gestalt theory teaches us that some “top-down processing” is inevitable, so help yourself to these faux roses--and please be patient! We are working toward a more scientific alphabet.
Last Tuesday, the Yes Man manifested at our front door, carrying a suitcase full of lip balm. He said, “I sense a vague dissatisfaction gnawing at our utterances. Perhaps we should recite some litanies to reduce the swelling. But would doing so cure the moon itch plaguing us all?” By this time, he’d gotten a foot inside the door and begun to open his suitcase. “This lip balm is laced with calming pheromones—it’s our only hope! Say, is that aspic I smell?” Mother smiled. She took him by the hand. Together, they went upstairs, while Father mounted another jackalope head to the wall.
II.
I fell through my own trap door. Or perhaps I was pushed. Was it you? Your three-pronged lance put me in a subjunctive mood; the feverish glare of your Byzantine breastplate roused my amygdala from its starfish dreams. O sleep tumescent! Why attach so much consciousness to desire? The elevator operator with the handlebar moustache cannot guess your middle name; I caught you writing crib notes in invisible ink; now a white lynx prowls your periphery, guarding what’s left of your chastity; I stare until I’m snow-blind, until everything seems imaginary, including me.
And thus, alone in my pensive citadel, I ask myself: when the wallpaper of appearances is stripped away, will the solipsistic rose hum with a clearer flame? Will the moon expectorate, and will you, sugar-newt, fall in love with shadows? If so, I’ll order a cheese omelet and arrange my keyhole collection in a glass display case formerly reserved for emblems of melancholy; then we can cancel our dentist appointments, and our erogenous zones will form perfect circles. At this point, I assume, all will be revealed, and we’ll know the consequences of this and that, and everything will blossom in an effulgence of Monday rain, causing our rhizomes to sparkle like new-fallen sequins beneath the interrogator’s floodlight while the angry mimes surrounding us melt away, leaving us free to gaze at our invisible wounds in mute appreciation. Then will your penchants bristle with declivities, as an engorged moon rises above the gun shop—the one that doubles as a massage parlor, or so I’m told.
“It’s true,” says the Yes Man, emerging from behind the viburnum and brandishing a valise full of eiderdown. “Just the other day, a convivial masseuse asked me if I wanted to buy ammunition. His ingratiating tone bore its own distinct message, separate from that of his ‘implied narrative.’ Nevertheless, his technique was excellent; under his maestro’s touch, my chakras were completely exfoliated. Would you like me to demonstrate?”
“That won’t be necessary,” I tell him.
At this precise moment, Mother steps out of the kitchen, bearing a floral-patterned sauciere. “Does this gravy look demoralized?” she asks.
Naturally, I refuse to look. Instead, I mount the porch swing, my thoughts of you already caramelized by flute-wielding hormones. Even now, I can feel something oblique besetting us—all the signs are here, ripe for misreading. Is this where I recall the slow rain of orchids as we groped beneath the trellis? Is this where I summon the memory of your flammable hips, your calcimine eyes with their bus terminal gaze, your emotional onion snows and the black ice of your affection, your eschatological smile with bits of God stuck between your teeth, your scent of confused lilies, your throat from which broken promises scuttle like mice, your grenadine sympathies and secret doorbells, your brittle manifestos, your titanium tears, your spiritual subwoofer, your poison honeysuckle kisses, your barbed-wire-and-cotton-candy voice with its ravenous plentitude of humdingers and sparkling bon mots, your deflective puppetry, your imaginary lapis lazuli-studded chastity belt and lugubrious horsehair cushions, your metaphysical salt mines and your hypnagogic hallucinations, your taste of marabou and that cobra trance you mistake for love, your pyrite sensibilities in financial matters, your World Fair torso and Teflon lips, your direct plumb-line to Nostradamus, your petroleum jelly heart and xylophone kneecaps and pardon-me-can-you-direct-me-to-the-nearest-monastery thighs?
The loud “Ahem!” of Father clearing his throat interrupts my revery. He squats beside me, removes his fleshing blade from its sheath, and begins to polish it, using one of Mother’s nylon stockings. “Remember when summer was like a fat girl, whispering dirty secrets?” he says. “I wish we could have those days again.”
III.
Look out! That xylophone is leaking butane, and this kaleidoscope’s rash may be contagious! What lovely pincers! Do not mistake me for one with a didactic mission just because I’m waving to you from this jetty. Keep tossing your desire from a red steeple if you think it helps. Were you born with those zippers? I suggest that we smoke until dawn, or at least until the screaming vexations molt into angels with salt on their tails—which reminds me: How many types of angels have you seen? Have you seen the translucent ones with accordions for hearts who sing high Eb’s above the rooftops, tormenting neighborhood dogs into a frenzy of howling? Or the ones with hourglasses for eyes whose songs compel men to think allegorically and dream of keys to non-existent maps? How about the ones with accidents for hands who hover over dead men’s houses, pointing at the moon—whose mouths form perfect circles from which only radio static can be heard?
The most terrifying angel was one I heard but never saw. One morning when I was in the throes of adolescence, while walking on a beach in Sea Isle City, I came upon a large whelk shell in the swash zone, a plaything of the waves, or so it seemed. Intact whelk shells were a rare find in such a populous area, so, congratulating myself on my luck, I picked it up and held it to my ear, as children do, expecting to “hear the sea.” Instead, a small, inhuman voice, like sculpted white noise, spiraled up from deep within the pink labyrinth and slithered into my ear, whispering “It is only pain. It is only pain. It is only pain.” I did not know exactly what it meant, but I felt plate tectonics within me shift, and since then, I’ve suffered from alternating bouts of lust and spiritual malaise, characterized by waking dream incursions and involuntary troping—a sort of linguo-ontological Tourette’s. The symptoms are especially acute at night, when I sometimes experience waves of synesthesia that translate moonlight into Gesualdo madrigals or cricket song into psoriasis. That disembodied Angel of the Whelk Shell has made its home in my head ever since, an itch, a thorn, a parasite, that can seemingly manifest at will, broadcasting its tribulations on any number of frequencies. Sometimes it even speaks in your voice, my little ding an sich.
I know others have heard it, too. Last night, in my favorite tavern, Willy, the new bartender, was polishing shot glasses when, apropos of nothing, he began to weep. “A vaster world awaits a place in our perception, awaits our grasp,” he sobbed. Then his voice rose, causing the palimpsest of conversations around us to cease. Customers looked up from their drinks and stared like dogs detecting a far-off whistle. “Metaphysics is the abandonment of Being!” Willy cried, and then, perhaps more ominously, “This pilsner is on the house!” That broke the tension. All the customers applauded, and Willy forced an uncertain smile, too, as if in acknowledgment. But I knew. And as the drinking resumed, I glanced outside the plate glass window and saw seven gray angels with wings of supernal Velcro, flying in trapezoidal patterns above the parking lot, carrying abacuses instead of lyres and singing of love using imaginary numbers in place of words.
IV.
I forget the acronym for my disorder. Someone demagnetized the goulash, and now the leukocytes sing beautifully. What accounts for my aesthetic sanctimony? With beveled sunlight accosting our bathos, it’s no wonder we felt little slices of the past returning to haunt us, trailing wilted poinsettias in their wake.
Was this the “sincerity” for which we scoured the source texts?
It’s true. I’m twice the man today I will be tomorrow—maybe more-- but to say “nothing happened” in my life would be an understatement, though accurate--and therein lies a theorem. Before I try to set it down, however, may I suggest we keep these poinsettia bracts in a vase? For as Wikipedia foretold, some bracts are more colorful than the “true flower”--and that’s the case here, wouldn’t you agree? So bring me my syllabus at once, and let’s all take notes before the ospreys swoop down, rending the pastel breeze in twain with farcical cries and paper streamers.
Having once laid claim to an education, I no longer need to ask, “Who damasked these nasturtiums?”
Instead, I ask, “Must this gloaming forever be our lot?”
Do you see the difference?
According to the syllabus, today’s class is about solar wind—and the way the earth’s magnetic shield protects us from its radiation, which longs to kill us. “You could say the shield is a mark of God’s providence,” says the professor, “though of course, God made the radiation, too, didn’t He? In any case, to understand this phenomenon correctly, we must first remember: a mark of Providence is not the same as a sign. Let’s turn to Saussure . . .”
After that, things get rather technical.
Now, as I watch the moonlight paint my humming pillow blue, here is what I know: somewhere in what old-timers still call “the dark,” a near-sighted glazier whistles “Aura Lee” in his sleep. Is it a harbinger of things to come, or just a song his mother used to sing? The syllabus doesn’t say.
Did you know that nasturtiums are edible? Did you know that they produce an airborne chemical that repels aphids, beetles, and squash bugs? Did you know that they serve as symbols for “patriotism, love, loyalty, strength, and purity”? Not even faux roses take on that much freight!
Yet as an educated man, I must ask, “Who gets to say what ‘patriotism, love, loyalty, strength, and purity’ mean? Is it you, little Zaubermaus? Also--what’s a squash bug?”
For the educated man, such questioning is a way of life:
Which hem-length goes best with flat ontologies?
How many heads of pins would support Friedrich Hegel dancing a jig?
Who took Occam’s razor to Anselm ‘s proof?
I have learned to read carefully, combing every text for landmines of possible symbols, such as eternal flames, sacred springs, bird bones arrayed on silver plates, peacock tails with blinking eyes, serpents whispering Latin aphorisms to gum-cracking altar boys, hag-mist, moon-glitter, thorn juice and cross varnish, The Six Dancing Chromosomes of Vaudeville, the morse code of quasars, melancholy hypotenuses, sirens who keep albatrosses as emotional support animals, deontological swastikas, wise-talking carp and lisping nightingales, Nietzsche-dust, a forgotten saint’s navel lint that’s said to cure scalp-itch, and postmodern seraphim who quote Wittgenstein while hovering over bowling alleys.
Nights, I whisper secrets into sinkholes.
Cloaked women with clock mechanisms for eyes want to know: “Can you hear the asps, circling the well?”
When the moon gets something caught between its teeth, why do I assume it’s my “learning objectives”?
Remember how the village thespians performed morality plays from the back of a white truck?
Remember the cardboard props, the bowls of steaming millet, the razor wire—or the way Jack-in-the-box music seemed to emanate from your thalamus?
In a yellow room, the turnstile operator picks up radio signals in his metal skull plate. “I think they’re playing our song,” he says.
As night falls, Mother serves prosthetic bread to her new suitor.
I’m installing doorbells on every mirror in the house. Soon the incessant ringing will drive the villagers mad.
And in our bedroom, as always, the burning carousel spins round and round.
V.
What roses remain have nothing left to do. And that sickle moon—better look it up in Cirlot’s Book of Symbols before it’s too late. (Who am I kidding? It’s already too late. Already these monologues subsume memory, the way “capitalism absorbs its own critique.”)
Wait, there’s more! These chitinous shells of words taste like after-dinner mints—quite unlike the melodious taste of persimmons, which overwhelms the poor little drawbridge operator whose raincoat is lost. Poets, why do you devote massive expenditures of energy in service to tongue depressors? Can’t you see how the allegorical figure of Venery, riding a unicycle, careens toward night eternal? Do you not feel the urgency? Is anyone out there?
They say nothing matters but the quality of the affection, which management in its wisdom has decided to “phase in” gradually. And therefore, awash in hermeneutical chem trails, the horizon itself shimmers, oozing mirages from which A Stranger will emerge—the one we’ve been waiting for, undoubtedly, moist with billowy foam and bloated with promises, the nature of which we have yet to surmise.
Did I tell you my Wednesday focus group once opined that poetry was the vestigial remains of an Ur-language? Then we waited for the winter wind to transform the trestle bridge on which we stood into an aeolian harp, but it was a “no go.”
Afterwards, Louise passed around Ritz crackers with some kind of olive spread.
What I remember most about those days was how you tried to give my poem mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. You wanted to “cure it” of its ills. I think you still do. Or maybe it’s me you’re hoping to cure. You’ve been giving us chemo for weeks now, and still, you say my poem “doesn’t mean anything,”—or rather, it has more meanings than a single body should bear, like a lumpy old dog that doesn’t knows it’s ugly. I sit holding my poem’s hand and watch you move from bed to bed in your crisp white coat, inserting your long needles and making notes on your chart, while outside the window you never see, three-headed cherubs hover above the medical waste bins, tossing syringes down on hare-lipped fauns who varnish my hurdy-gurdies in exchange for menthol cigarettes and pocket lint.
VI.
Darker now. All those sleepovers on minted sheets, transformed by the pickle-brine of memory—how I age! My face in the mirror is raw pork. A thousand ping-pong balls must drop on this linoleum floor immediately, or else I won’t be responsible for your haircut. As expected, a singing cobra slithers in via the narthex. “Melancholy Baby,” is it? I feel the thrill and disappointment of having met you. It’s true, I’ve had to rehearse what comes “naturally” to others, though “naturally” is a problematic term ever since Nixon left office. Most sandwiches prove anti-climactic, don’t you think? I blame it on “committee work” and all those “breakout sessions,” on “caring administrators” who outnumber us six to one, on pumice smiles and moon lard gumming up the mainsail’s unholy riggings, like eviscerated doilies on All Hallows Eve.
Ah, February! The scent of plaster of Paris, sticky crewcuts! Remember to turn off the blender when you’re through. Lately my laptop has been whispering to me—sweet somethings, imminent rain, conjugal visits, leprosy. This cochineal dwarfs my imagination, sleepyhead.
Darker now. Balloon animals infiltrate the well-worn similes. More liverwurst? Yes Man, Yes Man, why won’t you put down your pitch pipe? What gesture or jester seems called for? O sacred gene pool, why must you tie me to the tracks? Management declares the reset button off limits. How I age! How I age! A bubble bath to slake my medulla! “As long as there is straining toward style, there is versification” says Mallarme. The Yes Man practices ragas before imaginary magpies. A thousand yo-yos descend at once. Behind the veil—more zinc! Did you remember to shut off the blender? What’s the plural of “trapeze”?
Someone is spitting up jigsaw puzzle pieces. Can’t you see I’m blackberrying? A macaw challenges me to a journalism contest but makes me promise not to say “festoon.” Darker now. My face resembles trichinosis. Let the conundrums quiver! I second these minutes. Can anyone find the light switch?
Barbed wire, why so zealous? Why is the picnic basket charred? I hope a “bowl cut” will suffice. Soon your refrigerator full of lint will take flight, and that’s when I’ll bare real wounds, but in the meantime the Yes Man keeps shuffling these pages.
Did I tell you that Father has taken on the role of planetarium director? At first, the news was rather shocking, but then we realized how well he met the qualifications. As we know, planetarium directors are prone to incipient baldness. They have no appetite for rising action. H.O. trains circle deceptively deep puddles in their childhoods, and their lives appear tremulous—mostly because their spleens consist of terrycloth and chunks of feldspar--, and their gaze has been described as “nouveau septic.” From a distance, planetarium directors may be mistaken for peccadillos (the red-winged variety), which possibly accounts for their irresolute character and tendency to shrug inappropriately under stress. Little is known about their sexual mores or what they consider to be innuendo, and for that reason it is unwise to ask their opinions on anything.
Darker now. Were it not for poesy, our cheese would surely languish. Last night, the moon drank all my Milk of Magnesia. I dreamt of key fobs chirping like catbirds on a powerline. Today the ditch is choking on violets, and my heart is dry tinder. Have we entered the infinitival mode? It’s only fair to inform you that there’s a waiting room behind my eyes, where my true soul sits cross-legged in flickering light (fluorescent, of course), eating mallow cups and undressing you ontologically until there’s nothing left but a blue flame. Like Death, I chew with my mouth open, watching while an old woman paints marionettes in your image. The only question is “Is she in our heads, or are we in hers?”
Now a single black milkweed parachutes toward your open hand.
“Not darkness,” says the worm. “You can see darkness.”
VII.
Father is distributing allegories to the needy.
Father anoints with mercurochrome the balding pates of burgermeisters.
Father explains gyroscopes to children, speaking in measured cadences and pointing to the sky.
He says “Translucency.” “Meek.” “Atonement.”
He says “Pestilence.” “Beseech.” “Mire.”
Father collects the tears of grieving widows for his soup and solves quadratic equations on everybody’s napkin.
Father points out a passing cloud to a stone.
Alone in the attic, Father tinkers with his silhouette; he glues tiny clock parts to an illuminated manuscript, humming softly as he works.
Whenever he is angry, Father wears a veil made of smoke.
Whenever he falls in love, Father sires an invisible son, whom he names “Timothy Paul.”
Father is convinced that he knows moonlight “for what it is.”
He says, “Cinder.” “Invisible.” “Bequeath.”
He says, “Wound.” “Raiment.” “Slake.”
Father believes it possible, given an infinity of time, to calculate pi’s final integer but never to “know the mind of man.”
Father dreams that he is a prophet with larvikite eyes and a beard of Saint Elmo’s fire; he calls for public weeping to forestall the coming pestilence.
Father has taken to projecting imaginary galaxies on the planetarium’s domed ceiling. “There is no ‘outside’ from which to observe the expanding universe,” he announces, “nor can we explain why the rate of expansion seems to be increasing rather than slowing--which is why we posit phenomena such as ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy.’”
Father worries that he’s substituting feelings for belief. He wears a special “demythologizing” monocle, so that he won’t confuse the lint in his pocket with stars.
Father carries a special key, which he uses to unlock the basement door.
He stands on the top stair, silhouetted in a rectangle of light. “Timothy Paul, come out of the root cellar,” he shouts.
“Timothy Paul, this is your father.”
“Timothy Paul, don’t try to hide--I know you’re down there.”
VIII.
Skating past your house at midnight, dog-whistle in hand, I ponder your unconcealment. Already a truculent rain is gathering itself inside a cloud; soon it will ply lovers with its silver needles and cold exclamation points, making a sound like plangent harpsicords. I wipe away what spores I can and squint into the underbrush. Does the hooded falcon perched on my arm belong to you? Its talons seem to be drawing blood, though I doubt it’s intentional. What’s the name of that glove a falconer wears on his arm? A gauntlet? I should have one of those!
Was it Wittgenstein who said “One observes in order to see what one would not see if one did not observe”? That reminds me: I think the milk’s gone bad. Shall we blame the gibbous moon, the half-finished soup, your penchant for calculative thought? Whose turn is it to walk the dog? Am I ready for another “near-life” experience? Why am I bleeding myrrh? These gondolier costumes were your idea, don’t forget! Watching you read Hegel’s Asthetik while lying naked on high thread count sheets makes me wonder if it is possible to exist outside of description and narration. Why don’t we pretend these constellations belong to us, the way words do when we think we’ve tamed them? After all, “anise” is just another name for fennel—or so you’d have me believe.
How shall we tally these unremembered dreams?
Are the final credits rolling so soon?
Mune, mune, mune, mune, mune! Jaundiced, bleary-eyed, drunk on fog! Does a blank stare count as the Other’s gaze? You should know—you have the blankest stare of all—you half-eaten wafer, you old man’s mirror, you broken compass-- plagiarist of unfinished poems! Each night, you perform another cranioplasty. You peer into my skull and laugh as these dreams put my words through the spin cycle. You subject my dithyrambs to your gravitational force. You fill my head with silver commas. And now I wonder—why do you steep the faux roses in your amniotic light? Is that the shadow of your inconstancy I see in my lover’s eyes?
“Good questions,” says the Yes Man. He sets down a briefcase containing seventeen vials of rhino horn powder. “And I have a few questions of my own. For instance, ‘Does God wait for us behind each closed door? Or is God the closed door itself?’”
“Irrelevant!” shouts Father. “What we want to know is, ‘Where did this dark matter come from? Did someone forgot to turn off the blender?’ Well, moon, what do you say to that? I’ll just chew on these faulty syllogisms and await your reply.”
“Ignore them, moon,” cries Mother. “You and I both know the real question seems to be ‘Does this gravy need more salt?’”
We turn our expectant gazes skyward, as our kind has done for millennia. But the orphaned, heretical, dissolute moon shines down on all of us, or perhaps in spite of us—yes, even you, patient reader--and says nothing.
I.
At night I whisper to Lazarus. I hum along as the new moon practices its dirges. The trick is to cry anodyne tears and accept defeat as colorlessly as possible. “All roses are faux roses”—let that be your creed. What kind of darkness comes with handlebars? Who clings to a dream’s kite tail? These are the questions for which questioning was invented by pre-Orphic well diggers in the Herbaceous Era. Please direct all queries to the Yes Man.
The truth is, I’ve been carrying your dark groceries for too long. Yet even now, I’d like to watch you chewing gristle. I’d place my thumb just so. I’d let you stand naked in the lawn sprinkler, throwing croutons at magpies, knowing full well that thirty-seven kinds of rain couldn’t wet you. Still, my Jacobite longing will not be assuaged. Like the octopus outside my vestibule, it has three hearts, only one of which is incapable of carrying a tune. So be thankful German engineering only goes so far.
Be thankful, too, that those Latin cognates died in your throat like rats in a rain barrel—and remember, that leper in chiffon could be your doppelganger’s uncle bringing corn pies home from the fair. I still recall how the scent of hermeneutical varnish permeated the noumena, as Mother suspended six kinds of meat in aspic. That’s how we celebrated Lent in the Seventies. Such grim determination: no one would out-Leviticus our lunchboxes! The world’s fontanelle had yet to close. Blue candles had yet to be invented; maybe they never would be; it was none of my business, really. I was crouched behind an obsidian mountain, watching your shadow draw zeros and ones on pale parchment. Your incognito lips reminded me: some veils are meant to have zippers; some buttons are born to bleed. But why must your whispered “no’s” constantly lave my cochlea, leaving a residue of moon aloe? Thanks to you, my scotopic vision is 20-20. Thanks to you, the night is drained of metaphors—I watch them recede with their twirling parasols and humming stigmata into someone else’s thought experiment.
Meanwhile, the dog star rages. My Merkel’s discs stand at rapt attention. Shall we dine al fresco? This bear trap once belonged to Friedrich Hegel; now it belongs to the bear. Some say that the mythological imagination is in remission; I say that the idee fixe is on vacation. Gestalt theory teaches us that some “top-down processing” is inevitable, so help yourself to these faux roses--and please be patient! We are working toward a more scientific alphabet.
Last Tuesday, the Yes Man manifested at our front door, carrying a suitcase full of lip balm. He said, “I sense a vague dissatisfaction gnawing at our utterances. Perhaps we should recite some litanies to reduce the swelling. But would doing so cure the moon itch plaguing us all?” By this time, he’d gotten a foot inside the door and begun to open his suitcase. “This lip balm is laced with calming pheromones—it’s our only hope! Say, is that aspic I smell?” Mother smiled. She took him by the hand. Together, they went upstairs, while Father mounted another jackalope head to the wall.
II.
I fell through my own trap door. Or perhaps I was pushed. Was it you? Your three-pronged lance put me in a subjunctive mood; the feverish glare of your Byzantine breastplate roused my amygdala from its starfish dreams. O sleep tumescent! Why attach so much consciousness to desire? The elevator operator with the handlebar moustache cannot guess your middle name; I caught you writing crib notes in invisible ink; now a white lynx prowls your periphery, guarding what’s left of your chastity; I stare until I’m snow-blind, until everything seems imaginary, including me.
And thus, alone in my pensive citadel, I ask myself: when the wallpaper of appearances is stripped away, will the solipsistic rose hum with a clearer flame? Will the moon expectorate, and will you, sugar-newt, fall in love with shadows? If so, I’ll order a cheese omelet and arrange my keyhole collection in a glass display case formerly reserved for emblems of melancholy; then we can cancel our dentist appointments, and our erogenous zones will form perfect circles. At this point, I assume, all will be revealed, and we’ll know the consequences of this and that, and everything will blossom in an effulgence of Monday rain, causing our rhizomes to sparkle like new-fallen sequins beneath the interrogator’s floodlight while the angry mimes surrounding us melt away, leaving us free to gaze at our invisible wounds in mute appreciation. Then will your penchants bristle with declivities, as an engorged moon rises above the gun shop—the one that doubles as a massage parlor, or so I’m told.
“It’s true,” says the Yes Man, emerging from behind the viburnum and brandishing a valise full of eiderdown. “Just the other day, a convivial masseuse asked me if I wanted to buy ammunition. His ingratiating tone bore its own distinct message, separate from that of his ‘implied narrative.’ Nevertheless, his technique was excellent; under his maestro’s touch, my chakras were completely exfoliated. Would you like me to demonstrate?”
“That won’t be necessary,” I tell him.
At this precise moment, Mother steps out of the kitchen, bearing a floral-patterned sauciere. “Does this gravy look demoralized?” she asks.
Naturally, I refuse to look. Instead, I mount the porch swing, my thoughts of you already caramelized by flute-wielding hormones. Even now, I can feel something oblique besetting us—all the signs are here, ripe for misreading. Is this where I recall the slow rain of orchids as we groped beneath the trellis? Is this where I summon the memory of your flammable hips, your calcimine eyes with their bus terminal gaze, your emotional onion snows and the black ice of your affection, your eschatological smile with bits of God stuck between your teeth, your scent of confused lilies, your throat from which broken promises scuttle like mice, your grenadine sympathies and secret doorbells, your brittle manifestos, your titanium tears, your spiritual subwoofer, your poison honeysuckle kisses, your barbed-wire-and-cotton-candy voice with its ravenous plentitude of humdingers and sparkling bon mots, your deflective puppetry, your imaginary lapis lazuli-studded chastity belt and lugubrious horsehair cushions, your metaphysical salt mines and your hypnagogic hallucinations, your taste of marabou and that cobra trance you mistake for love, your pyrite sensibilities in financial matters, your World Fair torso and Teflon lips, your direct plumb-line to Nostradamus, your petroleum jelly heart and xylophone kneecaps and pardon-me-can-you-direct-me-to-the-nearest-monastery thighs?
The loud “Ahem!” of Father clearing his throat interrupts my revery. He squats beside me, removes his fleshing blade from its sheath, and begins to polish it, using one of Mother’s nylon stockings. “Remember when summer was like a fat girl, whispering dirty secrets?” he says. “I wish we could have those days again.”
III.
Look out! That xylophone is leaking butane, and this kaleidoscope’s rash may be contagious! What lovely pincers! Do not mistake me for one with a didactic mission just because I’m waving to you from this jetty. Keep tossing your desire from a red steeple if you think it helps. Were you born with those zippers? I suggest that we smoke until dawn, or at least until the screaming vexations molt into angels with salt on their tails—which reminds me: How many types of angels have you seen? Have you seen the translucent ones with accordions for hearts who sing high Eb’s above the rooftops, tormenting neighborhood dogs into a frenzy of howling? Or the ones with hourglasses for eyes whose songs compel men to think allegorically and dream of keys to non-existent maps? How about the ones with accidents for hands who hover over dead men’s houses, pointing at the moon—whose mouths form perfect circles from which only radio static can be heard?
The most terrifying angel was one I heard but never saw. One morning when I was in the throes of adolescence, while walking on a beach in Sea Isle City, I came upon a large whelk shell in the swash zone, a plaything of the waves, or so it seemed. Intact whelk shells were a rare find in such a populous area, so, congratulating myself on my luck, I picked it up and held it to my ear, as children do, expecting to “hear the sea.” Instead, a small, inhuman voice, like sculpted white noise, spiraled up from deep within the pink labyrinth and slithered into my ear, whispering “It is only pain. It is only pain. It is only pain.” I did not know exactly what it meant, but I felt plate tectonics within me shift, and since then, I’ve suffered from alternating bouts of lust and spiritual malaise, characterized by waking dream incursions and involuntary troping—a sort of linguo-ontological Tourette’s. The symptoms are especially acute at night, when I sometimes experience waves of synesthesia that translate moonlight into Gesualdo madrigals or cricket song into psoriasis. That disembodied Angel of the Whelk Shell has made its home in my head ever since, an itch, a thorn, a parasite, that can seemingly manifest at will, broadcasting its tribulations on any number of frequencies. Sometimes it even speaks in your voice, my little ding an sich.
I know others have heard it, too. Last night, in my favorite tavern, Willy, the new bartender, was polishing shot glasses when, apropos of nothing, he began to weep. “A vaster world awaits a place in our perception, awaits our grasp,” he sobbed. Then his voice rose, causing the palimpsest of conversations around us to cease. Customers looked up from their drinks and stared like dogs detecting a far-off whistle. “Metaphysics is the abandonment of Being!” Willy cried, and then, perhaps more ominously, “This pilsner is on the house!” That broke the tension. All the customers applauded, and Willy forced an uncertain smile, too, as if in acknowledgment. But I knew. And as the drinking resumed, I glanced outside the plate glass window and saw seven gray angels with wings of supernal Velcro, flying in trapezoidal patterns above the parking lot, carrying abacuses instead of lyres and singing of love using imaginary numbers in place of words.
IV.
I forget the acronym for my disorder. Someone demagnetized the goulash, and now the leukocytes sing beautifully. What accounts for my aesthetic sanctimony? With beveled sunlight accosting our bathos, it’s no wonder we felt little slices of the past returning to haunt us, trailing wilted poinsettias in their wake.
Was this the “sincerity” for which we scoured the source texts?
It’s true. I’m twice the man today I will be tomorrow—maybe more-- but to say “nothing happened” in my life would be an understatement, though accurate--and therein lies a theorem. Before I try to set it down, however, may I suggest we keep these poinsettia bracts in a vase? For as Wikipedia foretold, some bracts are more colorful than the “true flower”--and that’s the case here, wouldn’t you agree? So bring me my syllabus at once, and let’s all take notes before the ospreys swoop down, rending the pastel breeze in twain with farcical cries and paper streamers.
Having once laid claim to an education, I no longer need to ask, “Who damasked these nasturtiums?”
Instead, I ask, “Must this gloaming forever be our lot?”
Do you see the difference?
According to the syllabus, today’s class is about solar wind—and the way the earth’s magnetic shield protects us from its radiation, which longs to kill us. “You could say the shield is a mark of God’s providence,” says the professor, “though of course, God made the radiation, too, didn’t He? In any case, to understand this phenomenon correctly, we must first remember: a mark of Providence is not the same as a sign. Let’s turn to Saussure . . .”
After that, things get rather technical.
Now, as I watch the moonlight paint my humming pillow blue, here is what I know: somewhere in what old-timers still call “the dark,” a near-sighted glazier whistles “Aura Lee” in his sleep. Is it a harbinger of things to come, or just a song his mother used to sing? The syllabus doesn’t say.
Did you know that nasturtiums are edible? Did you know that they produce an airborne chemical that repels aphids, beetles, and squash bugs? Did you know that they serve as symbols for “patriotism, love, loyalty, strength, and purity”? Not even faux roses take on that much freight!
Yet as an educated man, I must ask, “Who gets to say what ‘patriotism, love, loyalty, strength, and purity’ mean? Is it you, little Zaubermaus? Also--what’s a squash bug?”
For the educated man, such questioning is a way of life:
Which hem-length goes best with flat ontologies?
How many heads of pins would support Friedrich Hegel dancing a jig?
Who took Occam’s razor to Anselm ‘s proof?
I have learned to read carefully, combing every text for landmines of possible symbols, such as eternal flames, sacred springs, bird bones arrayed on silver plates, peacock tails with blinking eyes, serpents whispering Latin aphorisms to gum-cracking altar boys, hag-mist, moon-glitter, thorn juice and cross varnish, The Six Dancing Chromosomes of Vaudeville, the morse code of quasars, melancholy hypotenuses, sirens who keep albatrosses as emotional support animals, deontological swastikas, wise-talking carp and lisping nightingales, Nietzsche-dust, a forgotten saint’s navel lint that’s said to cure scalp-itch, and postmodern seraphim who quote Wittgenstein while hovering over bowling alleys.
Nights, I whisper secrets into sinkholes.
Cloaked women with clock mechanisms for eyes want to know: “Can you hear the asps, circling the well?”
When the moon gets something caught between its teeth, why do I assume it’s my “learning objectives”?
Remember how the village thespians performed morality plays from the back of a white truck?
Remember the cardboard props, the bowls of steaming millet, the razor wire—or the way Jack-in-the-box music seemed to emanate from your thalamus?
In a yellow room, the turnstile operator picks up radio signals in his metal skull plate. “I think they’re playing our song,” he says.
As night falls, Mother serves prosthetic bread to her new suitor.
I’m installing doorbells on every mirror in the house. Soon the incessant ringing will drive the villagers mad.
And in our bedroom, as always, the burning carousel spins round and round.
V.
What roses remain have nothing left to do. And that sickle moon—better look it up in Cirlot’s Book of Symbols before it’s too late. (Who am I kidding? It’s already too late. Already these monologues subsume memory, the way “capitalism absorbs its own critique.”)
Wait, there’s more! These chitinous shells of words taste like after-dinner mints—quite unlike the melodious taste of persimmons, which overwhelms the poor little drawbridge operator whose raincoat is lost. Poets, why do you devote massive expenditures of energy in service to tongue depressors? Can’t you see how the allegorical figure of Venery, riding a unicycle, careens toward night eternal? Do you not feel the urgency? Is anyone out there?
They say nothing matters but the quality of the affection, which management in its wisdom has decided to “phase in” gradually. And therefore, awash in hermeneutical chem trails, the horizon itself shimmers, oozing mirages from which A Stranger will emerge—the one we’ve been waiting for, undoubtedly, moist with billowy foam and bloated with promises, the nature of which we have yet to surmise.
Did I tell you my Wednesday focus group once opined that poetry was the vestigial remains of an Ur-language? Then we waited for the winter wind to transform the trestle bridge on which we stood into an aeolian harp, but it was a “no go.”
Afterwards, Louise passed around Ritz crackers with some kind of olive spread.
What I remember most about those days was how you tried to give my poem mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. You wanted to “cure it” of its ills. I think you still do. Or maybe it’s me you’re hoping to cure. You’ve been giving us chemo for weeks now, and still, you say my poem “doesn’t mean anything,”—or rather, it has more meanings than a single body should bear, like a lumpy old dog that doesn’t knows it’s ugly. I sit holding my poem’s hand and watch you move from bed to bed in your crisp white coat, inserting your long needles and making notes on your chart, while outside the window you never see, three-headed cherubs hover above the medical waste bins, tossing syringes down on hare-lipped fauns who varnish my hurdy-gurdies in exchange for menthol cigarettes and pocket lint.
VI.
Darker now. All those sleepovers on minted sheets, transformed by the pickle-brine of memory—how I age! My face in the mirror is raw pork. A thousand ping-pong balls must drop on this linoleum floor immediately, or else I won’t be responsible for your haircut. As expected, a singing cobra slithers in via the narthex. “Melancholy Baby,” is it? I feel the thrill and disappointment of having met you. It’s true, I’ve had to rehearse what comes “naturally” to others, though “naturally” is a problematic term ever since Nixon left office. Most sandwiches prove anti-climactic, don’t you think? I blame it on “committee work” and all those “breakout sessions,” on “caring administrators” who outnumber us six to one, on pumice smiles and moon lard gumming up the mainsail’s unholy riggings, like eviscerated doilies on All Hallows Eve.
Ah, February! The scent of plaster of Paris, sticky crewcuts! Remember to turn off the blender when you’re through. Lately my laptop has been whispering to me—sweet somethings, imminent rain, conjugal visits, leprosy. This cochineal dwarfs my imagination, sleepyhead.
Darker now. Balloon animals infiltrate the well-worn similes. More liverwurst? Yes Man, Yes Man, why won’t you put down your pitch pipe? What gesture or jester seems called for? O sacred gene pool, why must you tie me to the tracks? Management declares the reset button off limits. How I age! How I age! A bubble bath to slake my medulla! “As long as there is straining toward style, there is versification” says Mallarme. The Yes Man practices ragas before imaginary magpies. A thousand yo-yos descend at once. Behind the veil—more zinc! Did you remember to shut off the blender? What’s the plural of “trapeze”?
Someone is spitting up jigsaw puzzle pieces. Can’t you see I’m blackberrying? A macaw challenges me to a journalism contest but makes me promise not to say “festoon.” Darker now. My face resembles trichinosis. Let the conundrums quiver! I second these minutes. Can anyone find the light switch?
Barbed wire, why so zealous? Why is the picnic basket charred? I hope a “bowl cut” will suffice. Soon your refrigerator full of lint will take flight, and that’s when I’ll bare real wounds, but in the meantime the Yes Man keeps shuffling these pages.
Did I tell you that Father has taken on the role of planetarium director? At first, the news was rather shocking, but then we realized how well he met the qualifications. As we know, planetarium directors are prone to incipient baldness. They have no appetite for rising action. H.O. trains circle deceptively deep puddles in their childhoods, and their lives appear tremulous—mostly because their spleens consist of terrycloth and chunks of feldspar--, and their gaze has been described as “nouveau septic.” From a distance, planetarium directors may be mistaken for peccadillos (the red-winged variety), which possibly accounts for their irresolute character and tendency to shrug inappropriately under stress. Little is known about their sexual mores or what they consider to be innuendo, and for that reason it is unwise to ask their opinions on anything.
Darker now. Were it not for poesy, our cheese would surely languish. Last night, the moon drank all my Milk of Magnesia. I dreamt of key fobs chirping like catbirds on a powerline. Today the ditch is choking on violets, and my heart is dry tinder. Have we entered the infinitival mode? It’s only fair to inform you that there’s a waiting room behind my eyes, where my true soul sits cross-legged in flickering light (fluorescent, of course), eating mallow cups and undressing you ontologically until there’s nothing left but a blue flame. Like Death, I chew with my mouth open, watching while an old woman paints marionettes in your image. The only question is “Is she in our heads, or are we in hers?”
Now a single black milkweed parachutes toward your open hand.
“Not darkness,” says the worm. “You can see darkness.”
VII.
Father is distributing allegories to the needy.
Father anoints with mercurochrome the balding pates of burgermeisters.
Father explains gyroscopes to children, speaking in measured cadences and pointing to the sky.
He says “Translucency.” “Meek.” “Atonement.”
He says “Pestilence.” “Beseech.” “Mire.”
Father collects the tears of grieving widows for his soup and solves quadratic equations on everybody’s napkin.
Father points out a passing cloud to a stone.
Alone in the attic, Father tinkers with his silhouette; he glues tiny clock parts to an illuminated manuscript, humming softly as he works.
Whenever he is angry, Father wears a veil made of smoke.
Whenever he falls in love, Father sires an invisible son, whom he names “Timothy Paul.”
Father is convinced that he knows moonlight “for what it is.”
He says, “Cinder.” “Invisible.” “Bequeath.”
He says, “Wound.” “Raiment.” “Slake.”
Father believes it possible, given an infinity of time, to calculate pi’s final integer but never to “know the mind of man.”
Father dreams that he is a prophet with larvikite eyes and a beard of Saint Elmo’s fire; he calls for public weeping to forestall the coming pestilence.
Father has taken to projecting imaginary galaxies on the planetarium’s domed ceiling. “There is no ‘outside’ from which to observe the expanding universe,” he announces, “nor can we explain why the rate of expansion seems to be increasing rather than slowing--which is why we posit phenomena such as ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy.’”
Father worries that he’s substituting feelings for belief. He wears a special “demythologizing” monocle, so that he won’t confuse the lint in his pocket with stars.
Father carries a special key, which he uses to unlock the basement door.
He stands on the top stair, silhouetted in a rectangle of light. “Timothy Paul, come out of the root cellar,” he shouts.
“Timothy Paul, this is your father.”
“Timothy Paul, don’t try to hide--I know you’re down there.”
VIII.
Skating past your house at midnight, dog-whistle in hand, I ponder your unconcealment. Already a truculent rain is gathering itself inside a cloud; soon it will ply lovers with its silver needles and cold exclamation points, making a sound like plangent harpsicords. I wipe away what spores I can and squint into the underbrush. Does the hooded falcon perched on my arm belong to you? Its talons seem to be drawing blood, though I doubt it’s intentional. What’s the name of that glove a falconer wears on his arm? A gauntlet? I should have one of those!
Was it Wittgenstein who said “One observes in order to see what one would not see if one did not observe”? That reminds me: I think the milk’s gone bad. Shall we blame the gibbous moon, the half-finished soup, your penchant for calculative thought? Whose turn is it to walk the dog? Am I ready for another “near-life” experience? Why am I bleeding myrrh? These gondolier costumes were your idea, don’t forget! Watching you read Hegel’s Asthetik while lying naked on high thread count sheets makes me wonder if it is possible to exist outside of description and narration. Why don’t we pretend these constellations belong to us, the way words do when we think we’ve tamed them? After all, “anise” is just another name for fennel—or so you’d have me believe.
How shall we tally these unremembered dreams?
Are the final credits rolling so soon?
Mune, mune, mune, mune, mune! Jaundiced, bleary-eyed, drunk on fog! Does a blank stare count as the Other’s gaze? You should know—you have the blankest stare of all—you half-eaten wafer, you old man’s mirror, you broken compass-- plagiarist of unfinished poems! Each night, you perform another cranioplasty. You peer into my skull and laugh as these dreams put my words through the spin cycle. You subject my dithyrambs to your gravitational force. You fill my head with silver commas. And now I wonder—why do you steep the faux roses in your amniotic light? Is that the shadow of your inconstancy I see in my lover’s eyes?
“Good questions,” says the Yes Man. He sets down a briefcase containing seventeen vials of rhino horn powder. “And I have a few questions of my own. For instance, ‘Does God wait for us behind each closed door? Or is God the closed door itself?’”
“Irrelevant!” shouts Father. “What we want to know is, ‘Where did this dark matter come from? Did someone forgot to turn off the blender?’ Well, moon, what do you say to that? I’ll just chew on these faulty syllogisms and await your reply.”
“Ignore them, moon,” cries Mother. “You and I both know the real question seems to be ‘Does this gravy need more salt?’”
We turn our expectant gazes skyward, as our kind has done for millennia. But the orphaned, heretical, dissolute moon shines down on all of us, or perhaps in spite of us—yes, even you, patient reader--and says nothing.
Thomas Townsley has published four books of poetry: Reading the Empty Page, Night Class for Insomniacs (Black Rabbit), Holding A Séance By Myself (Standing Stone Books), and most recently, I Pray This Letter Reaches You In Time (Doubly Mad Books), as well as a chapbook, Tangent of Ardency (SurVision Books). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including SurVision, The Decadent Review, Stone Canoe, and Doubly Mad. He currently teaches in the Humanities Department at Mohawk Valley Community College and spends ordinary evenings in New Hartford, NY.