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Dead Lamont

KUBOA


DEAD LAMONT

  Sean Ruane

  Copyright © 2013 by Sean Ruane

  (KUBOA)/SmashWords Edition

  www.kuboapress.wordpress.com

  It is the genuine hope of KUBOA to receive unfiltered feedback from readers regarding the works we produce. Whether your reaction to the work was positive, negative, or ambivalent, we would much appreciate your taking the time to send some remarks to us—these will be shared with the authors.

  [email protected]

  For Chris and Ciara and Hanna

  Birth

  The squat and preclamsic impose first address when the turnstiles strut and the travelers break by and smile; the peripatetic pause for ambiance and stolen water and lumps of pilfered butterfish from the kidskin nightwatched kiosk so’west of Little Hawaii.

  Skirt the truck stop milkmaids, mark vigil in a faux candlestick bomb vest on loan from the baptismal wing of the Hall of Notable and Dead Swedes; there is erupting from the broom closet --- imposters in an uncategorical Kant skein of real leather, nomenclature, all generalized caste eying fiascos of past sitar players left over from the Bombay Flatbread Company delivery van explosion.

  Trouble again followed by slapstick prayer in the anteroom.

  Lamont

  Robot

  "Are they causing this music, these Ugandan silk ministers? In on a menace junket, rolling up silkworms and squeezing them onto brushes to comb into a girl's dress?" Genevieve, no, probably...Ugandan maybe, but for sure men of sperm bearing age; look at their scarred-up thighs, the jutting onyx realism of their heterodox short pants! A blind boy tumbles into the street and ceases relative to ice cream. Ugandans roll him like a pickle barrel, assign him to recollection.

  Genevieve twirls in her dress.

  These streets are beautiful, she says. She shifts in her dress and squints. The thighs of the marching ministers marble in the sun as the sweeper comes to collect the dead now lining the curbs; they lie there with courteous grimaces and silken skin, smiling, as fathers often do.

  Acadia Cafe,

  Minneapolis, January 18th

 

  It is so goddam cold I almost immediately chattered into pieces the brim of this twee Belgian snifter and my face under-reacts and the benighted waiter congratulates me on my winning the impromptu Bell's palsy contest and so again I’m pained with t-shirts.

  There is a girl in this place with Juan Epstein hair and she drifts with the ease of daylight amid all these overturned chairs and she makes me want to straighten up and breathe with earnest continuity through my nose.

  Oh, excellent, the River Dell downs escapees are here, breaking plastic spoons with their aping of manners and misguided fists! They swat me on the back and ask with Manwich-Night alacrity where the tufts of hair in my fists came from. I don't remember, I say, laughing along with them, sticking the hair into my embroidered ass-pockets.

  One of us points and so we stare through the window.

  We stare at that specious sliver of moon.

  Ion Channel

  Situation ruminant and plug tunin' in a fat suit, dig? Twatshit nickel punch truculent bank tellers talkin' nothing skulking ink packs and breast plated concierge handjob candy, feel me? Bitches lobotomized on backhand asides and the craquelure of eponymous junkies saying what them jumpsuits did, right? Red, yellow, and green forties liberated via skank from a Cleveland brothel carbonated as egomaniacal orphan bassoonists hood fighting and breaking oboes with crackerteeth…

  Drink that and player spit that shit at heaven if it counts to you motherfuckers bein' partners with a brother. Thug those unregulated retard meds you ginger ass jonsin' trick, we've got places to be. Busters observe curb cunt and affable claphounds and be tweaking with a high-thighed chorus-line of smoked up prankster prelates.

  Lamont let's go.

  Sweden, 2011

  The toothsome indigents indulged in drunken and clubfooted ursine mimicry and discomfited a captured animal to such a synaptically broken degree that it began rubbing its fur bare against the hostel's kitchen door jamb. Nobody intervened and after it ate the building's finest steward we agreed that it was the month's most awkward Sunday ever.

  Later, Glenda, a mawkish hangnail of a woman, dropped all the wet forks and sighed in the most cloven-handed ASL we had ever seen.

  "What?" we asked, in the language of thrown potatoes.

  Nothing; she just picked up each one in abstract Broadway silence and made mooney "kill-us" faces until we yawned as loudly as we could and again bid goodnight to Sweden, its avid novice police sketches and clouds blowing wildly and unnoticed.

  Stutter List

  Ataxia meds, lemons, trite hand-job taxonomies, back-talk, pilfered Lagos stockfish recipes, Navajo Indian compotes, fructose heavy shark-bite placebos -- all the foundation for a good entry in the diary of a Wednesday.

  A Jesuit mixologist and Castillian sideburn festooner informed mama ayer sobre her especial exorcism enema, and she comported herself in a manner befitting the most avid of defenestrators and so then went, three floors above sea level, romantically lit by the eclipse, into the beige dirt of a weird day my sister blames me for, me and my friars haircut, my Latin bagpipes.

  Moon Cycles

  a.

  Don't rattle right, lunatic, he says, filling the tumbler and seeing the tooth sitting in it.

  It doesn’t, asks the other man, rattle right you say?

  No, not at all; try again.

  To mitigate these ursicidal thoughts what cognitive subterfuges have you in mind?

  The man removes the tooth from the glass, puts it in his mouth.

  That is gross, says the man.

  Well, it is my tooth, say what you will.

  You were about to say?

  Shoot the panda, he says, waving his pliers towards the cage.

  b.

  Outside the house a dog barks and sounds to both men like the premonition of a distant train. They stop to listen.

  Lower your binoculars, embrace en vivo this tableau; besides, he says, those are just tin cans anyway.

  The phone rings.

  It rings fifteen times, bespeaks something, but what?

  One of them lunges for the phone, picks it up, yells:

  “The absence of surmised premises seldom fails to obtain an independence from cold discordant truth.”

  Hangs up.

  They stare at the phone and nod.

  The one who put the tooth in his mouth begins chewing, making a silent wager as to which will win, extant or extinct.

  Where did this other molar come from, shouts the other man, startled, holding his water glass up to the light bulb. This wasn't there before!

  c.

  The other man puts down his makeshift binoculars and begins removing a rancid gambroon of handkerchiefs from his shirt sleeve, stares out the window.

  An audacity of teeth infest my glass, says the man; what a foolish Eden we've found here in mama's kitchen!

  A dog in the distance hears the report of a gun and runs off into the far crooked edge of a parking lot.

  The man with the glass begins stuffing it with a taupe handkerchief. He refills the glass. There, he says.

  The panda bleats, pulls a curtain off of the rod, sets about chewing it with banausic avidity, pauses, blinks, dies.

  They both stare out the window.

  It looks better without the curtain, they think.

  Sing-Song Phrontistery

  The bordello walls emitted frequencies--a malarial yellow, a strain of amoebic beige and opaque pumpkin; they danced malignant, distracted me again from being a success at whoring, the foretold curve blown doubtless by the equine showmanship of the Chinese midget. I even failed to negotiate without injury the pre-screening agility ladde
r, scoring an execrable ‘two’ on the functional movement test. He laughed, as you might have imagined, as I would have surmised, and then he laughed again at the very partiality of my nudity, his seething smile the precursor to a smug meander of skyrockets and policemen.

  Tremens

  With these borrowed pants I can do nearly anything, I bet. I could be your boyfriend now, for example, if you'd like, oh could I!

  Well, I know; yours is a borrowed dress and as such comes with restrictions on allowing miracles and plain talk; still though, I'm good at sums and can modestly decode words in the fashion of great peacetime reservists-- these pockets are deep and yield softly to racing forms and liturgical propaganda. Imagine!

  And your dress has a front pocket, which is great, but I must warn you: I think it is faux; that is, it is squarely false, deaf utterly to function. That's why your wedding video fell onto the floor, I deduce. Don't cry, please; your nuptials were just so much hoo-hah, a dishevelment of light, an ultraviolet impediment to the forward motion of these pants.

  And this is why I am jumping so much.

  Drifting

  I want to watch you chase snuff pinching Aleutians from the knee-pits of my dreams, scuttling them with broomsticks and piccolo trumpets;

  I want to inherit the cranberry bog your sick mother keeps whispering about during her fogged up hospice gibberings; I want to call your brother the Anti-Columbus now that the Indian girls have at last set loose upon his great creased personage dueling continental strains of syphilis;

  I want to ruin the integument of your faux suede davenport with the gnarled tin bottoms of my feet and make you think of that time I encouraged you to spend the last of your medicine money to rent it;

  I want you to rekindle my sister’s stutter with a bouquet of desiccated loblollies and an exegesis on her period;

  I want him, that puerile hypnagogue, to manifest a scourge of apportations in the form of truculent rotary phones that jangle from the hatboxes with comic pith and sincere harm, razzling him into an enviable group home mania;

  I want you to stop bending my I.V. tube, fucktwat, so that I can watch without impediment my revivification by carrot juice and ethanol—I can see you!

  I want to watch a credible horror film where the madman interrupts his day to take a humanizing crap, maybe tweets some odious one-liners about an unnamed mama;

  I want the dompteuse to divest herself of her penchant for lies, panties, and slide whistles;

  I want to lift myself up real high and succumb to the whimsy that I'm tall enough to condescend to the crepuscular disputation of heavily angled factitious Marphan Syndrome sufferers, the ones snapping into an antecedent phalanx as soon as I’m spotted leaving the phone booth;

  I want to shrug and make echoes between where I am and where I ought not to go, smiling edgewise through all the cracks in the map limning where I’ve been, all the way running into sleep.

  Memorial Yard

  A man shoots at wolves in the Bloomington war cemetery so that the gravedigger can tend to his digging. Usually he is good at his job, but sometimes he deliberately shoots the gravedigger. Why waste gravediggers like this, says the boss of wolf shooters. One must reward the efforts of wolves, he says to his boss, to ensure the continued need for gravediggers. Of course, says the boss of gravediggers, and to encourage an honest symbiosis among wolves and men, I see. Plus, he continues, it suppresses the ambition of all the lank unemployed gravediggers cavorting in wolfskins.

  Capital, he says, putting on another Eddie Cantor album.

  His office danced.

  A gravedigger is hired to deal with shooting the spate of heterodox wolf shooters. Shoot all the motherfuck wolf shooters, says the boss of wolf shooter shooters. This seems wasteful, says the hospice concern to the boss, but okay, I’ll do it. And so he is handed a rifle and a hat that looks like a grave stone and goes off into the cemetery to hunt wolf shooters. This is great, thinks the hospice concern to the vulture what perched with all undue irony upon the briar of his hat.

  Seven shots are heard.

  Nothing, says the vulture, flying off into a stray of fog.

  William

  Wears plaid rich linen in fits and greets the Greeks with the great faux gums of great Vatican primogeniture; catches trailer cod from repurposed refrigerator aquariums; dictates diatribes on improper Indian wrestling only to the most thumbless of all the retrograde amnesiacs:

  “Let's get Billy, “ we yell, getting Billy --- Billy, gotten, we pour forties into his empty wheelchair, now a year later, transient planter carrying cacti pruned to mimic our young sterile tear-dropped stuttering vato in miniature.

  He was a god.

  Mom's lover, a Polio harboring Maltese with a Texas belt-buckle and a scatterfuck beard shouts "Billy" into a rolled up racing form. "Billy," he repeats, over and over again, but we are too busy spinning gravel donuts on the lawn to listen, our lascivious neighbor naked as blazes onanizing away her arid dotage on the wicker chaise with a desiccated jackboot.

  We skylark as she thaws and restocks the cod.

  She is woman as re-animator.

  We make Molotov shoeboxes for dancing.

  We flummox judges with hyperbolic aphasic mime-slur and hugs.

  We shout “Billy” into Mom’s surgery cone, but mom’s got “John-eyes” again and so she bicycles away and adheres to an amazing road devoid of Euclid; she shimmers away into road quiver.

  We treat Saturdays like bus station zippers.

  We are like gods.

  It is Tuesday, though, and Michigan reeks of infidelity; the air is full of sirens and the trendy squeak of old plastic and new Brazilians.

  Decoherence

  The cab driver with the hook turned into a deli and three fat passersby began a game of chase. My Five-Hour Energy suppository has been falling out all day. I got out of the cab.

  You are the George Lazenby of all my lovers, she said, and I believed her because I was the only one to accidentally punch a wrestler during the auditions. Tomas reluctantly admitted in the smokehouse that since college he has been taken in strange ways by uberous women and I told Tomas that he shouldn’t have ever majored in chocoleteering. Tomas, though, collects affected Tourette’s ticks so the world is his for the taking, presumably. Hey you ecaudate eidetic ponies, your bosons are showing, or at the very least their influence, mathematically speaking, and your mescaline saddled Friday tantrums and sententious honking envelope all you tankshirt bitches, says the fallen prelate to the lottery lady on Wednesdays.

  Smothering silent stalking abortion hymns we whistle at the stained glass when we go there, to the dollar store for the Chinese screaming lead panties.

  It is Thursday, sure, now, so there is that; the days progress much more than we do and so maybe that is why we are going where we are, burying some, digging up others, singing the entire time or what others might call braying; others still, klezmer spirituals, the rumor of slang.

  Lepers

  The lepers towed the mangonel with great difficulty and toted stones with even less aplomb. Every so often they would stop, those with thumbs gauging wind speed. The sky, now a permanent grayness, pushed down around them, discomfiting one to such a degree that he dropped a stone on his foot, imagining the emptying of the earth, a visitation of great height.

  It was the best parade.

  Isn’t it? Edgar, I asked.

  Edgar reminded me that it was a regular Tuesday and that parades had been outlawed by heavy lobbying from the young businessmen’s faction.

  There had been a war. He motioned to the sky with his palms.

  Then why are you shooting at them with your antique pistol, Edgar? I asked.

  Because I am a patriot; besides, he said, they are gaining on us.

  these horse here

  A galericulated cattle horse thief stowed-away abaft behind the crate of ladies overpanties and was betrayed by his eating carrots and was thrown into the sea. This was how
the song began. This is what we had memorized, what we taught our children to sing on great occasions.

  The ragmatical protested like you wouldn’t believe, but remember the malaguena all muffled in trousers, four apiece, on that boat in wartime? We spoke of the frolic of Anne Frank and of how my malapropisms belied a certain predilection for insensitive ahistorical reminiscences.

  If you recall, we also drank.

  Menace

  Bears niggle at pricing worse than usual but nobody darts them; these are meth bears, understand, and they quarrel unabated. We are used to it here in Bloomington, though, and mostly ignore them; in fact, even the IRS refuses to give them “the treatment”--- in a form letter they’ve declared them epistemologically insolvent, their shrewd laundering discomfiture better suited for later days, if at all. They are also protected by the state.

  They tricycle in the streets and when they see kippers they take kippers, no matter that they sit in your hungry baby’s bowl for later, no matter at all.

  Your wife sews them into the cuffs of your jumper.

  Eventually you arrive home with panda-eyes, a constellated forehead, and other lamentation marks.

  Whittled Prosthetics

  Whether it is seen or not, my prosthesis, is of little consequence and I’m of a mind right now to brundle through this here elephant call and deliver unto that slope shouldered breech-birthed woman, the one who made an absolute circus of this elevator, what with her sleeve of popcorn and hemorrhoidal whistling, an old fashioned Gypsy-Americana comeuppance, but I haven’t an elephant call and there is no woman, and for crissakes I am surrounded by musthing elephants!