Dead Lamont, Page 2

  This is like Tuesday all over again.

  Fuck off, Wednesday…and there is temporin everywhere my feet are, which is maybe why I tap dance with such potency and vigor.

  Truant Death Cake

  The truant mailman ate the sick child's cake.

  A stop light manifested its animus towards a one-eyed disco roller skater.

  Lamont called a mailman on his ironic rotary phone, offsetting its effect by using a mechanical pencil he stole from the sperm bank.

  A child was reminded of all he didn't understand about death and promises.

  Bunt cake doesn't understand when needs must.

  A roller skate wheel, like a wobbled and concave miracle, hit a Spaniard making fists.

  ‘Flowers for the moribund’, reads the card, said the mother.

  Christ, Menard should have returned with medicine and gum like fifteen minutes ago, long before the sundering of Matlock by that jazz neighbor with his New York sitar and occidental blue veined hickies.

  The fucking yo-yo sprang from the glove box, lacking anthropomorphism, and made the man regret the pastime of step children.

  An Old Italian pointed to the road and then to his horse and then to his wife, in that order, and in a manner which defied ambiguity.

  Nobody noticed there was no clapping.

  A mailman carried a picture of a comrade that was feared mauled.

  The action potential of a taut phone cord is bidirectional.

  The man with fiddle backed acne and truncated attention attended to, in an uncharacteristically assiduous way, the escape of his own shadow, jumping in place.

  When you want a cake, don't look for one to be delivered.

  Raymond's wanton cur bowdlerized the man of his fez.

  He unfolded his hand, the Spaniard, and dropped the teeth to chase the wheel.

  A female organ transplant courier stopped off for a Tom Collins at RJ's Emporium and SayNuthin' Check Ca$hing.

  When one of your breasts is larger than the other the natural choice is a windbreaker and a borrowed book on card tricks.

  A lung and a baby and a windbreaker walk into a bar.

  Two-hands

  Certainly there are the things we talk about suffused with the maw of bitten tongues and we speak in a way limned; she passes a note held like a dove and he forms lurched in the corner a bending curious way of inattention yet he takes the note and strains a casual polity and then leaves.

  Across the park the mothers and fathers sway under the leaden weight of mittens passing like ours, el tiempo pasando como si fuera de ribbons of {‘…’}, nothing, as always, and then he went on forgetting elementary conversational strut.

  In a moment he stopped and watched a man and a girl argue over the span of five minutes whereupon slapping happened and blue skies yawned and forgot everyone.

  Nascar Bar

  Mansard haircut, radiant, not going away, and you and I stared at him and his plate of effigy shrimp, Mache twists touted as benign regurgatants and you commented astutely about how if this was how it was going to be you’d be better off eating the faux ontology proffered by your thinly bearded rhetoric professor standing in the flower pot holding wilting warring gerunds and a sly playground boner. That is a very real watering can you’re carrying off, ever getting smaller, and lighter, you with your big smile, me with my moon sized laugh.

  Friends

  Father, I’ve a friend, a simpatico mate whose cycle will link to my own stochastic maxillary emissions.

  That’s assuming much about the proximity of trailer row and the sacrosanct tedium of Chinese checkers; by the way, aren’t you preclamsic?

  The fuck you say, cheater!

  Bucolic

  The sisters griefless and hours doubted yet they adhered to a violence, sin embargo, and played Mancala with hail stones, shivered in grey tantrum, and he regretted what he had said when he pulled down a handful of clouds and yelled into its seams, words alluding to cheating: Fucking Cheats. Cheating cheats. Fucks!

  The cloud responded by freezing his hand, shattered it with an otherwise affable westerly torque. It reminded him of that time his granddaddy delivered a cursed calf on the coldest Wednesday in the almanac.

  His dead sisters’ sclerotic floral dress pockets burst and the sun ingratiated itself in seldom shadow and they danced and kicked and the other brothers fought to steady the ladder that dangled from the foot at the end of a brother who struggled.

  He hung onto the cloud.

  He was a stupid brother , they thought, and as for their sisters, well, they are doubtless unacquainted with the niceties of kingly sport, comport themselves in a cheap and small manner; dead or not, though, their grabbing from the air their brother’s newly manifested ghost hand and slapping it against their thighs was in poor taste and father will have something serious to say, later on, sometime during the night when he can’t find his frame of reference and falls from the second floor bathroom window. Where’s the goddam ladder, he will say.

  Gin breached a poor levy of bad teeth and caught wind: You three are very bad sisters, he will say, very bad sisters. The brothers will lean the ladder against the barn and take turns jumping; they will jump and father will catch not a one.

  Pony

  Where there was whether and ewe were also an apocrypha of herons and a heretic and weather events abiding the mounted pony riders to dismount to lean on their bright green burial shovels and admire the obtuse shadows cast by the declension of the children with knives chasing geese. The pony I was riding rose on its hind legs and knocked the ice cream off of Lamont's cone to which he reacted with comic dudgeon and slapped and slapped and slapped that goddam pony.

  Delta Gate D-29

  A midget suffering beneath a Weltschmerz of forehead laughs at a feather-banged townie aping an urbanites glide; she has an orthopedic boot, the midget not the townie.

  A mountebank is there, too, festooned with the orthodontia of wild douchery: double Blue-Tooth connections united by a ginger and merkinish Vandyke; he closes a laptop sacerdotally.

  The freaks rehearse, loop, appear, repeat, die, become reborn in nightmare; they stretch the length of the terminal.

  An amblyopic fat child makes a pig's ear of an old man's improperly stowed colostomy bag; an Army man dusts powdered sugar from a distant lady's taut blouse with a lascivious counter-clockwise rotation of his head. And that fucker gets to board with Zone 1.

  A priest mutters to an atheist, "This is a Braille symphony etched into a dry foot.”

  I stand with my back to the sun, arms outstretched, fingers extended; I make shadow mustaches on the faces of sleeping fools.

  “It goes on, it seems, unabated" replies the atheist, “hummed between the toes, as it were; it’s the perfect counterpoint to the sound of unconscious clatter, that fretting of misplaced dotards splashing tub water.”

  The urbanite glides by in a Gucci wheelchair; she is the star of the airport and she knows it.

  She makes me want to mock her with my legs.

  And so I do.

  Plans

  You found me ridiculous and I shrugged it all off because of my appointments, my places to be, but in the mauve suit of my dead grandfather, you asked? Yes; it bespeaks business and strikes notes of old world hauteur. Why do you blow such bubbles? There is laughter in each one. Your laughter could fill mason jars, bell jars of ringing preserved disregard. You said that I will never convince the bank to give me a loan, drunk on gin as I am. How else to un-fray sleeves and reconstitute ambition than with free bank money? Your father manages the bank. He has sideburns. I have sideburns, yes, prosthetic ones, you keep reminding me; I lack the facial hair for modern business. Leading my giraffe around, high-stepping her in a wide circle, blending big-top showmanship with Broadway arrogance, I convince you that, despite the gin, I am still sober as a Briss; you say so yourself. Your eyebrows are so unkempt it is hard to see the sarcasm on your face; you are a conspiracy of hair. It crawls up your thi
ghs like ivy, nearly choking the rose tattoo that once took bloom on your ass, the one you got after we ran through the bladdernuts smeared in marmalade, erratic as rolling apples. I will not now or ever, for the record, note the impropriety of your sheer white bikini. Bubbles stick to my hair, bursting near my ears--wet soapy laughter. The giraffe, distracted by the ontological skepticism invoked by your bikini, walks into a power line (in its defense, it was too low). And you call rubber leashes absurd! Gin you say? All gone, but when the bottle stops spinning we'll head in the direction of its stale socket, the one that smells of my pipe and your chewing gum. We'll get more after my appointments, my beloved; we shall make it part of our plans. Your giraffe is atwitch beneath the tarp; I told you he wasn't quite dead, but you spent good money on a tarp and you are set to put it to use. We roll it up in the tarp and start dragging it behind us, towards the bank. Put on some pants, you hirsute thing! Do you want to startle the tucotuco!? I will stand in your father's office. I will jog in place. I will do Thompson's stretches against his desk. I will perform other feats of credit worthiness. If your father doesn't approve my loan I will ball up my fists and make wild cloud noises, perhaps diffusing through the ceiling. Will she marry me, your daughter, I'll ask, looking over my shoulder towards where you're sitting; you rise and fall to the cadence of an unconscious giraffe. He just might pull through. He smells of jerky near where he was power lined. You are sitting side saddle across his belly, blowing bubbles. You are my dream. I'm on the rise, my stock in its ascendancy, I'll yell, when the henchmen arrive. Love is what keeps your daughter from being overrun by weeds: my love.

  Simpatico Flagrant

  Five-foot three manifestos call for abrupt platonic mixed drinks and X calls about and walks and

  there is a great nothing.

  Bundled want in furious synapses shift subtle awareness -- light, shadow, yelling,

  a black man,

  an Injun,

  idioms of all sorts slapping and why we don’t know any of the threads others tug is

  beyond the scope and we’ll work it off the lady says the man

  and so he shall as wanting as a ginger walker staid in black narrowed in the shadows bleary against the oblique ventricles of alleys

  where at all hours pederasts

  hunch & leer

  and spin donuts with their Technicolor plaid candy vans smacking doors shut like the breastplates of jangling Slavic lady skaters.

  Enough docile patter says the lady to the overcoat

  hello Bloomington

  you morning

  To grind the very wheat from even the ghosts of your teeth requires nostalgia and presumably at least one good tooth; or, maybe, lacking a junk bond trader’s jaw for business, the juxtaposition of one rough stone and the hands of piano tuner. I wake to find that your shrewdly bargained-for yard sale pigs have had a monkey’s way with the knick-knacks; I point with my chin towards the constituents of your amateur piggery, busy again entangling themselves in your sedentary husband’s sustaining wires and garrulous feeding tubes. Let us shower, you say, and we do; we shower and the lead pipes scream a brown gerunding knifing nonsense at us and you laugh as we grapple like post-op onanists at the sliver of soap.

  We frotteur against Tuesdays with squeaky pudenda; Wednesdays with a mere nod, mandibles tucked, tipping forward the whole of our torsos; and Thursdays we pretend are Fridays because Fridays remind you of the unsettled frenzy of nurses’ zippers and cocaine. We do not live much more that we expect we should, and whether that's even what we've obtained most doubt.

  That husband over there seems to be petting a pig but he isn't; it is just the marionetted concomitant of mismanaged porcine egress. See how he waves!

  We require booze stipends, a chess timer, mariachi klezmorim, and a nosegay of band-aids to fortify our efforts against this tri-jointed quim-slap of a Bloomington Monday, and there you go again, winning poorly, you bepimpled surrogate, howling statistics that mean as much nothing as a horse trapped beneath a tampered rafter; remember the one you led there with that stolen windsucking leash brushed with a fetid integument of aus jus? Yes you do. I said you do.

  It is just a fucking day, though, you say, and we bow, bumping helmets, whinnying like mashed thumbs.

  F2

 

  Snapping contradicts listening and my goddamn self shivers and still you drive up and then in an arc pull from a sack your flute; and I thought you had sandwiches, the advent of consideration in want of sunny things, but ‘father me drunkard’, your shouts said, and I admired the persistence of castanets.

  ‘Why are there no Elizabethan bell jars, charming apothegms and lilywater sundries? I’m scarcely at a loss for attending vice and I keep snapping.

  Lamont partakes of little after the introductions and father whets druthers and breaks noses in the bullfight bleachers and addresses faux Spaniards in the ‘usted’ form while the sky bleaks and cracks; he hands crinkled cincos to a man in standard pants and lurching gums.

  Would be that my face averted convention, swashbuckling and arrogant with sebaceous revolt; in a word, yes, verdad, no, true, wrong?

  Claro que no, captain; los cincos, immediamel, friend, thanks.

  The bulls clatter and robot makes small wagging sounds to get him flicking off what he had been programmed to understand about night.

  We’d much pulling and glancing ahead of us, facing an afternoon smile and the elongating slowly rotating shade of dead bulls.

  Ole, said Lamont, and father wept and robot went haywire claiming the flute somehow belittled them both.

  Dutch_3

  Slacks for the mending and Genevieve to do the re-tethering, equidistant left, table up, and I yelled “Sarasota and flannel!”

  Dreamscape those balloons, Thomson, and Reynolds listened, his table on sprawl and swooning in a seized head. Reynolds packed the area, a grandiose remedy, Walgreen’s rum and Pablo strutting with the prosthetic grace of awkward Russian idiom, but even if Pablo arrives, the mare keeps graying, and we speak very little of this down our sleeves to warm our arm hair; indeed there would be no point, we flail in sleeveless tanks!

  Time seized the Tiananmen clowns, of course, elbowed even the sawhorses, the ruthless cake absent of intent that a lady of standing carried in a hatbox labeled ‘party’. He had his, doubtless, and hitting he smote, jackass air; hitting against this he seized her, the bulbs the ceiling grew to light the old tapeworms eating sounds of food recorded on grainy spools, to the devil with the what was left; still, though, in his retropolitan tweed, Pablo does, and points, too, at the pie table, and castanets a clicker to summon dance, get up old and earn a slice, slap ceiling, thighs, all in the direction of the click, left for stopping, blouse, cake, unbutton into red air, then eat. Pull up your socks first, hard enough to mean something, soft enough to not break toes. Repeat.

  Bowlers of

  Emergent Barristers

  There was a little man caught in a mousetrap; a sticky one, not a gruesome one--the trap, not the man.

  His legs protruded from one end, feet describing ten and two; it was an unlikely place for a siesta, he thought.

  He wasn't wearing any shoes.

  The man had been the undoing of many mice, but never one of his own kind; in fact, were it not for the victim being so small and irrelevant, the man thought he might have had qualms.

  On hands and knees he searched along the walls and floorboards for a possible point of entry and found by the front door a set of little black loafers and spats; a miniature umbrella leaned against the wall and supported a rather rakish bowler hat.

  On either side of the door were several other sets of equally tiny shoes, scattered like droppings.

  Christ! We've a plague of tiny barristers, the man yelled.

  The man tore up the stairs to tell his wife.

  He opened the bedroom door to find his wife covered in tiny men, all nude save for the few who still wore
their bowlers.

  The man stood there staring at the colony; their emergent movements, as caught sidelong in the mirror, resembled the flow and ebb of a single, regular sized man wearing thirty-seven miniature hats.

  Genevieve

  Then the legs that her season spoke of, not avoiding the spell the spring air carried, Bach and mailman whistle, kicked at the sun scalded blighted tree and limbs fell and spirited the birds to a hell of unintended flight; they all fell, in feathers, in knockings, and the light girl danced in a dress that bespoke both indigence and candid glee. The embroidery was a rare Ugandan lace, the catalyst of distant woe, patricide, the fires of fathers and a smoke that stained bark. Genevieve spun and kicked and told the boy with the binoculars, not himself a father, to hold them backwards when watching the sun; distance maximized, perceived or otherwise, will stave retinal scorch and unhone small beams into wide flowery patches of warmth that are most affable; this pleased the boy who stared, unafraid.

  Bunyan

  There was a small girl who sat in her yard near a tree because her mother told her that the tree was alive; it would move at night towards the house, she said, to peer into the windows and remember what it was like to be young.

  What are you doing sitting on that trashcan so near to that tree, said the little girl's father, awkwardly, not recognizing the tree.

  Do you want to encourage lightening?

  After a week of this some of the children in the neighborhood began sitting on their own trashcans in front of the tree. There was the avuncular hare-lipped girl, a boy with an advancing forehead, and even a teenage mom who brushed her hair out like summer.