+++
In autumn, in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun recedes in strength and duration, like a golden leaf saying half-hearted good-byes. "I am still strong, but you turn away," says the sun. And so we turn.
The Bad Magician heard Bill O'Reilly talking and turned not away, but towards the body. O'Reilly said "I am a warrior" and "I fight battles"--the Bad Magician waited for him to say he cleaned all the hard to remove stains.
The Bad Magician hears outside the norms of place the equivalent of endless fishing weights, a sound like perfect lonely death: it is NoDaddy climbing up the creaking stairs, step by step He climbs. The Bad Magician points. The Bad Magician follows. We climb the broken palace of Bill and spy rats the size of Pit Bulls chewing upon the dying cells of a culture wraith; knock on the door, knock on the door, knock on the door. The wooden creatures wobble open: A butler arrives by steam engine and hands us a loofah, and into the Palace of Bill we stride...
The Palace of Bill smells like fish do when they wear cotton briefs and pretend they are models. NoDaddy moves ahead, the air pushed aside by Dark Matter, and takes the world apart, brick by brick. " Where is Bill the Warrior? Where is the honorable foe? Who calls me out of deepest slumber?" A boy throws a rock from the top of the stairs. He turns and runs. The Bad Magician looks at the rock: it is America. Uh-oh.
NoDaddy pulls at the stairs like crab grass and shakes the roots. A brackish sky descends, then vanishes: the roof becomes a cannon that shoots words. "Shut up! Shut up!" screams the cannons. NoDaddy unleashes a call of pitiless loss: a lament of seafaring birds who watch the sailors drown, soldiers cut by vorpal blades, blood as a sonnet, broken lads on the concrete steps of death, a call relentless until the eyes of god go blind with weeping. The cannons fall. The boy runs out of luck.
The Bad Magician tinkers with a machine made of thread. It sings for him:
Little boy Bill, come blow your horn,
Come blow your horn by the sea
The waves will rise in eventide
And carry you far from me
Where is the fighter, Little Boy Bill? Where is the war of desire? Inside the halls of flimsy constructs, made by monkeys, managed by storms, leased by birds, the Warrior is standing in a line that never moves. NoDaddy addresses the line. Come closer, Bill. Come out. Shhh. Bill, a shadow, stands alone. NoDaddy reaches forward and touches him, as a friend. When shadows vanish we are left with cold ashes. Bill cannot imagine his own mouth. NoDaddy whispers. Bill vanishes.
The Bad Magician can no longer see the Palace. The sky bends light and mountains. Streams and oceans appear on the paper floor. NoDaddy was never there. The Dead are all retired. Shh!--No yelling in their perfection! No bullys in the Silent World! The Bad Magician closes the gate. He follows the rust home and hears NoDaddy at the end of the world, rattling a chain of skulls. NoDaddy never plays for laughs.
+++
Image of 15th century petroglyph from here.
+++
No comments:
Post a Comment