(undergrowth).





bottomless.

walking through the multiple mirror cages with heathery lambs
and heathen lions, luminary and innocent as serial killers
down Calluna Vulgaris Avenue, down a tunnel.
right, left...
up an escalator out into the city.
the noise and crows and all the buildings.
rusted snow. cold winds blowing...
papers thrown,
tossed down sidewalks, side streets
and drenched in dirty damp drugs,
succumbed to tramps and lamps and trash-bugs,
crashed cars & cracked actors down.
Suddenly the two most unordinary clowns
wandering off from the Misplaced Circus;
one was a very tall & thin leather suitcase;
they said their names were Popranolol and Pronethalol,
their act called Pop & Prone:
“What is faster than the eye?” Prone said.
“I can’t.” Pop replied.
“You can’t help it.”
“It tires me out.”
“Makes you miserable,”
“Vague,”
“Even the street signs all look like,”
“Fish,”
“Faster,”
“Farts,”
“Ridiculous. Faster,”
“Arts of cocks, parts of clocks,”
“Not even locks; wrong again, Pops. Faster,”
“Trams!”
“No! Closer. Still faster...”
“Ah! Fast moving trains,”
“Without the rains,”
“Tain, or reflections.”
“Spot on, Pop!”
“Many thanks, Prone.” they were not funny.
not funny at all, and made absolutely no sense,
no cents at tall.
two, and too surreal to be comedians,
looking more like things from a Dali or Gleeson painting.
one, the suitcase, carried a black umbrella; the other was the umbrella,
“We are looking for Inderal Street,”
“Underhill Street?”you asked.

then the rain came and they melted away.
you were standing outside the
Metropolitan Museum of Endless Enigmas,
in Hyde City, on Pleroma Street, beneath the Paul of Tarsus statue.
it was just then that you realized
your name was William James Black (or Blake?
or was it James Morris Sun, possibly Jack K. Whacked
or Edward Van Allan Pope or Poe);
you still didn’t know.
you recall, once, someone saying to you:
"Tough Shit, Eliot!" Feeling like an idiot,
you were just a dumb kid
listening to Radiohead songs, like
"Fake Plastic Trees"
& "How To Disappear Completely"...

[so many years in limbo...]

thirty-three years had passed since you last recalled any part
of your name. since you went
over,
fell
off that ship
the ship
from the bottle
off the bottle
in the bottle
in-
to aseaofalcohol...
(“water & whiskey”)

bottomless.


(umbraclouds)...


 

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