Tag: Absurd

Writing

Fiction — “Where was Freud at Pompeii?”

Posted on by Desmond White

Some surrealism for ya.

A train stop and three occupants. The benches look like grills for our asses. I’m cooking. Temp is what? 99? 103? You can see the swelter in the air. It reminds you of the word “billowing” which is a ridiculous word. The heat’s cooking these benches, prepping my ass to be put on a patty. Train. In the distance. Tiptoeing towards us like bare feet on hot pavement. The blue rocks next to the tracks are shaking. The word clang comes to mind, which sounds like an ethnic slur.

INT. TRAIN

I’m huddled between a chubber in a tie and the meanest blonde I’ve ever wanted. The power lines and electric boxes zoom past – the industrial zones – the other trains – I could be the future. A mound of shatter zips past. Ragnarocks! I imagine a universe constructed with jigsaw pieces most of them lost. A blue spot here, a smiling red there, and gaps in the teeth. I wish the stars were a tapestry, the sun a boiled egg, this train the moon. I want to get out but I can’t (I’m stuck between animal and fiction). Instead barn doors swish, toilets go plunk!, and finally, finally, finally the next stop rolls up.

Creativity isn’t a disembodied head mulling through the multiverse: coldly indifferent, logical, wilting. Creativity isn’t a spade in hand, a pot the other. It can assimilate, steal, kill, and certainly rape. A square is a rectangle, but not. However, we forget that the circle is more natural, a pagan beauty. Creativity itself is not creating. It needs arms, legs, torsos, abdomens, stingers, hair. It’s not freedom, not prison. It walks behind your eyes, away from prying thoughts, below moving blades – where shadow is light. Creativity can be in the stocks and still be stronger. A shopkeeper who doesn’t sell, a werewolf who won’t bite. A rose that listens to the road and makes no sound.

Where was Freud at Pompeii? This train’s taking me to death.

Writing

Fiction — “Kervani”

Posted on by Desmond White

A strange little cult. Inspired by the wonderful scribblings of Borges.

Could be a man or a six-armed cow or a twenty-headed sex goddess.

We can’t tell. There are too many Orders in the way. Too many black-and-white cloaks crinkling like choppy seas of newspaper.

The Orders go as follows: the Nine Apostles, the Elite Select, the Elite-Lite, the Demi-Elders, the Mystical Ring, the Phytes, and finally the endless serfs and smurfs and their bare-chested children and cattle. The Orders follow Kervani. We follow them. We, being Doug and Armani and myself, chafed and sun-scratched and willing to tour Hell just to get a snap of Satan.

They call us Iconoclasts but really we’re photographers, with every news outlet from here to Timbuktu willing to pay us the—eh? Doug just informed me that Timbuktu is two nations over. From here to Jakarta.

I’m thinking the sun’s fried their brains. If I said the world is flat, the earth is the center of the universe, sins build up in the pancreas, we should be bled from our livers to balance the humors, a little man operates the brain, animals compete to reincarnate into ghosts, blood makes the grass grow, I’d be locked in a padded closet. But the masses follow Kervani’s farts like they’re heralding a new age. They save his sweat in vials, listen to his speeches on audiobook.

Tourists, too, in faded green buses. Taking pictures of the shaking girls, skeptical, scandalized, complaining about the heat. The guides lead them in spiritual songs, trying to connect fanny-packed brains to the Order of Things. But mostly they can’t wait to return to five-star mattresses. Can’t blame them. Sometimes I’m tempted to follow along. Get a cheap hotel, a cheap girl.

Other times I have dreams of a different sort. I receive ‘the Cosmic Call.’ So does Doug. And the others. We all do. It’s like a whisper and an itch and a boner, and it’s supposed to be Kervani. The six-armed, twenty-headed sex cow.

We dwindle. I’ll find a camera, smashed, dust on the lens. Another convert. Those of us who remain hope to sneak the Vanguard, to rush the tent with the golden wool. An exclusive interview, a photo-op, a Q&A with Kervani looking like a mystic hobo in his sack robes (or her, lovely, in her coral pink scarf; or it, bleating sagely).

And maybe we have other reasons to make the hajj.

Instead, I take pictures, and wait, and wonder if God grew sick of Moses.

Writing

Spoken Word — “These were my brothers”

Posted on by Desmond White

[A Spoken Word piece I improvised on-the-spot when somebody (as prank vengeance for doing the same to her) signed me up for Bean Night.]

These were my brothers.

The oldest breathed water and wouldn’t stay in the sea. Sprinting across the crags, he lived puddle to puddle. Why not just stay in the ocean? But I think he was broken.

The second found cadavers that walked and talked and kissed but were dead. Second would give them pieces of his soul so they could glow, but soul isn’t sunlight.

Third lived in a cloud fishing for people. When he caught them he would reel them up and eat them. Little stink pieces of heart and blood dripped from the vapor. I would have liked Third, maybe. At least he knew there were worse things than being lonely.

Fourth lived by an ugly statue, a humpty dumpty god. At night he burned his hands in fireplaces, and in the morning he pieced the monument together with Third-World tools. Noon, he would write poetry on its corpse.

When the Fourth died, there were no children to complete his work. But dying isn’t disappearing.

These were my brothers. They speak to me and make me want to do terrible things.

Satire

A Beatnik Imitation — “Americalypse”

Posted on by Desmond White
I wanted to imitate those kinds of elegies by beatniks who thought they were broken prophets or something.

 

Dear Post-America, no, Postal America,

I’m coughing myself to sleep on howling steps that were once the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, pillowed by the tombstones of Louis and Clark, spooning the mummified corpse of Sacagewea. I can see twin towers covered in fuselage and the dead men they swallowed. Before that we didn’t do ruins.

Now we are the modern Pompeii buried beneath newspapers and motel sixes, beneath brick and stone and the bones of Pharisees and Wall Street Brokers.

I’m foreign in a familiar land. I’m a bookless, homeless, bombed-out, burned-up pioneer in a dead world made of dead words facing a sea-washed statue liberated from meaning, her flame out, her arm stretched in the air as she sinks in the sand. Over there is a mountain with four worn-away faces, there’s Washington’s limp phallis, a white house sick with the blood of Indians and presidents. I start to think this is all one big middle finger to whoever came up with the phrase ideas never die and the phrase I’d give you the shirt off my back and to whoever thought democracy was immortal.

And I know the devil’s been most patient.

Satire

Case of the Key Espy

Posted on by Desmond White

From The Santa Barbara Hounds Case Files

Case File #1 #86

Agents Involved: Wilder, Percipheles and Reeves.

February 18th.

Wilder found a key #1203-16 on the grass near Storke Tower. On its head was printed University of California Santa Barbara: Duplication Prohibited. Attached to the keychain was a bottle opener with the word Bathroom taped on the side. Wilder took the keychain off and attached it to his own set of keys. After consulting Reeves and Percipheles about Case #86, he then sleuthed campus trying the key on different doorways, to no avail. HOUNDS!

February 19th.

During an interview with the campus newspaper The Bottomline, Wilder overheard mention that the key to The Bottomline’s handicapped restrooms was missing! He said he didn’t know anything about it. HOUNDS!

February 20th.

Wilder and Percipheles checked The Bottomline’s handicapped bathrooms. The key worked! After relieving themselves, they went back to The Studio and closed the case. They were going to celebrate with victory wine, but a fly had gotten into their bottle of Barefoot Sauvignon Blanc.

“What a buzz kill,” quipped Percipheles quite successfully. Reeves drank some anyway. They decided not to return the key as Wilder wanted to keep the bottle opener.

Case Solved