FIFTYTWO DODGE PICKUP



     "Never fear to interfere," the Ace shouldered a spade. "You already have."
     They dug my clown in the ribs. Whipped him stupid. Hung him till he creamed. A shrewdness of apes, a muster of peacocks, a snood of coxcombs, they crowned with thorns my joker.
     I tip my high hat to the cymbals, to the triangles, to this idea on the radio of my consciousness received.
     As they took him down on Friday from the job, dealt the blow of nothing to do, the Queen propositioned the Jack, "What would an anti-ant be? - a whore net, a crazy bug do, some buzzword in a web, all of the above, or just another cypher with imaginary feelers, negative head, x over tan skeleton?"
     "Perhaps the wasp," joked the Jack, "waist of an hourglass?"
     Me - pokerfaced above my hand - I bloody well know they exist. I have been up all night three days consuming coke, skimming the papers, itching in my bones. Every burger I crunch stirs colonies. Incites anti-swarms to subtract from the insight the dim sum of some subliminal ad; dividends you can't afford to split.
     Picture scanning into Chinese twigs in a breeze. Or tea leaves, given enough coke, fallen into characters lousy with Shakespeare.
     I'm down here on the floor - burger and coke on the counter - groping for that characteristic tic tips you anti-feelers at hand… Oop - index picked one up!
     Meteors across parallelogram translates mouth. Building block for beaucoup composite characters. So here it could be like saying tongue my dung, skin that cat, blow the dog or donkey licketysplit to the doctor spit upon the engine's periphrastic chops.
     I don't know. I don't care. It doesn't anti-matter. The rub is to at any cost - split whatever infinitive - stomp.
     After-images crushed crabs. I stood. Ate coke. Sipped at the burger's wallet. Mused over data. Desperate for a - news almost on - breakthrough.
     The present gifted the past; in the sense German, in which tongue gift means poison. As any present kisses the cousin of anybody knowing what I want. How dare you, when I don't know myself?
     Except the trump - what every clown of a joker in town, every card in the pack lacks. Why I'm now back on all fours under the sink, spelunking for that distinctive anti-stink.
     After hours, however, of nosing Ajax, dozing Kleenex, mousing lye, lousing Windex, the only clue turns up is this trap. Once I fall to banging the tuba steel, the tune clarifies: It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a Mozart!
     Back out Gee-zus miner-wise: I got 'em now, these understudies to, in the grasshopper parable, the winner. But the hopper didn't dig smoke a bowl of anti-ants see sharp. Gasters resonant with hallucinatory funk.
     Under the microscope of alexithymia cogitate ergonomically, "I stink therefore I came."
     Get to my feet like cirrhosis of the soul. Uppers also cracked. I look up - and out of the reefer Auntie Death steps. You freeze; cry, "Uncle!" No more shame than a homonym.
     But me, I refuse to admit symptoms of illogic. Because I  feel the bone, and am on the whole. Because the coke, and because the burger impaled outside Dracula's Lincoln; as the parasite eliminates across the ditch one out of sight golden arch.
     "What would an anti-ant be?" the brook, unable to brook any further babble, babbled. Once a lusty epistemologist, she had doubted the fabric of reality, ejaculating syllogism:
     "Polly and Esther screwed a pig named Lester. After, Polly asked which was bester - Polly or Esther? Lester let it fester; then said, 'Although Polly is faster, and Esther ain't no lollygagger, I cotton to Rayon.'"
     Till the gods, pissed at her heresy, made the maid into this obscure creek in the wood; as from the ankles of his ghost they yank the nail.
     "Never fear to interfere," the Ace pocketed her spade. "Because dig it -you already have."     

END