The Patient Lies Etherized Upon the Table

Let him be. Give him a cigarette if he comes to. So he’s dying of lung-cancer, so what? It’s a terminal case. Dose him with morphine whenever he asks for it, whether for analgesic or recreational satisfaction. I know, I know: “We’re gonna do something, something serious and huge, we’re gonna fix stuff.” No yer not. You’re just gonna talk about stuff on the Information-overloaded Dirt Road of Surveillance and Road Pizza.

Everything you say — and write — will be held against you. Not that that matters either. What are They gonna do? What can They do but pretend to be “specialists” called in to save the poor bastard from the Grinning Reaper’s icey-caress in “the nick of time” — so he can run up more bills: Dead Men have no coverage. Eligability is lost immediately upon separation of meat from mind. Whatever. The Beatles were off the mark, but close. It’s not, “all you need is love,” but “all you got left is love.” Find someone to lay with and be etherized. Smoke a doob if it helps you relax.

Good-luck, and Au river. Ciao. See ya,

The Phantom and Staff of /dev/null

Celebration Over You

Recall way back almost a convalescent
scene of clammy sheets stained brown
with blood, the stiff replaced by you.
Night lingered: some kind of…must be this
huge mistake everywhere always like a
popular tune. Go ahead, pull my finger. See?
Even a fart draws nothing but blank stares.
Doctors goofing in surgery talk travel,
long vacations earned rummaging your core
for evidence. So the operation made sense
after all  — what’d you expect?  
Dollars all around and celebration
over you. May thy name and all it stood for
— what? anything? — rest in peace

Adam Engel has traveled the farthest regions of cyberspace, where Dark-matter meets Doesn't-matter; and Anti-matter, despite its negative connotation and dour point-of-view, excercises rights of expression protected by Richard Stallman's GNU/Free Software Foundation and CopyLeft agreement, if nobody and nothing else. Having spent many years studying Boobus Americanus (Summum Ignoramus), allegedly the most intelligent mammal on earth -- after its distant relative, Homo Sapiens -- in various natural habitats (couch, cubicle, bar-stool, ball-game -- televised or 'real-time') -- Engel has thus far related his observations of and experiences with this most dangerous of predators in three books -- Topiary, Cella Fantastik, and I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague (the combined international sales of which have reached literally dozens, perhaps as many as seventy, with projected revenue to top three digits by decade's end! Truly a publishing phenomenon). Engel is Associate Editor of Time Capsule Books, a division of Oliver Arts & Open Press, published in limited editions for a tiny, highly specified, though eclectic, target-audience: people who actually read books. He can be reached at adam@new.dissidentvoice.org Read other articles by Adam, or visit Adam's website.