Swaying Precarious

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” – Shelley

Straight-jacketed and cuffed for sin of Tooth-fang (mocking Death’s assumption of my mirror), I was at liberty to choose: custom-crucifixion, or celebrity-autographed slug (hollow-point splash-effect inside-out – cameras pan dead audience eyes: unthinkable). Oh blessed mercy of The Cross!

Holyman said, “Tender thy name to God’s gulag hand that thou mays’t kiss kid-gloves. Repent.”

But surely Holyman knew slow, lubricious afternoon’s sudden awake-night drunk (throbbing – music – dance) and swayed precarious over the booze-blank I-whole?

He said, “Pray. Pray. Supplicate. Cast away thy Righteous Indignation of the Wronged. Pawn thine ass, idiot, and beg! Else…”

I dunno. All this Mass to From. It almost feels.

“Tell me, Holyman,” I said. “If Winter comes, can Spring up from behind and beat you senseless, pocket yer heart and scram, but anyway: no harm done? Or blast infinities through multi-cell orgasmic merge of womb with stretched pursuit of matter-deep Abstraction’s yearning far? Extend your go-Me trips to radical-immerse with Other?

“Will She blow minds senseless? Will She wear soft clothes?”

Holyman muttered, “Hopeless. Hopeless.”

Silently I asked, not prayed to any god, and certainly not to ‘save’ my sorry ass, for Quagmire Sue’s ascent.

Oh Quagmire Sue! Will your country-root-rock-band survive the ladder-climb – or set folks blue? Open money-flood conduits to Happy – or yield Imperative to fickle segment-think: Market demand of Consume?

Will you still blast life-surround decibels in Freedom-mode, perform raucous gigs – stalwart, sidereal, immense – to tend the anyways of Life, no broke to mend?

Will devote-to-amuse kill genius of explore?

Clock-watched job minutes flush errant avenues till Friday Night’s eternity-trip to uncharted endorphin zones: two hours in Sacred Time you mesmerized der Volk – and me too. Then.

Now you are huge. Do not annihilate us when you peak, Sue, please: do not annihilate yourself with drink…

Holyman closed The Book and scowled.

“I condemn ye to thy dark reward,” he shrugged. “May god have mercy on your soul.”

“Fuck off, Holyman,” I said – what’d I have to lose? “Fuck yer god. And his little dogs too! I’ll see that dark reward, and raise you one life of Eternal Spring. God can play too, if he’s game. So long as he ante’s up.”

Adam Engel lived for your sins -- and he lived well! -- in Fear-and-Trembling, Brooklyn, one of the last gangrenous toes of NYC not yet severed and replaced with a prosthetic gentrification device. 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.