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A train roar through him whistle blowing... boat whistle, foghorn, sky rocket burst over oily lagoons... penny arcade open into a maze of dirty pictures... ceremonial cannon boom in the harbor... a scream shoots down a white hospital corridor... out along a wide dusty street between palm trees, whistles out across the desert like a bullet (vulture wings husk in the dry air), a thousand boys come at once in out- houses, bleak public school toilets, attics, basements, treehouses, Ferris wheels, deserted houses, limestone caves, rowboats, garages, barns, rubbly windy city out- skirts behind mud walls (smell of dried excrement)... black dust blowing over lean copper bodies... ragged pants dropped to cracked bleeding bare feet... (place where vultures fight over fish heads)... by jungle la- goons, vicious fish snap at white sperm floating on black water, sand flies bite the copper ass, howler monkies like wind in the trees (a land of great brown rivers where whole trees float, bright colored snakes in the branches, pensive lemurs watch the shore with sad eyes), a red plane traces arabesques in blue substance of sky, a rattlesnake strike, a cobra rear, spread, spit white venom, pearl and opal chips fall in a slow silent rain through air clear as glycerine. Time jump like a broken typewriter, the boys are old men, young hips quivering and twitching in boy-spasms go slack and flabby, draped over an outhouse seat, a park bench, a stone wall in Spanish sunlight, a sagging furnished room bed (outside red brick slum in clear winter sun- light)... twitching and shivering in dirty underwear, probing for a vein in the junk-sick morning, in an Arab cafe muttering and slobbering -- the Arabs whisper "Medjoub" and edge away -- (a Medjoub is a special sort of religious Moslem lunatic... often epileptic among other disorders). "The Moslems must have blood and jissom.... See, see where Christ's blood streams in the spermament," howls the Medjoub.... He stand up screaming and black blood spurt solid from his last erection, a pale white statue standing there, as if he had stepped whole across the Great Fence, climbed it inno- cent and calm as a boy climb the fence to fish in the forbidden pond -- in a few seconds he catch a huge cat- fish -- The Old Man will rush out of a little black hut cursing, with a pitchfork and the boy run laughing across the Missouri field -- he find a beautiful pink arrow- head and snatch it up as he runs with a flowing swoop of young bone and muscle -- (his bones blend into the Beld, he lies dead by the wooden fence a shotgun by his side, blood on frozen red clap seeps into the winter stubble of Georgia). |
