Still life: razor blade, book of matches atop a pile of white sheets of paper… does every eye see it the same?
Tired old rush– tied off, tucked in and sucked away. drop by drop. spots on the wall, unique decoration, jazz writing, surreal hypoglyphics, gimmicks, mexicans say it best– in a song “me quiero nada…” On the street of the Saint, Monica, Mr Cadillac pulls his barrels, 38 blast— BAM! ten bicycle writhers spewed asunder. Flash, thunder. The occult bookstore stands monument to the spot and a pizza joint blasphemies the cradle of nostalgia.
HAD A PIECE LATELY? None of yer fuckin bizness. OH, yeh, bicycles, bicycles, thousands, MILLIONS of bicycles, and rats. Bicycles and rats combo sandwich. No Renfield, he lay on a hospital a week delirious, raving of rats and bicycles… then he died. I say, I was there, I saw it, not Renfield, not bicycles and rats not just then, but i was there, i saw him die. Horrible. Well, not so bad, really, I went out afterwards and had a rat and bicycle sandwich. I never could stand the taste of pizza, the aftertaste of a hand me down childhood romance, even New York style.
Silverfish, California, oh that sure is a nice place, no neighbor sam to terrify your ant gardens. It’s like memory lane, oh such a nice place. But now let me finish… He’d never rode a bicycle in his life, never flown a kite. But he had his own designs, little bottles of bacteria, stacked up in mason jars in a weedy old tool shed, above rows and rows of tenement slum buildings, he lived in them all.
Harlem, teeming with grease, bubbling and mysterious, he controlled the whole sector, he heard the sunday gospel music in his head, his brain circuits were locked in and crossed countries, gazing by industrial moonlight into the murky bottles he collected. A little god, the abnormal child he grew into the depths of his microcosmic universe and it grew into him, pulled his strings like a puppet. Till one day he met his match. He beheld a row of gleaming perfect little white teeth, clicking in the murk. Clicking gleaming perfect little white incisors.
That’s how it started and the clicking grew and persisted in his mind, louder and louder, distracting his thoughts at the dinner table and conventional prayer and incantations that had always kept the fragile balance, his control began to snap and his manners grew dark and brooding. Finally he was cast by his family and friends out into the night. Mania blossomed. He bound up the stairs to the rooftop, blindly, clutching his special jar, the accursed white teeth, and fled off into the sea of teeming millions, emitting strange radio waves. Shady characters in dark suits followed furtively.