Last Night

Last night sleep refused me entrance into its anodynic domain with increasing resistance. Intermittently I would turn on my side, reach for my bedside lamp, turn it on, and read Headbirths. The Turks and Asians are milling around in the Führer's room. They are setting up their Döner Kebab stalls and selling six tees for ten marks, respectively; as Helmut Schimdt pontificates on the virtues of the pill. The non-practicing Lutheran has taken over the pulpit and the altar will remain, barren.

They keep a cat and still have no child.

They give birth to Athene at the crest of their skull. They shall nurture her. An immaculate conception.

Why push little Karl or Gerhard out of the poor unsuspecting cervix, when Germany is severed at the head by ideologies: communism and capitalism. No, once conceived, let them fall off the precipice, desperately grasping at the inhospitable uterus. They shall all meet again in the Rheine.

Thirty years later, give or take, I sit here contemplating the rise of Jewry, and how Europeans are still grappling with their sterile wombs after all these years. Take a pill, once more, vanquish this thought, take these palpitations and allow me to sleep.

Auto De Fé

When 'me' became rapt in my immediate carnal desires, and myself was the end of those desires, the raison d'être; I sought and intended to exhaust my flesh.

To rid myself of these demons. In the process I pierced my eyes, wore gloves over my hands, stuffed my ears with bright orange ear plugs, and held my nose with my right hand. My tongue I held too dear. Instead I walked with a pair of black sunglasses over my bandaged eyes, holding a cane and a top hat to boot, and I walked to the nearest tea house. There I sat down at the furthest table from the entrance. I asked my good friend, the waitress, Luise Dorothea, a large stout lady of Bavarian descent, to bring me a cupful of earl grey tea every hour on the strike of the grand clock behind her ancient Samovar.

I asked her to describe the tea with her powers of perception that I had so willfully forsaken. She said the tremor over the surface of the tea was like that of a great stygian lake, fuming with prehistoric fumes that would surely scald and incense my tongue. I nodded. She knew that 'it' had started. I was undergoing the last procedure.

You see, Dorothea had been the ear to many of my musings and eyes to the chalk sketches in my large notebook. She fought it first, tried to persuade me, but she learnt very soon that "my flesh had to go." My heart could not bear to beat underneath all this sin. It had to be shed.

My cerebral hemispheres, they alone were capable of instructing me. I yielded to them.

Frozen

On my way home: my muscles and sinews cling to my bones longingly, dreaming of summer days sprawled on the beach, in the good company of Les chemins de la liberté, my body bare to the radiant features of Apollo, except for my groins and face, the latter cool and shaded by the undulant brim of an emerald green bucket hat.

I walk past a white land-owner as he waits in the glacial conditions; waiting patiently to deny the bare grass, the warmth of his dog's shit. He will place the polyethylene bag carefully over his hands, nonchalantly thrusting his hand to grasp the newly produced excrement of this overtly fecund, recto-anal canal. I see four separate pieces of shit aligned like the stars on the curbside grass. The dog moves along a bit, not caring to inspect the colour or shape of his production, but to sniff the grass further ahead. Likely to spare himself the stench of a close encounter. This man, however, willingly stoops to clasp the brown manifestations of digestion. Shit, dog shit on the ground, yet he will laugh and scorn at the immigrants who wash their own ass instead of wiping it. He will sit around his poker table, enjoying his brew, speaking of his "paki friend" who uses water to clean his ass.

I walk along, making my observations, moving hurriedly past Cody, outside the frathouse. I move swiftly to the sound of an orchestra, raging in my ears. Here's Mike, he's got a job, he drives a car manufactured in Canada. He stands, slothful, outside the rehabilitation centre for alcoholics. His wife is not with him. She pays a man. Enters a room, decorated to resemble a Hindu temple, as accurately as it can be perceived on Queen street. She's wearing her tight-fitting yoga pants, purchased on Bloor. Now she's doing the upside down dog, and learning the eight pillars of Ashtanga, from the Swami. Swami, goes and takes a bathroom break, as he charges Mike's wife 30 dollars an hour. Swami now washes his ass with water.

I look at Mike, and then move along, still swaying to the voices and instruments in my head.