Ma gavte la nata

Section	Theme	Elements
A	Virtuous	Some kind of quiet introduction, bases, flat calm. Spirit full of who-knows-what.
B		Dogfighting. Mending. For it is not by our words or even our faith that we are made men.
A		Perhaps the domestic element. First tinge of voodoo.
B		Space for humanity. some kind of altercation? Some explanation of why he is soportado
A	Desirous	Quiet morning ride. All things licentious.
B		Hints and blossoming, inexplicit.
A		Perhaps some place alone, underwhelmed, revising the articles of his faith
B		Explosion, sweat-trembling, point of failure
C	Doubting, self-loathing, syncretism	Confusion of elements. A seeking for salvation. For the rapture.
D		Absolute knowledge of hellfire.
C		Syncretist mumblings. Gwo-bon ange on loan, some swedenborgian space element
D		Absolute doubt of the power of salvation
C		Oomantic rumblings. A grasping at straws.
D		Prayer as talisman, as psychological failure. Conclusion of rightness. return to trunking.

Balmy (notes)

Domesticity a balm for all and all. He’s entered into contracts, into binding agreements that he’ll honour through sickness, if such there be. Through health, through disappointment, through growth and through necrotic vomitings, meiosis, aggrandizing and braggardly foreboding – the detritus of a soul at large.

Not ducking responsibility. Not shirking. Meeting the disregarded task, the drudgery, backstraight chinhigh. Always. Seeking rightness, feeling affirmation in what is done, what is right. A pair of heeled shoes tossed in the storm drain as he takes shanks’ nag, hoofs it home. Doing what is right. 62% of all journeys by car traverse less than 6 miles. Upstanding. Decent.

He’s found peace in these things, the traces. The battled leads, the lines. The chains that measure the breadth of things, the links, the spans and the shaftments. A means by which one might measure, weigh, plumb one’s solid involvement in the world. Metron and trochee, whole hurled elements spat or smoothed through the lingual casemates.

There’s a tremendous and lasting pleasure to be found in another’s presence, to the exclusion of all others. A joy there – an unconsidered tithing, an offering up. To continue that alert breathing, to fossick out, to turn over the stones on another’s more proper utterances, essences, the floating rib hooked and whole under the flattened palm. In the night to reach out to another’s body and to find that hip, humped fawns, deeper, darker than blue – to find surprising, reckless desire at dawn. A paradigm, shifted.

And he’s correct – upright. He’s upstanding. He breathes a light, mint-scented mist, flosses, rarely drinks. A beer, occasionally. For what is right is what is written, and in what is written he can find it all. Not with an arrogant certainty, nor without a tremulous doubt. But it’s right there – it’s right, there. Inerrant, whole as written, beyond question (but not interpretation). And in us all that petit bon ange, the thing in itself, fleck or spark or grain. That which we are, beyond all else.

Saddled (notes)

He saddles up and rides at dawn a long trail between nettlebanks, idly considering the forager’s life. This early light pinning the cooled body of a roadkill rabbit or young hare, lurcher coursed, blood matted fur with darker flecks. The darker wild onion stalks now several feet high in places alongside the road and in the grit and glass spray of the verge abandoned gloves, pacifiers, condoms, detritus to be picked over or poached. Unwant, disuse. Fewer cars at this hour and sky flat dark in the east like the belly of a priapic mule. Spitting rain in lighter gusts and the neon whipping on his cuffs and back as if the flayed skin of a larger man had been hung around him as an afterthought.

Last evening the squawk of a roadbound tortoise – at a new extremity. Walked to tremulous safety by a passing and flat-footed motorist, the shield-beast at arms’ length he waddle-walked to the shoulder. Bushes herald the animal’s hurried retreat. Think of its meat, cooked in its shell on ribald coals, a smoked tinge (think of jerky strips) – every thing he sees with its underbelly, everything exposed, torrid, licentious.

Fogged (notes)

Crabs along the wider paves and slabs and half-cocks his leg making it to the hedged-in passage leading to the front door humming and hovering almost on toes and light-stepping in a precarious dance one foot the other as he reaches into one pocket and the side pocket in reach of the key and then slides it in, slips it in, forces it hard into the lock and he’s in now where he can be who he is and how and with back almost parodically against the door stands defeated and he knows defiled again by want or by his own flimsy useless will relents and gives it full bloom. That thing that thing that thing wanted and humbling and altogether wrong. Fantastic couplings for one wretched second. Panting like a bloody beast. Stamping and snorting. Stopstopstop. Stop.

Across the hall he can see that the table is laid. A glass of spring water holding particles swirling and he’s not yet convinced that the water is not in fact somehow contaminated, unclean – that it has not in fact eddied around the carcass of a bloat-felled lamb or some filthy cloven hoof before being sloshed into that glass which God knows may not be clean and will hold a memory, an infringement, some bacilli or curse that will clench his gut awake at early dawn and condemn him to hours spent wringing a gritty gruel from his remorseless insides. A flood that will wash away all the good along with all the bad and leave him hollowed in its wake.

Sounds of domesticity – of cutlery. Shirt’s yardage cooling at the placket’s tuck – gusset spotted and likely rank, reasty. Only seconds have passed since he swooped birdlike into this house and his head has yet to clear, fogged, turpid. The fluttering or clanging at his chest; the damp palms; the unmodulated and tremulous voice that startles as it deepens. She has really empowered herself, she is paler now.

Hounded (notes)

Hounded. Beef heart unpegged, cloistered. That furious chopping, yawing, yowling. Flung sputum flecks frothed in with tarblood, hands flapping and drooling. Meaty flews and a tear the length of a scrubby neck, logarithmic concerns for the dipping needle. What rends and what floods with bile, unconscious fears pulsing at the neck veins.

The first time he had to sew up an animal’s ruptured gut his own heaved and hollowed, the blood a call to some deeper resentment – a parasitic carnivore, hunkered in the maw. Spastic contractions of a valve, bitter tongue root plastered and swollen, blurting in the dry teeth. Waiting for redemption like all undue warriors, a pit of muscled luck and tools plundered or jerry-rigged; a bone-saw and stubbed needles sharpened regularly on a bike-mounted stone, flat-end tweezers to leverage tooth from bone, saps and clamps and sutures. Gloves. Knucklepads. Pliers for heavy lifting and a bag of filthy rags, poultices, tinctures. Chalk dust and clay marl.

The sound of it and the stench, pitbull with its yellowed fascia torn and steaming in the January air. Belling and coursing, each dank and pissedin corner hides the fixer’s stool, the saw bones, God’s lonely man brought in and brought low – an office, a calling, a decision. For it is not by our words but by our actions that we are made men .

Orifice, sphincter, puncture; slop of something’s sudden dead innards as its bowels gush loss and failed will, a useless thing with no hope, no use, no power. Or its whining and keening, haggard and pissrolled, flung aside and despised, booted, a vomited caucus of better intent. Gutterdog.