Willie Smith - June 2005

 

THE RED PRIEST

Nothing happening really. Safe in bed between the sheets; head upon the pillow; mind on cloud nine; soul nested with a cuckoo. But there I stood – penis in pencil sharpener. It was the parakeet I was after.

All afternoon we had been listening to a Vivaldi mandolin concerto. The arpeggios threw the parakeet, whose name was Bluebeard, into ecstasy. I had set the CD to repeat the last movement, because then the mandolinist got  it on best.

  

I had been composing on my Smith-Corona a letter to the editor. Bluebeard also got off on my typing. And I tended to type fast during the cadenzas – the whole gestalt feeding back into quite a furious lot of chirping typing opinionated vivace.

Bluebeard – nicknamed Gilligan – hopped down to the red plastic feeder beside the water bottle. Filled his bill with bird seed. I took a break from cranking the sharpener. Sniffed my palm, eyeing through spread fingers and steel bars the bird.


The palm smelled of seed. It wasn’t – English being riddled with lies – really seed; but rather pre-ejaculate. Neither was it bird seed Gilligan gobbled. You couldn’t grow a bird from that. It was hemp seed. It would grow pot.

Envisioning a kettle cloaking Bluebeard’s cabeza, I slowly returned to grinding. Sure, I was nuts; honing penis down to the nuts. But how else rape a parakeet to act out the chestnut of a flying fuck? Which I indeed did give –witness the letter – a diatribe against a witness in the current AC/DC abuse inquest.

Unlike, however, most nuts, I hold the key to my madness – kiss its etiology; likewise certain secret etymologies; not to mention the aforementioned witness. I am, you see, religiously nuts. I eschew balance. Because I discern in the word itself Baal – an alias for Old Nick, another name for none other than Satan.

I elude balance the way a hiker in the timber sidesteps a rattler, how a derelict weeds out wood alcohol; taboo equilibrium like a newspaper shunning shit, or a believer avoiding the handle concealed in the Tetragrammaton.
Teeter on a crack, break momma’s totter. Circumcision greets a boy into the circle of at least giving a flying.

Best way to tip Baal’s lance (scale the snake) is to keep sharpening, keep keening, keep shedding skin, shedding light, shrinking to an ever more finely-pointed opinion. Thus by design became fruitcake nuts. How I came originally to the parakeet and the Boston pencil sharpener; to catch myself asleep. Surely I’m not this cracked awake?

The Vivaldi re-recommenced; my penis whittled to a stinger. Gilligan perked up as the consort blazed into the vivace (actually an allegro, but the CD twirled too fast, or maybe time was outta whack, accelerated by the blood the blade must have been creating, but never seemed to spew).
The bird leaped up on the swing hung from the dome of the cage. His chirps pierced my ear with a bloody Yale to some forbidden room.
I and my stub dripping wth lies approached Gilligan. He swung – claws grasping bar; head cocked to the hysterical mandolin of the Red Priest.
As our eyes locked, the letter wandered into: Why stop at castration? – Pluck off also limbs. No human sheared to the shape of a bean would ever again rape.

     I reduced to a pinto. Sallied into a Mustang. Galloped through the air like an amputated Pegasus – I’d show who gave one. Entered a steep dive. Leveled a rocket on Blue Boy’s cloaca. First hadda shrink to a noseeum, angle under those tail feathers.
Lost earth contact – buzzing into loosening cleft.
Then appeared, as I wove through muscle fiber, curious nano-mites. Sphincter inmates tiny as a solitary cell. But oh, were they sharp – dressed to the nines in electric tuxes, quantum top hats, dynamic spats of ivory over obsidian alligator boots!
My skeleton bugged. The heart popped. I owned the boner of all time. Slapped trigger.
Drilled uptown parasites. Swatted self silly, obsessed – in the cinema Ma gave me for a brain – with word as a word for word…
I awoke from my fugue – snapped out of extended syncope – on a park bench reading in The Times the letter I had forgotten; my name nonetheless appended thereto. Must’ve composed unbalanced.
Crumpled up and tossed in wire trash receptacle beside bench section containing page with letter that began, “I know you won’t have the pluck to print this…”
Stood up and set out to even the day; to sway events any other way than the way of the witness.  

 

Willie Smith is stuck in Seattle. He is deeply ashamed of being human. His work celebrates this horror.