JE M’AMUSE

By way of introduction: I typed and retyped roughly 50 words in columns from the beginning of several texts. I then proceded to read across the columns and typed them again, trusting the words only. They showed me writers who were fed up with Reality. This was the way I saw it long ago: “A short blast of their machine guns, understand, and we talked better than their guns.”
Words may amuse by exhibiting the ridiculous. If their dying images attract the intellect, it is because they earn their living in a dying galaxy. (“We just kept going until the thing happened in trance & horrible agony. Lightyears filled with compassion for you all.”)
Chinese classics were never a one-way trip, not when juggling words seemed exactly right. On the edge, orbiting, wounded, paying dues. News of suicide hit me as it cared. So I typed and retyped these columns to talk.
I lay there riddled with the springs and traps of inspiration, courtesy of Brion Gysin. Streaming holes of what we breathe, terminal holes which formed in the air, in we who breathe in words. And words protest. They came in, hovering above us, a sort of antipray coughing white cloud of ruined sex — Thee, the Out-word in action.
I was occupied searching for word pattern. Found a rangy young man whose authority was more habit-forming than his life. He hunkered down in gray bone-dry “heroin words.” (“No, these are not the fossilized bones near the shores of Lake Rudolph. Addicts talk I am talking about.”)
The patterns smelled surgical, visual & aural, racing alive again. Smelled like cotton & pistachio nuts and drifted away in one direction to sounds and colored money, in the other to my skin of conspicuously more brain waves … minute electrical discharges oscillating with Dr. Vassily Lewis, who wrote in a messy hotel room: “Activity can be measured accurately. The pinhole has been graphically recorded where medieval epidemics are occluding.”
We were holed up in Superville. He brushed a straight and certain exercise of authority through a lock of rust-colored hair. He used words, authority words, courtesy of Bill Burroughs. He uncovered the skull of a man more habit-forming than heroin, a creature who lived the use of words more than two and a half million years ago, where colorless words formed the bomb-throwers. The future will go next.
Enter ZZ, flipped, saying: “I gotta learn no-chance nugget voice of consciousness.” How to use words? She stopped for about two minutes, then snorted out, thinking: “What are words anyway? A few banshee yells.” She started to fall, and it frightened her. She haunted the subway and felt very lonely. Deprived of both outlets (sex & words), she became a ritilin freak who’d been drummed out. So she wandered, straight, and ended up in Tangier. “I was so serious, it was a monologue.”
— The Tireless Staff of Thousands took the day off.

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