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BEATIFIC BAIT: Or since I lost (like an old set of keys that belong to an apartment that I no longing live in) my faith in God-- I have decided to choose a new one at random: A short play of insectual prosody
Prologue: My Parasitic Prayer
If I'm still dwelling in the House of the Lord well into adulthood-- could I be labeled, like a child who stills lives with his parents well into his adulthood-- a parasite? What if I was forced to leave the house and fend for myself? What if my celestial trust fund was cut off and my infantile prayers went unanswered? Might the silence of the Sky Daddy would cause me to, at last, grow self-sufficient?
Setting: A crumbling railroad flat,
Place: Lower Park Slope, Brooklyn,
Time: Around ten-thirty, a.m.
Stage direction: Spawled upon a battered futon, I drift in and out of the final dream of a night of uneasy sleep.
...interrupting the endless palaver of the yellowing wallpaper, my parasitic prayer attempted to scuttle into a cleave of cracked plaster concealed beneath the wallpaper's faded, floral bluster. Hoping to pass through these walls into the freedom of mid-morning, my entreaties bore into
the woodwork. I am a termite army of rapacious hope. Such is my insectual devotion to the hive of my self regard: I hear there are individuals who refer to themselves as "dog people" or "cat people." If I were to label myself I'd have to admit that, at times, I find myself a "a mouse
in a running wheel person," but, as of late, I have become a "fly caught in the house person," then, at moments, a "worm shriveling on the sun-baked sidewalk person," but I am attempting to ask more from myself by applying for work as "extraterrestrial slime-mold person."
The wallpaper, as enamored of its own decay as a nineteenth century French poet, pronounces my presence on this plane of space/time "an annoying buzzing, a barely audible tapping upon the closed window pane of this house of eternal fulmination."
But I have no need to defend the integrity of my dissolution; for, I have reveled in auras of rot rising from the garbage piles of a Brooklyn August; I have seen maggot Mozarts, their body waving like a conductor's baton, composing the veritable destiny of summer's manic
imaginings; I have caught a whiff of rancid, time-turned manna, its expiration date eons expired, then watched as inter-dimensional ants broke down its remains and carried them away to their portals to feed to the Queen of the Hive of Time.
I am sprawled upon my back, discarded in the empire's landfill of longings; my parasitic prayers preyed upon and devoured by harsh-voiced, realist gulls and opportunist crows... decimated in their attempt to rise skyward. My dreams are carrion for these
scavenger angels. Digested, they fall like bird-shit, spackling the windshields of your car. They fuel birdsong and predation. They build the bowers of perennial longing. They calcify into a fortress of eggshells, wherein gestates all things waiting to born.
A realization upon awakening: Since it is no long an option to drop by the House of Lord and do my laundry for free . Instead, I must save my loose change, today-- then, tomorrow, I will gather my dirty cloths and linen, then slouch east of Eden into mortal uncertainties of the neighborhood laundromat. I don't have a prayer.
Stage direction: I roll over on my stomach and pull a dingy sheet over my head.
(Blackout)
Act: 1
After crawling from the mouth of depression I was devoured by a leviathan of light... but then: There were everyday tasks to attend to: I found myself encased in the belly of laundry day.
My Day Planner spoke: It was ordained: My Sabbath was reserved for the cleansing of my sullied cloths and linen, the drowning deluge of wash and rinse, then... garments cast into the dryer's perdition-- rising and falling like souls: A cleansing by water and fire.
Instead, I strayed uptown into the park where I worshipped an earthworm as immense as Saturday night.... And I lingered until Sunday morning when he promised me a tour of magnificent, bait-shack cathedrals as grand and resplendid as Chartres.
Luckily, that day, I had decided, at the last minute, to include with the ensemble of my anatomy: My stained-glass scrotum and bell-tower testicles. (My own pink, little, trouser-worm-- nestled in the loam of subterranean underwear-- was indeed dressed for church.)
And as the Pond sang hymns, I was told the tale of a Gentle Worm of Redemption, the beatific bait used by the Fisher of Men, a gentle soul of the soil who was crucified on a hook beside two criminal crickets-- and who rose from the dead and then descended into heavenly dirt... thereby absolving all creatures of the soil of sin.
The lowest were made most high. Only the blind worm saw the truth: The earth was good: Heaven lay in its dirt.
Plants and trees rose from it like angels.
The worm knew: The heavenly soil is our inevitable destination.
We go into the dirt, We become the dirt, And we pass through the worm. He gathers the dead within him and we become his flesh. We are all united in the heaven of the earthworm's belly.... Just passing through....
(blackout)
Act: 2
Monday Morning: The worm rose before me like a flame.
Not hackyned hell-fire.
Not even all too veritable Hiroshima.
But... the consuming flame of a world-devouring sun gone super-nova....
It was too much to bear: The world ending before morning coffee.... I fled to the sanctuary of a coffee shop to seek solace inside the insulating din of everyday activity... attempted to take refuge within the mundane clamor created by the less apocalyptic, lesser deities of Monday morning....
...But when the grinding whirl of the deus ex machina/ espresso machine ceased... the sounds of the worm-forsaken world returned.... not in fury... but like the unconscious exhalations my father began to emit after the world had cut his operatic rage to staccato bird song.
When the aroma of the coffee dissipated... the stench of memory returned... not like the putrescent remains of a half-eaten, week old, egg salad sandwich disinterred, this morning, from beneath my sepulchral sofa...
...but instead, bearing the slightly sour smell I once detected from the too tight garments of an aging beauty at a late night bar when I was eighteen.... Her youth half-past gone, her physical endowment nearly spent... bandying over her brandy the 3:OO am. prophecy that she could "...smell a future loser, blindfolded... at a hundred yards, and, boy, you need to turn down the volume of your reek...."
I awoke to these memories when I could no longer smell the coffee.... And when the coffee buzz faded... and the mindless caffeine chatter ceased... I heard a million molars grinding, fulminating anxious thunder, delivering dread, heralding hopelessness... as constellations of latte bubbles
burst/burst/burst, exploding like world-destroying stars as the Savior Worm was saying something I could not discern... owing to the fact I'm always so easily distracted by the end of the world. "You'll get used to it," the Worm-All-Mighty replied later, after I had confessed all....
(blackout)
Act: 3
After the collapse of my life into the singularity of a caffeine hang-over, I passed through an uptown subway tunnel/worm-hole, arriving at a new universe located near the West Fifty-Ninth Street entrance of Central Park....
Then I cast my day planner into the Pond....
Reborn: I am now an apostle of the Bait-Shack Redeemer: I will shill for silence; I will chronicle the auguries of worms:
Worm passing through earth, Earth passing through worm, Earth passing through time, Time passing through us.
Rising briefly from dark ground: We talk, sing, and spindle for a short while,
dread Angel-of-Death early bird, try not to shrivel in the sidewalk sun....
We smell the moist dirt, God's fragrant dream of decay.
Yes-- weep over the existence of fish-hooks.
But-- rejoice: All complexity is compost.
Dear friend,
Dear friend, the world passes through us and we pass through it....
Just passing through... just passing through...
just passing....
(blackout)
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