X TEST WAS ALWAYS X
What was the prefigurement sighing about? It was on its time. You could tell it had really been dickied with, was the thing. Off-shoots of aspiring authors pretending they weren’t already writers on something like a summer fling getting repertoired by their closest ghosts—getting shoved out to sea to sing.
It is now 9:52 PM, and the objective is to, as it always has been: write stream-of-consciousnessly about whatever within the twenty to thirty minute timespan it usually takes—shittiness and all accepting, all of it just jammed in there, with more or less minimal effort, as a kind of a meditation on the thing. Usually (recently, on The Golden Damned) I will stop at ~1000 words. This is the usual marker of the barrier or whathaveyou. When I reach around 1000, it is time for me to wrap things up.
But so tantrime fer luvvers doubly ducked, the spell rill was applied with the quiet of a pantomime. And little of it was known outside its users’ circles, wherein they talked. But tantrime. Leftering hooblervexed gargantuan slant rhymes, onomatopoeic KLANG! brides ran out of their unified churches on the day of their weddings at the same time to relive the freedom of saying no to a commitment, but I would not judge. So many things are already so fucked. Howe can you expect anyone to be loyal to your heart? It isn’t loyal to itself yet. How can you expect better greens to roil true-blooded in the ivy smelt of the hot? I was not aware all the way what was going on. It is now 9:58 and I am barely getting things done.
The truth apart from yell-pain-words was art. And even then, slowly, my grown ghosts were trains going. We called up the ceremony and asked when it would start. “Yes, no, could maybe, but, yes—when will you—yes. Yes—when will you start?” And then for the more of our seasoned Lou Reed impostors, “Walk on The Wild Side” came on from the proximal vocals of twelve of them at once. I was walking the invisible dog, doing dang with the halt. They were singing that song and it was groovy all the way, you know. So then for heights’ strings, we crept up all the way to the next paragraph: it was going to be an ascension of tongues; it was going to be beautiful; it was going to take the whole day.
The ebon-draught shine to the cracked earth was wild; the springmaster reigned in the soul—in The Season of Eyes, not even three months ago—and what drew up from that dry earth far overhead for a while was… something like a shadow, yes. A shadow without name, but a reveling tone to it voice as, from its apex, it asked of us, “Oh, who are you? Is this an exercise?”
And we as me as one of many said, “Yes, we are just trying to write. That is The Golden Damned. You take absolute nonsense and try to put it into a contextless hermetiphoride.”
“Oh,” the ascended nameless shadow said, “I see. That is rather dumb.” But we didn’t pay him any mind; we were all so drunk off eggnog leftover from the Christmas party of dreams that its predispositions to our strangeness rarely mattered. No matter who it was, it was welcome to partake with us.
“I have to be going on the late bus,” the other of us who was and was not me said. Right before he lumbered off into the dark snowing vagueness of the sidewalk then that night. I threw him a pack of freshly shipped mittens. “Take these for the road,” I said. “It is sure a cold cold night tonight.”
Oh little bleakness you do not know. What of our hours is put to the test or right. What of our words is good as it is now 10:09. Post Meridiem. Central Mountain Time. And only about six-hundred-and-seventy-five words have been said according to the counter in Microsoft Word. But then they don’t seem to count the comparative pay-outs. I was pulling up on the machine and barely able to clear the bar when fate said, “oh you may be very weak. And I don’t know how to offer any consolation.” And then what else of us is lost to time? You are thinking, “WHAT IS THIS RANDOMNESS? WHY AM I READING THIS RIGHT NOW? WHAT IS THE POINT? WASTED TIME.” And I am thinking, “BLUE BIRD IS THE SKY. RED OR BLUE. CARDINALS ARE ALL RIGHT.”
So, to main the ever-present shielding of the sight: no violence would prosper beyond my forcefield I shared with you; there were little blue hexagons in the air that sparked every time someone tried, bouncing their fists back. Oh little sequence showing oh little time. What you know, then? Tell us.
I know a lot of you are just like me and I don’t want to waste your time. But this never had to be read, in excess, the eagles all settling down in the Canadian forestry about rivers nearly frozen over full of salmon would admit, maybe, if they could get out of their avian righteous minds. I know very little and I think that that may be the point: I know very little and I have very little time. It is now 10:15 and I’m going over the limit already. You do not start to get the point until the hand that tests itself breaks the line. Writes the line. Breaks the rule that measures itself against the hand that breaks and writes the line. Sometimes it manifests as raving mad tongues: Ooh la borglaine off trahbah. Sometimes it’s like a bird touching down: Twer pleet. Though it’s relative and out-of-mind and you can’t say altogether now, can you—but. I believe that trying to pigeon hole the sense makes a bastard out of text in general and reels the winder that reels the mind. It is now 10:18.