Supreme in stupidity and a fog of waste, profit in what is left. Oh what
delectable morsel is left. Blessed hunchback, scum of loves weekly
praying in all churches--which by the way take up the very best sites in
the town. There she sat, her body low down below the window frame, only
her face showing, and looked at me dully, looked because I looked--and
my heart leaped up to her in passionate appeal that she should be my
queen and run with me over the foggy land--Forward--Onward and upward
forever.
So saying the day had progressed toward the afternoon and under the
poplars the dried leaves had begun to collect. It had been unbearably
hot. September is a hot month. The leaves had fallen one by one. No
wind. One by one pushed off by the buds which swollen by the heat had
thought that winter was over. Off with you. You stand in the way of
progress, say the young leaves. Sitting on his chair he seemed like any
other man but to get to the bed he suddenly descended to the floor. On
his long arms--he Apollo, and using the stumps of his legs, apelike on
all fours and talking quietly he swung himself up over the edge of the
bed and lay down.
Over the field--for the fog had left the grasses in the early morning
when the sun came up with majestic progression, haughtily leaving the
dropping city under him--over the field--for it was late in the
afternoon and the sunlight shone in with his poor broken legs, crippled
as he was--the sun shone in from the west. The car had turned in to the
wrong street and he had gone into the store where the paralysed
Scotchman whom he had never seen before put him on the way--climbing
into his bed sent his rays almost level over a patch of red grass hot
and blinding. Over the field the heat rose and in it even from a
distance due to the blur of light on their wings a great swarm of gnats
could be seen turning, twisting in the air, rising falling--over the
grass, fringed with the progressing sun.
But with great sweeps and sudden turns a dozen dragon flies seeming
twice as large as they really were, from the sun blurring their
transparent wings, darted back and forth over the field catching and
eating the gnats. Swiftly the gnats progressed into the dragon flies,
swiftly coalescing--and from time to time a droplet of stuff fell from
the vent of a feeding dragon fly,--and the little sound of this stuff
striking the earth could not be heard with its true poetic force. Lost.
Lost in a complicated world. Except in the eyes of God. But a word, a
word rang true. Shit, said the father. With this name I thee christen:
he added under his breath.
And yet--one must begin somewhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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