KAKONYM

Maybe evil is merely a lack of vision.

Just in case, I remain attentive, even vigilant when I can muster such a stance; I am the custodian of filthy visions in oil-stained cement floors, chemically altered halos, cigarette bonfires, dingy exterior stucco spattered with bleaching agents, particle board tangrams, gravel and pavemented parking lots, corrupted by weeds. I sit in the garage, unfocus my eyes, and wait for the next crest of the nightmare to swell. Emerge. Emerging. Arising from that spot where we are all blind as mole rats, where the cunning architecture of the eye is marred by the fished-through cabling of the optic nerve. This negative zone, this sulcus of sight, from which all abominations ook forth. They begin to enact their dharma in my vision like tutting, tearful pontiffs subtending a large masterwork painting, rising from the blotchy stains on the floor-- emerging echoes of The Battle of Alexander at Issus and Dynamism of a Soccer Player interfere with and chop one another up into a vortex of art-object debris. Several flies investigate and are caught up within the swirl of lightlike angular momentum-- all housed in a single plane, yet reaching out to me in cunningly wrought holography-- a waking dream before me. I hum a nothing tune, pretending to ignore its wiles. Maybe I don't want to watch this time. The obscene clanking uproar of a garbage truck shits down the street, dunking turd after turd of post-consumer offal into itself with its hookshot robot arm. The maelstrom teeters, threatens to divest itself from the world of vision. I'm starving myself, I think. I focus hard on the knife in my belly-- the autosurgery is well underway-- can't quit it without losing the patient. Doc, am I gonna make it? Don't bullshit me! Give it to me straight, Doc. Et cetera.

I snort and choke on faux gusts, sneezing up spores and dust. A heavy, earthen breath breaks out of my lungs-- cellar smells and earth-wet flavors of bedewed mushroom heads drooping in low grey light-- I've been colonized; a janitor-apostle peddling fungal apocrypha between vomit mop-ups. Maybe I should leap from my chair and run-- run through the tripwires set by spiders in the night, unbelievably long ones, silver lines cast in lucky breezes, flashing like razor edges against the mundane lozenges of American yards. Unspool the wires of the weed eaters... choke out the chumps wielding them... wipe out the gasoline tongues tanging the dirt; the phonemes of flies, the hapless cellphone convos yammering ceaselessly under business casual planes cruising the smug blue envelope of sky. It's a nice day to destroy. The wreckage in my chest smashes against itself, independent bergs of garbage floating on a violent saline-spittle sea. I still see the moth from this morning, the orange one, flapping on the floor, peppering the air with little orange scales, never gonna fly again, you. I'll leave you to your agony's long, slow attenuation.

She steps out of the art vortex, just like I knew she would. I'm ready I guess, bludgeoned into submission by all the rampant distraction. I've got my pen, ready to describe, and not much else. Not even a hangover. My eyes are plastic bags, lazily and inexpertly filled with Halloween candy. My penis and scrotum are afterthoughts, like bad lines jotted on the phonebook cover of my body. My chocolaty eyes grow huge at her shape, appearing, scissoring into the universe. Her lips are a copulating pair of pseudoplusia includens. Her chin and neck, forged in gradients of Nebuchadnezzar's electrum dream. Her splayed, encompassing arms are snaking towers constantly both falling apart and being rebuilt, with dark hairs like scaffolding. Her fingers are long, squawking hooked bills, each holding some kind of alien nut in its jealous, bifurcated grip. Her head is shaven close, with white stubble, and crowning her is a floating, black ziggurat, rotating in space like a 3-D model, casting aliased shadows that break on her brow. Her breasts are avocados that cut themselves open, revealing large pits and green-yellow fatty flesh, then reseal without seam their bumpy dark rinds, over and over, turning and twisting the skin of her chest with them, never following the line of any previous cut. Her nipples orbit roughly where they ought to be, bite-size black licorice. Her skull is a white truck barreling towards me at top speed-- total approach, never arriving. She is murderous to behold, but I don't flinch. It wouldn't do. Eyes like the strobing muzzle flashes of automatic weapons track me on whining gimbals; ears, hourglasses of red ferrous sand, shrieking about my time running out; her bulging belly a clear aquarium-- a charnel-pit of sundered fetal parts, sloshing side to side as her coquette pelvis churns within the dervish, and tipping, spilling splotches of sizzling amniotic fluid and baby blood onto the floor, each stain a snapshot of a vulture in flight, snatched up and animated by the whirling art-devil undulating before me.

She castigates me:

Ho, supplicant! I am called your condemnatrix by you who shall one day wring me defiant into the world-- I am your dying wish-- I have come from your death bed where you lay in misery, flopping in fevers. Not so much older, mind you. Nevertheless! My bottle you did rub rightly, and usher unto you now in this time I shall, your own judgment. You who have stolen every moment, such there are none left for anyone else. All down your gullet like a grandiose drain on the bottom of the world. All through your pretty fingers-- how like a woman's they are! How golden your tongue through your fingertips in its fullness of bloom. Only just twice, or perhaps four times, did you surpass yourself in words. But you fueled your desires with ill-gotten time. All these precious, stolen moments, and now they are gone. Wasted. Vanished. None left for the world or even for the prayers of children. I have come for my bride-price, pilgrim!

Her accusation roars like an airliner through the garage-- I am deafened. Grit swirls in whips through the air, cutting my eyes, my mouth, sanding my hair. Am I supposed to understand her meaning? She clips forward a step, revealing through the swarm tattered scarlet taffeta robes, fragments of dresses, slips, skirts, scarves, all rioting with the holographic chaff of the miasmic paintings twisting in the confused air. Her body is revealed more and more in its ostentatious lunacy. Two crescent moons of hips about to kiss.

"I really don't know if I can pull this off!" I protest. Every five seconds, one of the dull denizens of the house rattles through the door, stumping and snuffling around for loose tobacco, utterly oblivious to the scene taking place. I can see, as if for the first time, a certain truth. They are coccooned in television halos, like condoms made of garish commercial broadcasts. I almost envy them their ignorance now, more than ever. Me? I'm a naked larva, wriggling and hurt by both the real and by dreams. My genitals vanish completely inside my abdomen. She seems to notice this fact beneath my clothes, and she smirks. Her face does appear to have normal skin, but it's broken out in heat bumps. I peer at it intently, trying to puzzle out if some kind of message or clue to her admonishings are in there, steganographically encoded in her blemishes. Deviation from mean distance, from mean size-- maybe at least Fibonacci's sequence in the number in each cluster. She wrinkles her nose in disgust. She takes another step forward. It's only then that my concentration is shattered with the awareness that her lower half, borne up, sure enough, by four, bone-white-but-fading-to-brown legs, is that of a horse.

How does one respond to the invective of a horse goddess? The alkies are still milling through the tableau, trying to interrupt me with chit-chat about the heatwave of recent weeks. The centaurine entity appears not to notice them either-- are these the enemies of contemplation? Have I stolen all their moments? Is that how people disappear? How many people have I deleted, five minutes here, ten minutes there, escaping wherever I was at the time-- whatever I was supposed to be doing, in daydreams? Did I destroy the human race through my thievery? Ridiculous!

I'm not sure I can pull this one off. I'm always stuck between a bunch of pricker bushes and some certain death, like a white delivery truck speeding past. Sometimes I even sit in my car, just to steal more moments. I'm really not made for this. I wish I was made to fuck-- to be a real fucker, and now I have no dick. I want to feel my cum shoot like some large animal's, bruising the cervix, massive impact on each fertile moon, way up inside the warp tubes of some bony Empress, but now my balls are gone, lost somewhere in my fat body like vagabond anal beads. I'm vulgar. A libertine in a blue-collar straightjacket. A demonic force more in sobriety than liquored up. Manic. Mentally unsound. If I ever did a good thing, I swear I didn't mean it. I was never any good for longer than a couple weeks. Because I always wanted to be somewhere else, right? Is that what life is? Is life just a few moments of pure rapture, and the rest just made up of drudgery and sprinkled, stolen moments of pining to get back there? Is that why Paradise is such a success? Did I really send this Great Horsey Scarlet Harlot back through time with my own dying old-man wish? Is that how the pity party really ends?

Am I on to something? Am I pulling myself off?