My friends and I are sailing through some beautiful pennants and such. My friends, like me, are built of three thousand mitres each, resembling poorly made up beds. The pennants and knights and arrogance through which we are flying putter up and down louse-ridden alleyways, consuming themselves in an orgy of betrayal--betrayal of neighbor, conduct, nose. As we fly through them, we describe our reactions: "Terrific." "A bit of malaise hindering posings." "Masterful dismissal of everything so apparently cheesy in this, the life of a previous majesty." "Awe-like."
Some of us breathe the air of Sardinia, taut with mists different from these mists of unkindred flushings, and others of us the air of our other homelands--homelands further from here than Sardinia, further than Egypt itself.
Egypt: land of vast men with total ideas.
The pennants, knights, arrogance and betrayal through which we are sailing do not nod to us, do not anchor themselves in our flanking, do not breathe for our moneys. They amuse themselves with up-and-down futzing, linking the cobbler with tarts, the mustard-impresario with his only adultery.
I call to my friends, who, like me, resemble dignified but messy beds in flight. I say to them, loudly and with poise, "Prices are moving but we are beyond their concern! Facts are accosting our punch with a certain controlled substance. How does our punch react? In the drag of a wink?"
"Enough," my friends call back. I tilt my head as they argue about my intentions. I am, after all, just like them. I do not cause ripples, befuddle my stalwart munching of progress with image glee, slit masturbation. I am friends with all comforts, lick their shins. What can I mean? intend?
We continue along, the trappings of former amber lifting it out of control and into a future of blocked picks; stumble stumble stumble, and earnestly we consider a nation of honest lifers, laughing it up with the moody cloistered, coughing bereavement into the handkerchief of stranded royalty. How are we to demonstrate whatever it is we are obviously here to demonstrate? Some of us are coughing bereavement, after all, others are cloistered, others are full of axe-miffing guffaws. How do we keep the metal sticking to the best of its crimped allegory (swords, ploughs), the monks describing modes of plasticity, the dead not happening?
It is all this that disturbs us and also, interestingly, renders us flip as we sail through pennants, knights, arrogance, betrayal and scenery. If we could only concentrate on the pennants et al. If we could slumber with mollusks and deal moments from a clipped androgyny. No such luck: we are complex, interesting, doomed.
Somewhere far away a mist arises and describes itself to its father, who wishes it proud voyage with a purse of distinctness and a pat on the tic. It wends its way through the stippled math of this heart of splendor and finds us shredding paper at a café while the headwaiter snacks on a bazooka. The mist describes itself and we breathe it in and soon return to our fine, earnest seekings in the lands certain mists will never understand.