Seen behind these masks. A Last time we were much younger. Anyway. What are you speaking at the threshold like that for? B I see starfish everywhere, worn like malign inertia and dirty movements murky as a ram’s decayed muzzle don’t I? Don’t I?  Don’t I? Don’t I? It didn’t matter. C The billets-doux near the guillotine. D The forest fire. E. The severed ear shell. You want advice lady? Keep at least one sense in hiding. And keep your bloody mouth shut until you’ve finished. Get on with it. Please. I’m most comfortable in changing rooms, flirtatious intrigues and gameness that’s a yielding euphemism. What I’d insist on is that all the doors remain locked until you’re just an exception of style. Or a vast kingdom. Or a line with a new price on your head. Ignore these masks and the physiognomic and fuck-off refinements that come to people who live without rain and snow. There’s no polished serenity in you denying kitsch. We stay cold and vile and don’t have forks, mugs, not even the map mounted on cotton fabric. F The map of the mountain. The map of the mountain you had to climb day in and out. I remember finding sugar. G People sometimes are trenches and others are folds. If I told you everything you’d either hand me a medal or strangle me at birth and that’s it really, junk and ashes, the whole dictum a password to the cosmos and the mind. What are you saying? This is a vast slaughterhouse. Why a golden cage when you can find shrouds in the fog and ironies galore in perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. If you try bridle the earth you’ll find out soon enough to walk on parquet. Are these proverbs, or what remains of them? Whatever, their incessant hum the rockets out of Versailles or the fireworks at the Belgian front. H The pond of Dsivoa. Feel me there, my terrible genealogies that can’t know what earth actually sustains us, or if any earth actually remains. Did it occur to you that nothing is more intolerable than sacrifice if no one asks for it? It’s like a grandmother in silks. Your legs shine but I want you on the I black lacquer table from the Shang dynasty. Why? To see how you secrete your douceur. It’s a thing. I miss people for their mischief rather than their endearing moments. Chatter wakes me up and puts me to sleep. Go figure. Is this your J cabin with the porch lights on and the lake open and pinkish with childish bears, plastic reptiles and the sound of the clinking cutlery? I see vulgarities and make no contacts. Lick my face. The important thing is to forget as many names as you can and carry with you a little chest of poisons. These are where the axe splits the logos. You hear nothing of fate but intoxications of nuance. Benevolent dogmas cut off heads, never forget that. What was Richard Nixon if not the tradesman at the door piping the final liberators. He’s as indifferent as Talleyrand, without compass or plot but voluptuous like a whirlpool. He is a throng of banners and a prophetic symbol. And he’s gone. That makes me a frontier. Graves are good for meditations and picnics. K Teddy bears are crossed silence and uninhabited reflections. What are you wanting me as? I’m a platoon of fringes. Every bar of the Ring. The presage and the foreign land. What tends to happen is that bodies mangle like falling down a staircase in gloom. I have haloes, an open tunic, and note shoulders, coiffures, the curve behind the knee, do a kind of celluloid carnality in sullen voyeurism and congress. What are you doing? Dividing the spoils. So here we are. Add a piece of advice: don’t trust your social conversations and the impressions you draw out from stage sets. On the other hand I’ll pay to see more of what you despise and your prodigality. Treacherously. You’re Pascal’s catapult, all theology disdaining contact. The conclusion is thus: the world can fill us up enough. And I see nothing.  I hear nothing. Which is of course vanity. And mediocre. And like a Sabbath prayer. And a wretched city. And La coup d’etat. And solid support for x, y, z. And the advent spreading. And loosening a screw here and there. Talking of which I could do with your signature moves now, and a dose of the ceremonial. The kind Robert Crumb keeps on devising as bivouacs in cork, a la Proust and his inconceivable violence. Stretch out on the bed like glory and exist as a detour between mirrors and nails. This is true: there are majestic beasts. Your dark epidermis casts around for shapes. NNixon, to get back to him, he’s what happens when you eliminate the pauper. He’s a vicious circle. O The secret nature of fire is water. The sheep will be gutted like newspapers and we’ll eat theological consequences. Midges always strike me as extrinsic to fields of sense. But they still draw blood. Calvin’s will is just a seeker of arbitrary archetypes. When you cut flesh you invent the sweetness of the repeating mouth. Everything here is a separated interval done as sacrifice and origin. P The mnemic wave. Smooth languages are inert and sour. Get it? What are your masks? Contagious legacies? “I think they’re the records of massacres” is what I said and you were internal, amiable but left quickly with an excuse that blasphemy is when you choose to discuss the origin of the gods. Well, I too have my methods. This place is more than a long pink-footed pastoral before Q a Viking pyre or R guillotine. Had you stayed I’d have spat down. Nothing like hurled imprecations against rabid fashion to pass the time. I love in the ground like a mole and have so little trifles like S a woolen dress and sheets, no pillows, that’s what I know as destiny and who ever really suspects there’s a war going on? Where are the feelings and the rapacious? Everywhere, but in stages. This is T a little Gothicism, like U the foothills of the Jura or a plate of anchovies or Anabaptism. Cross your legs. Discuss the precise hallucinations. Are they these V little cemeteries, pretty ruins and midnight dancehalls? Go surround them with intoxications and come back if you find anything at all inside. Take less notice than usual and maybe something will occur. Remember that even W Goethe’s judgment never rejected anything entirely except the marriage of Jason, Medea and Creusa. I hear a lot of talk about how we, however, should reject meanings. Well now I know what it is to need just big knives and little stories. Sure I’ll drink with you but let you be knowing this: I’ve X a lizard soul and prefer Y petite strippers thin like sarcophagi and steamy doorways and hanging lanterns than Z the nakedness of the symbol. Any symbol. Whatever: art’s not policy: those aren’t my eyes. The face under the mask is not a face. And what is floating between the eyes? You should never have gone up onto the rooftop. What you gained was another, one you didn’t want. “When you get there you will already be there.” When she said that I recalled TV. Around the dinner table the conversations freeze. Is that this? Rancho Rosa smiles into the third space. What’s that? Mask. Face. Power-point on the wall. What is none is coming out of the mouth of two. The third is nowhere. Arms have heads that count. What happened? The mask, manufactured for a purpose, is the map. A head is black smoke from a low room-level metal grill. This detail is a slow 60’s room. Eventually we seed, on the armchair. The Canworth beige. The seed can be anything but a mask. The mask is a horse. And what’s the white of the eye? The girl holding his shoes. Or the girl who sleeps. Or the girl who swallows the well. Or Chantelle of the ‘wet’. Who enters the dark within the mask? A protected witness who doesn’t know. Well, in the shell of the ear is the better mask. So now listen to me. Even though I am allergic to maps I took the assignment because I felt like a special agent. Or a librarian in a backwater. That I did. But do you? This? Understand the risks? This day has come. Before this day it was a very long way to here. It’s how some masks are. So, two masks. One indisposed and the other one more than it should be. There are coordinates. You can see them here and here and here. Most of the numbers are ok but some bend backwards and they’re no good. The ones that float still work despite appearances. But in the one mask there are none. Recall: ‘What is none is coming out of the mouth of two. The third is nowhere.’ It’s a funny thing when we fold out. Because I don’t want to lose myself here. And folding out can seem like its opposite. That’s what they might call the fly in the ointment. It was weather. So: Mask = weather report. One day = a map another time = a weather report. Who’d have figured on figuring that? We live within humidity + in a zone. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%.  30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%.  30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%. 30%. 40%.  + there is no air conditioning. + the attic is overheating. + electricity is humming in mountains, rivers, seas, stars and the moon is inside. + we die in that pitch which remains.