"Many red devils ran from my heart and out upon the page." S. Crane
A red, white and black mulligan in my coffee turns into a hairy mutt in my gut mixing with regurgitations from a rancid politico Neocon Presidential fund raising dinner when the waitress approaches and asks, *Want another?*
Though brain sizzles like a frying egg and my pulse races like mad, I say, *Yes, and yes I will Yes.*
How could I have been so stupid? I feel inside like I've swallowed a mystery stew along with the greasy spoon carrying me along for a ride on the back of Big Brother to a place of government cover-ups where I enter a world of bogus TV. Commercials ruled by Queen Ptomaine and her husband the Lord of Misrule.
Here, everything important isn't important anymore. I discover who I’m not where past, present and future tangle, I hurl, rotting from inside out, turning into a bizarre hallucinatory machine.
I can only talk about what I don't know. Browse whole libraries of missing books. Back from Byzantium, a mechanical bird mutters, *Oh, to be human and not made of springs. Quackie quack baby. Ouch! Whoosh!*
I’m on a retinal scan planet under the influence of a raging hormonally unbalanced goddess bitch where children of greed don shadowy smiles to go with their stock portfolio fangs while twenty five German poets speak all at once in Geek. Still born gestures of compassion are laid out in coffins. A statue of Hitler hatches an egg. Twelve apostles take turns pulling out the hair of Christ.
Robot machines of destruction make subterranean swampy smorgasbord things spewing mass mind insanity pills the department of homeland security gives out to intellectuals suffering from a bad case of unpatriotic sniffling persnickety kerfuffles.
I feel like I’m going to Gitmo. I'd strangle myself if I could. My throat demands lungfulls of air, so full it’s shouting: Fire! Avalanche! Despair!
Chief Rumsfeld and the Cheney Boys micro-waved in aspartame turn into nuclear warriors unfolding tasar wings as they whisper in my ear that every commander looks for an edge and the deconstruction of perception takes balls of lead. I find myself standing before Queen Ptomaine who takes the shape of my uncle Sam’s wife and I'm naked in the poverty of her sight.
She says *Hey, I’ve been inside you thinking about you for hours. You know my husband and I are infatuated with you. We’re falling in love… I no longer know what to do! If you’re also unhappy, let’s chat and see. We would trade anything for a night with you. What are you doing later on tonight? Why don’t you join the National Guard?*
Scott Malby is a frequent contributor to journals worldwide.
