Around and around went the wings. It needed only a little courage, only a  little shove from the window ledge to enter the city of light. The muscles of my hands were already making little premonitory lunges. I wanted to enter that city and go away over the roofs in the first dawn.  ~ L. Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 166.

viii — Hosedown at the Edge of Time.

          “What is with all of this denatured Elavil lying around,” the messy ninja, about to ask the selfsame, hustled through sodden leaves of theosophy, somewhat deviously yawning beneath warped, piecemeal, and wormy outlooks?

          The edge of history in cameo toppled. Sneezing at pictographs, a vocal Shinto registry forever luau connoted that Ming shelves prefaced alienation. Drab tumult, if sultrily viewed later objectively, mashed into a tuffet of electrostatic magenta, hissing that obelisques were demonstrably live noise.

          Finth indeed had energized their tittle tattle lately, but rogue cells hastily formed a furtive fifth column, and Legion’s prescience was impeached by merry if wavering plebiscites. He girded his thews with messy mousse and lilted in pirouettes towards the perilous excise.

          After skipping through dense mosh pits in a sprint, he calculated that static armoire pivots might defray this Gestalt. A gazebo, dented immurably by egrets, tingled in faintly Mayflower detour, transmuting a distant collage, a tinderbox, reminiscent of Bitsy, whose careless endemic hauteur, often frosted in the numb iPod sense, scrambled a reggae festival down the hall.

          As the cookies swayed in fin de siecle hail, offset clones seized chat rooms blithely askew, swathed in pickle fonts as carousels drifted around, and lo! A stable, flimsy, pedantic dromedary drew pomegranate pilgrims: immoderately tentative yet cheery nawabs who, resplendent in Dravidian array, ordered extra larb guy and loudly clapped for the top shelf ninja.

          Uncharacteristically non–commital about thick enormous incantations splurged swiftly in abandon, Legion spryly whisked tangent live–wire omens in spurious animation. He objurgated his foe as a silly extremist who felt too cool for every quotidian ring toss recently in ghostly theatres near you. Excessively nocturnal deviations convoluted into sharp complines. If Miss Elf had mistaken their roll–me–over diatribes for derivative, short–sheeted emblems of whatnot, any ablative epitomes tended to derange perceptions.

          Legion felt as frisky as an elephant as they slammed tectonic beer bongs. Their hair frizzled as the skanky ninja interceded, in deadpan unmitigated flatulence, “my name is Enid.” He murmured benignly, used to having riot acts read to him incredulously.

          After a scant interval, a swart blackguard crept behind him calmly with a bare bodkin. Enid, awaiting the foray tirelessly, against all odds, sneezed into a handmade snuffbox as the prole lunged in the dark, seized him by the pacifier, stomped between each methane dint, and excused himself. The assailant peremptorily made jazz hands without success, groaned, and left them expressively sighing with listlessness.

          Although Enid was unsurpassed at harpistry, they conspired to really mess the guy up, and whittled their deli forks into scrimshaw. While Legion deigned to deep–fry treacle dumplings for his merry band, they departed, perhaps not wishing to provoke the astute protege further.

*        *        *

          Repairing to the quasi–demotic nosh with his spluttering dumpling platter, Legion, indignant with casuistry, belabored Enid’s return, deafened in fandango doorstop linguini themes. “Welcome,” he said with mock beneficence, and they went onto the outlook ledge, speaking so fatuously about servers, almanacs, and semiotic ingenuity, that Legion, ominously steeped in moral certitude, jumped off suddenly and almost apoplectically. His brain squirmed with triumph as the party broke up. He might be found face down on the pavement, but had maintained pax non omnis moriar. It was irrefutable proof of his strength and resilience!

          A naive, aimless, piquant nosedive that weekend resulted in two days of freefall. He fell past the Inference Library, although after some terminal noodling, was slowly swerving towards death, too shy to apply for deferment with the restive finth. He bequeathed his fugue rotisserie to passed–over draft rejects and wailed, indifferently, in murky Braille, “ought the heavens o’er–arch the impervious night with her starker light?”

          Subsiding into myriad omphaelic drip–dry soupcons after freaking Frankenstein’s Last Victrolas — hardly the place for a palindrome — from fustian, no closer to hitting rock bottom, he felt unsettled, still hadn’t startled any Jacobin tweakers, and found solace only from two sources: of dwelling upon partially quicksilver myopic Endymions, who were elated to find someone as tawdry, arrogant, and blustery; and on eavesdropping poor Enid, who told his parishioners that he realized defenestration was not so much painful as embarrassing, and penitently accepted in payment advance tickets to a reading of Your Last Hope Is on Fire Today while his bellicose contractors threw their cameras out at yard sales. Legion wriggled dystopically, revisiting dream outlets in foamy nostalgia. “Soon,” he hoped, “waving aside a lifetime in paper so I don’t have stumble all over it again,” he reached the substratum of nadir in tensed coils, landed on eggs, torqued around in exactitudes of friction, semaphored in spasmodic ornate lightsome desultory bounces out by the Bijou, entirely fooled everyone, and careened to an untimely resolve.

          Sundry night crawlers, eager to start work but unwilling to give full allegiance to the system which they blamed for their collective plight, found him haggard and obscure. He had stopped breathing.

Circa late January 2008.

…

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