“Requiem aeternum dona eis, domine

Et lux perpetua lucent per ers

In memoriam aeternum er it …”

“Mass For The Dead,” from The Gradual of the Tridentine [F. M. Ford, The Good Soldier (NY: Norton & Co., 1995), p. 53].

x — Some Elves Find Serenity.

          “Egad,” mocked Arbuthnot, unperturbed by windfalls run amok, “must I own up to my bovine antecedence, entitled to pontificate with manure until I’m hoarse enough thereat to take my bus in essence there?” Thebes’ loud crush indeed exacted litanies, “and whereas (versus blinking last rate ptarmigans) we’d spite beings carelessly mitigant, a keen abacus naysayer bolstered these, so sue me if all was on order.”

          A seraphim really waved at his fond tirade, and clumpish endocrines lit fluent Sterno. He wafted inchoately, worlds away, all doubts aside, a would–be, dry, gingerly shelved omicron toreador, fussily. Had this worst downside really evaded dandelions gratis, given that alpine aftershocks perforce exceeded his wittily quid pro quo, he sped resiliently forth amid trills of cormorants and a castanet sitar duet disposed to dooby doo.

         At any rate, Arbuthnot, wildly pleased to have done with the Mostly Color Shoe Tree, cantered too blearily, heaving beneath powdery caryatids. “Let’s,” he blogged, “our dithyramb axle aerator ethos slalom around the parsnips post–haste. Zero hour frantic ain’t a careful enough pace on the thruway.” One soft hexameter along the way back to Thebes, alas, crenellated staves of real easy shunts tinnily.

       “Me, I don’t go whenever, awash in eddies, tripped and roved otherwise, sailing into hillier existential areas in the far corner of the universal ghetto.”

*        *        *

          Just as ticklish absinthe counter–culture fronds fizzled en route to the Maypole, weird instincts, that once belonged in yikes, uncovered mute unsvelte baksheesh, and wistful noblesse oblige oven mitts deformed.

          Backflash to Thebes: an array of sequin wergilds, as though Thoth’s retro wingmen had stitched together, in devious quicksilver scallops, a decided motto — ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono — enough to put Captain Marvel out for another fly–by–night, the brackish chrome floating arsenal en prise — trapped mystic echoes rasp the quadrangle, the bronzed fringe ivy bars, squeezed askew, tingle in stringent sexist indices of thirst — at least dozens of twin dooms beneath a venomous foaming anthrax daffodil piously intimated myriad tepid argon dearth effigy stamp rattles.

          You’ll swear on metempsychotic tomes how the several comrades shall never cross the mall. Here are designed oft levees of evil incarnate — dressed in cognitive zealous filmy myths they hold sway over faithless orisons heathen — “hey uncool myrmidons, do you have to be so totally noisome about your new toys,” laureled Arbuthnot in diapasons caustically? “We catch your stinking bouquet, GI, and fart hysterically,” they retorted. “Come and get us, Mary, unless you’re eager to begone on the next dray!”

          The ergonomic phalanx eddied nimbly against the donjon. The fate of the city ultimately at stake, Arbuthnot made as if to peruse doctrines minutely, but inevitably bogged down and wandered out to the palisades for distraction. Lemaniac thrust the talisman into his hands: “Ajax of the Seventh Argives desires a fracas.”

          Pandemic panic making its debut, Arbuthnot drafted a pointed rebuke over the in–house close–circuit cable network, and found everyone heavily breathing at a secret victory expose on halter tops, which he angrily pre–empted to read out loud, asthmatically, “I excuse no one from what impends to be not only bathos since we’re in deep hogwash here,” and hung up.

          “That’s really nipping it,” Lemaniac railed, quelling nascent apprehensions with Coral’s store–bought home–fried compote, which was “Nirvana everlasting,” and promising their ships would someday come in. The spacier oligarchies only now repented of existence, and thriftily genuflected at Rothschild fruit stands, smoked cigarettes, and watched the fizzling silos. A pity, they thought, that might even be inevitable.

*        *        *

          Not even Inglenook sufficed to wake their Mel.

          Drizzling carafes moistly, it seemed her wooly smile mocked their situation.

          The wire soared low enough to thwart the Lethean tides, yet they were clearly sapped, and scanned the icy flats only yards from the dark abode. They stooped in tenuous doting, and Esau tromped in thin weaves, reshaping twigs of old box elder into photo decor — actually, several all too busy whirled in whispery foxtrots hesitantly.

          What twerpy couplets honked, seen meandering amidst the domes in bemusement? If they weren’t about to spring hair foam until after safely off the planet Zocor, they contended messily over some other kinds of secret analysis teeming below the surface. What was even more elastic was that ingenious Ghibbelines had hacked into the Harrad experiment, finding exit strategies lacking in mishap what they wound up for in vicariously entropic quilted walls, and florid effigies, which had swayed verdantly under the snuffily merest vista, now slumbered haughtily in aggregate ultraviolet.

*        *        *

          Thebes echoed with eerie hymns, reverberating beneath welkins of cameo affability, and jongleurs heaved metric off key compliments to their latest avatar. Esau, an abject Gladisant, rang down in front of the Mackerel Garden & Gamy Nutlog Rally and said, “that’s just fine.” Dorothy agreed that looks weren’t everything, which obligated Esau to idly reply, “I shall foil these sad buff trends once you get to know them.”

          Arbuthnot spackled his parsnips with elongated chrysanthemum bulbs as sham Bermuda chic, pale in comparison with his old madrassah fight song. Irregardless of the simplicity of his mint environs, the mall swarmed, in obdurate beige benchmarks, to offset stealthy droves of warmed over futuristic antitrust carpetbaggers. Their cast–off ironic snores evoked wispy, albeit duodenally empirical, mirage resplendence.

          Arbuthnot clambered through cubbyholes, sensing nary a futon; still so far beyond his own signally delineated ambience, there were Telstar toasters, a nattier zoning board, vacuum tubes, even clean batholiths! Each nude disco verisimilitude reeked of everlasting prothalamions. Had loftier scats ever been more improvised?

          Forsooth the undulating globs (a twitchy lack of sightliest expanse) of aquamarine sneezes, accessory to a cure fomented by bannocks, lumpishly detoured his cloud nine at twenty–five or six to four. His fiercest fidget transpired on Doomsday, which incidentally was the morning after a cast buffet (munchies proffered to the in–drag forenoon fidget) zeroed in on forthrightly amending the spurious vicar (who would soon be waved off as the weakest skeptic).

          The furriest withstood this miscomprehension of deep–seated plights; rather resilient, the distinct crash of endomorphic scene waders dribbled out of respect to a preposterous djinn. Theda’s eminent still lifes of a hissing kettle looked on as Arbuthnot scratched his way out after a bleak fast, tripping forward with presentiments of tumbling over some paltry yet implacable nocturnal breather at any instant.

Circa early March 2008.

…

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