SCOWL

for Andrew Deveau

As fate would have it I was dead asleep when, oozing miraculous confounding sentiment,
the shoulder of the Cosmos lurched, tossing up all the others in a hey hey scramble
and sixty-eight neutron stars bumped into one another, whining eagerly, eyelids pricked
and there were starbursts blitzing in the stellar mucous, humming explosively wide
When a single archaic sun, grinning, trickled down a single octopus-finger, gently laid upon the quivering potatobelly of a scared baby, blessed him and left him, taking his time through the erotic drapes.
When eleven though maybe twelve ironic rumwhiskey apostles were dragged north-north west by their guilty eyeteeth from their velvet sleeping holes, out into the incandescent bitter smirk

of their own parents adolescent remorse, of course.

When the Big Smile bashed his way in the door, screaming for more ecstasy, more poetry, more gilded indulgence, more of life! And was wrong all along. Furthermore, clipping his forehead with a maroon, rightangle gash on the oaken thresholds as he strolled about in houses built for dwarves, being exactly idiotic.
When a chromium-addicted whitehead tumbled into the rainforest with plan and coldiron compass, carving his likeness onto trees and Sunday squirrels and rock’n’roll orange juice containers, dredged up in a quick shower lately.
When the frizzygold love of all types like mine condescended to my nightmarish jungle-gym, and talked over lilacs with me, destiny, hot chocolate lattes and bliss-making. And then, in a spooky puff, also left up in rippling arms.
When the Orient sprayed itself into every last nook of my life, leaving ping pong and eggrolls in my inbox and my sex diary, provoking sleeplessness and green-colored rage.
When psychomaniacal imp in greasy petticoat hopped into my train of thought and stuck there for ten centuries, childishly sexual, demoniacally virginal, whose heart giggled and was fuzzy.
When it became intensely obvious that all anyone had to do anymore was sit around in museum soda-shops, poking their blisters and muttering through unbrushed teeth all about their ennui and nonage.
When two of my cousins were suddenly epileptic in bowl of dip, spattering everything, ruining the fourth for everyone, setting the dogs on fire.
When the ferris wheel came off its joint, rolled at precisely lightspeed backwards across the Atlantic into Africa, and there became human, built a bamboo hut and fathered two sons, Robot and Rocket Pellowski, proceeding to jot meditations of the Meditations.
When half my best friends were cordially invited to hop on the rickety bandwagon of rubber-glove homosexuals, and cordially turned the offer down, choosing instead to piss holes in the sacred snow on Halloween.  
When, following that, we all trickertreated on christmas, and I toga’d it up as Epictetus and froze my willy off in the icy wonderland, caroling brightly under flocks of December birds which drifted like smoke rings over hill and dale.
When the colossal invisible pendulum that really does exist and swings outside my window began to whisper there.
When Littrell found treasure in my breakfast, leaped up onto my chair and declared to Chicago, this is the wages of death! And regained his composure, retired and sold his head to a collector.
When my iPod began to jiggle endlessly, and by the time I noticed, a ghoul had lovingly wrapped itself around me, coaxing me with pitcher of Listerine to the marriage-bed.
When I became trapped in a dubstep stainglass window, mixed up my toes in ashes from neo-hipsters’ cigarettes, and found references to Sophocles in Yu-Gi-Oh, but never told anybody.
When moist towelettes were all the rage, and we reported one-hundred-percent pregancy rates, and I went to school in a swamp, and my crayolas turned to succulent goo.
When peopled told each other that they loved each other, and then felt stupid about it --that all went on in my slumber. When everyone was secretly justifying their racism to a midnight mirror. When God frightened the bajeesus out of everybody and my dad lost money.  
When high school was real, man, it was like in Grease, gangs and cars and all the girls worth talking to also put out like a jack-in-the-box, and nobody ever actually had to go to class.
When I opened up a package of Doritoes and inside was a solitary human skull, ruby-red and shouting FIFTEEEEEEN at me. I knew exactly what that meant.
When my generation started to digest itself, and, lacking the necessary nutrition, vomited. The candy-cane flecks of its own volcanic spew got caught in the edgebeards of our parents, and our parents wisely sighed, ignorant as Easter sheep.
When meaning moved to Scotland. And who was left in the New World, angry and conniving and perpetually vain? Not me.
When, in the course of four years, roughly three hundred kids submitted themselves to maybe a billion multiple choice questions. Most of these kids, legend has it, forgot about self esteem, and are dead.
ah, Deveau, you must understand this somewhat. We are all the same genus of maggot, dancing microscopic jigs beside the roots of our mutual World Tree, adorants of rain and rainbows, knowledge and intuition, karma and caramel.
ah Deveau, was it you who echoed in my library one solemn eve, when I was returning an anorexic volume of greek tragedy (because everything, including agony, is hilarious, wot wot) to its place amid the Archie comics and renegade coffee beans on the shelf? Did you call to me through some American spacetime portal? Did you ask me something?
ah Deveau, this is all for you, and Lokesh is all for me, and Flowers is all for Lokesh, and Benji is all for Flowers, but no one is for Benji except himself.  
ah Deveau, this I missed and more since I was still sleeping, though once I know I broke and rose uncovered to the window where the fat moon looked in at me, and I was questioned by my partner what is the matter? And I said I just have a lot of my mind. But soon again I was asleep when the Fall fell on my city.
When the calculus of livelihood was so horrendously mutated by money for one chubby singing girl, and she and her half-asian asinine boyfriend disappeared in a mist of high-finance retardation, titanic self-delusion, algorithmic, masturbatory music.
When Klimt, Huey Long, Theseus, Wallace Stevens, Joel Osteen and Lil Wayne all came back from the grave except for the last two to tell me, there biggist fan, the best book any of them had ever read was Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You. Hell yes I was disappointed.
When I was confusingly molested on a mustard schoolbus outside of the mosque were I took the SAT by a muscular, warbly bipolar boy. Whom I later cried for, and consequently made me despise tenderness.
When I successfully tricked a teacup with a lipstick smear on it, or a plum, or a mink, into drunken love with me in a foreign land, and put it on my resume.
When the streets gushed with excited milk, and we all ran out in our plain pajamas to get some, discovering immediately it was too sticky and too sweet for our species, and that it had come from Somewhere Sinful.
When time stopped.

And started again.

When I went years without crying, but cried everynight in my dreams in a desert, where angel appeared, smoking rapidly, and demonstrated how love was not the answer to my problems.
When we danced in a circle around a Tesla coil, and a parade of boys drizzling puberty worshipped the geometric fizz of eternity, took to Kant and swallowed each other every night for the rest of their lives.
When Narcissus collapsed in a splash, and the chortling nymphomaniacs mocked him on their artsy blogs, all of which were worse than mine, since mine is “themed.”
When, ultimately, I chalked it all up to entertainment, didn’t take it seriously, and so it all made sense to me. O you poor others, with your seven-knuckled fingers turning over themselves in needless worry, just listen to what I’ve been saying, Jesus.
Because I am quite fine, lol.
    
Alternatively, you may change your life.
No, no, no, no I said no I won’t no.
You MUST change your life...

Because it is not enough to stargaze, because you are an animal, because you are made out of meat and liquid, yes you are. Because Lokesh commands you, and Lokesh is everything, in the scriptures, in the galactic epic, in my heart-of-hearts.

Lokesh! That engine of black, segmented semi-sanity, who trowels up mountainsides with a gravelly cackle. He is humongous! He “contains multitudes!”
Lokesh! Who devours all the words, all the memes and archetypes, wields a calabash and kola nut! He is a gargantuan wizard, king of elephants and lord of Antarctica! His lipsmacks cause thunder!
Lokesh! The great, thick talking ship-beam of sarcasm! Lokesh! caged in the tabernacle, of whom you are forbidden to eat with seafood (for this may cause nausea) according to the chart!
Lokesh! who is the captain of queerness, a fanboy of sublimity, a devotee of the arabesque! Lokesh whose entire purpose is to deceive you on Valentine’s day with a bushel of latex roses and a seductive noose!
Lokesh! Who lusts for geography, for etymology, for spiderflesh and tapioca! Who partakes in Chinese checkers (I am still not totally sure how that game works) and once, on a dare, ate an entire Wii console with butter! Who paints burning nations under the desk in his q-mech class, who allows priests to befriend him in alleyways, posing as schizophrenic gigolos with a mission from Thor!
Lokesh! who binds broken furniture together and sells it on craigslist with an eight by ten glossy of himself stapled to his bill! Lokesh who bid children gather round while he murders a family of rabbits with a fork! Lokesh who peers into your zipper and licks his lips, dreaming of syrup!
Lokesh! who rents movies and returns them in their cases all junked up with his iridescent seed! Lokesh who ponders Yung Joc atop somebody else’s car on prom night, picking at a twenty-year old scab on his head, wearing nothing but mittens!
Lokesh who wanders! Lokesh who marauds! Lokesh the vagrant disciple of my art! Lokesh who lives with “...a baby in a jar with glasses on, and a gun!” Lokesh whose minds is made of mockgems, whose arm is a hammer, whose teeth are priceless, and whose eyes are also hammers, and whose heart is also mine!
Lokesh! creature of destruction, destructor of creation! Who will forever live in infamy, in ignominy, in an igloo of solid skin! Lokesh who listens to Monk, and Gaga, and sings happy birthday to himself sacrilegiously if you pay him enough!
Lokesh who chose everything, who specified this and that, who selected this world instead of others, who once accidentally kissed Micromegas in his nethereye while he was looking for Candide!
Lokesh the shifty mechanic of jeriatric disintergration, the orchestrator of death panels, the rheumatic dictionary-writer, the bewhiskered nun, the curmudgeonly curator of rare flagella and foreskins, the sunflower-lover! Lokesh the only symbol remaining to mankind!
Lokesh the wasted potential! Lokesh the ninety-nine-percent! Lokesh the cardboard wasteland, the ten-ton ejaculation of blossoming imagination, the vitreous ocean of might, maybe, perhaps! Lokesh, ever never missing the “eternal note of human misery” because he is too busy on his smudged gameboy!  
Lokesh the dirty secret! Lokesh, inspired by me, as he can testify, to move to the rectangular North because, let’s be honest, he is way too turned on by circles; he leers at them hideously! Lokesh who broke open my will and found mangled gibberish there, scrawled in feces, sprinkled with cracked pepper, signed in gluestick!  
Lokesh! whose chest is a cavern inhabited by academic trolls, relishers of anti-fantasy, who regularly put their pink bathtowels back on the rack with something that looks not unlike Bisquick! But Lokesh doesn’t care!
Lokesh who is a spawn of india-ink diagrams! Lokesh who fishes in the toilet for plastic trinkets to write verses on, thereupon which he will submit to his old high-school’s litmag, and be rewarded with tepid fame! Lokesh who is encrusted in Western Culture! Lokesh who has touched a UFO!
Lokesh who is the evil genius behind the networks, who turns his nipples into honorary satellites,

who grants degrees to the homeless! Lokesh who digs tunnels under wishing wells desiring copper nickels, who does this creepy thing where he twists his wrists in mid air like he’s trying to open a pair of unseen jars!

Lokesh who takes ten girls to the opera and leaves with all their virginities! Lokesh who boxed with Pollux and got fisted “onaccident” on the subway by a man wearing a soccer shirt and a fedora!
Fedoras! Who can tell me why anyone wears these things! Fedoras! Additionally, why do people wear them inside! Fedoras! Seriously!
Lokesh who played quiz bowl in a hurricane with you Deveau, but you didn’t know, because like me, you’ve slept a third of your life, and that’s ample time for all kinds of eerie events to take place on and around your body!
Lokesh who constructed this world from wet dreams and soggy fantasiae! Lokesh who can take it all back by inverting his thumb! Lokesh who is the lawgiver of wasps, weevils, earwigs and weasels! Lokesh who visits urban widows with handmade cards and cookie bouquets and a camera crew, asks to use the bathroom and commits suicide on television!

Andrew Deveau! I’m with you in Park Ridge!

where on the the first day christmas, my true love gave to me: a Park Ridge and a parody lol

I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where stoplights go off between your legs ever’time you think of buzzing in
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where malis wears an apron that says “Kiss the Chode” and makes the two of you brunch in bed
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where Benji is building a summer home and storing up barleycorns and gothic pornography
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where Benji is also painting a mural of matrimonial excellence
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where you are a bigger hipster than I am
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
look I am not a hipster
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
idk if you are one
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
w/e let’s just both agree we’re both cool guys. no need for labels k
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where all the Jews are transvestites
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where you can get a plug of meth for a buck
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where all the men are beautiful
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where I suggest you compose an offensive parody of This Lime Tree Bower My Prison about your girlfriend
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
the land of landlocked seasides, friendly pebble-people and free Snickers
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
the desolate chasm of studly charm
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
the maximum of vocabularic, connotative blending
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
the zone of chipper intellectuals, mending corduroy trousers, squirting espresso, making homophobic jokes under the blankets
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
where I am approaching always
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
my destination in flexible Divinity
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
thence after the aforementioned years of “stony sleep” I am slouching “to be born”
I’m with you in Park Ridge!
but ah, Deveau, I lie. For in this long, preceding filament of my literary decadence, I know: Park Ridge is not where I go. I have dropped my aspirations like leather luggage at the feet of the Colossus and wept openly, in front of Benji even, begging for a commission, for a corpse to marry, for a subject to make my object, but I have gotten nothing from you, from Benji, from outer space and outer time, and so I must go. Though
I have nowhere left to go but starward.