The Eternal Manuscript

The flies swarm upon the manuscript as if it were rotten flesh steaming with new death. The pages, stapled at the corner, are swept open by the wind like a surgical incision revealing the organs coiled inside, each one blasphemously metaphorical, stray drops of rain strike the page, allowing it to bleed appropriately. Sorry for the flies that this ink is made of pigments less palatable than blood, this cheap stuff that flows so more easily from a pen. Though it is thoroughly indigestible to them they can sense its putrefaction better than those who might read it, gulping it down through eyes with their dilated pupils eager to consume it in ripples of peristalsis that ease it down the optic nerve as gently as a constrictor wraps its mouth around a peccary it snatched from the brush, turning its legs and hooves, sensitive snout and teeth and slight tail into nothing more than a motive bulge along its slender body.

The flies wade on its surface, suckering their mouths, vomiting in expectation, they flit around it in futility, searching for the stench that drew them in. In one writhing mass they congregate over the pages, flee when they flutter, and ignore their kin who are crushed by the mass of that paper, who intermingle ink with their innards, only now do they ramble on the page, their corpses transubstantiated to dying words. This is the miracle of the written word, let it be grim and do not deride it, this unparalleled miracle. They continue their circling, in still thicker clouds cohering into forms that flicker above the pages as they roil in the madness of the meal they sense has been denied them.

First they materialize as classical sculpture, forms of men denuded, flashing the contours of muscled torsos and the full breasts of fertile goddesses, then as the long beard of Zeus, detached from his body, floating with its authority stripped by its very absurdity, though it is bathed in the thunder of tremulous buzzing. They are smashed now by the dozens every second, as the author, stuck in a personal delirium, is unable to stop them, paralyzed by his own wretched wisdom, he watches.

Heaping on the pages now, they cover up all his work, but their cloud grows no thinner, as more and more of their fellows join them. The cloud rebels against the better angels of Greece and Rome, they turn to Petronius, animating the lost orgies of the Satyricon, pitching in the throes of intercourse until they shudder in joylessly reenacted orgasms, spewing the fruits of these pointillistic erections into the pages, where those unlucky flies are splattered warmly and cemented along with those that fell there before them.

As if punishing themselves for their indulgences they morph into the sign of the cross and the man who was nailed there, flies gush from his wounds, dripping into the manuscript. Then they replay the testament backwards from the crucifixion, Judas warns Christ in the garden, bribing the Roman soldiers with only a few pieces of silver, and they flee to the last supper, where all the disciples vomit up the flesh and blood of Yahweh at his earthly incarnation’s direction. He gathers up this micturation and forms it like clay into its true aspect, a great black fly that the disciples marvel at before it alights on each one of them in turn, haired forelegs braced on their shoulders, and, distending its mouth over their heads, turns them to mush with its powerful digestive enzymes that slowly corrode their skin, consecrating their bodily forms back to the rot from which they came, rashes to rashes, muck to muck.

From within this scene the flies turn their bodies to the stuff of other times. They bloom in vast pastorals of timeless country sides, a shepherd takes his crook and guides his flock of frogs through valleys of writhing flies that they feast on, tongues brandished as slimy lances. The manuscript is, by now, more fly than paper, its pages and ink dissolve into a ream of the smashed insects. Then the author stirs, out of his trance, and whisks away the swarms with his arms, clutches his precious work to his breast and dashes inside. He pours himself a cup of coffee and takes up his pen to edit it, but his head lolls and hits his desk in slumber. In response the manuscript oozes guts onto the desk at its edges, seeping out from between the pages.

He sleeps for so long maggots hatch and begin their gestation, laid their in fertile patches by their mothers who did not care that their young would be forced to cannibalize these fermented layers of their ancestors. They feed happily and follow the trails of nourishment that ooze onto the desk and find the nostrils of the sleeping author, that they enter and burrow. He still sleeps, in his dream turning the tickling on his nostrils into the touch of a butterfly's wings against his nose which he brushes away, smiling.

So the maggots crawl along the nasal passages until they finally make their home in his brain and there settle down to pupate in its fatty folds. He wakes in fits of inspiration, scrambles to find a pen, and finding nothing handy, flips open the sticky pages of flies and begins to scrape words into them with his yellowing fingernails. Pulsating, the pupae erupt into gleaming, healthy flies in the cavity of his skull, emptied by the hunger of their former maggots.

This is the mind of his new inspiration, a cavity swarming with flies so constrained that they smack into each other and flit off lazily, dazed by the impact, courting each other in timeless frenzy, a few escaping through the portals of the nostrils to hover by the manuscript’s eternal corpse, taking off and landing skittishly, to lay their eggs again.

This is the miracle of the written word, let it be grim and do not deride it, this unparalleled miracle.

Metaphor Implosion

I have been smashing cockroaches with dictionaries, turning them into sordid pancakes sprouting their gleaming legs like a leftover game of rancid pick-up-sticks, and where have the children gone? What made them leave their game, however disgusting, with the score untallied? And where have the cockroaches gone? Though I have to admit that I admire them for leaving behind the pancakes, so tirelessly were they flipping them that they lost some of their legs and left them behind in the batter proudly as a monument to their industriousness, sticking out like knives of serrated obsidian left behind on sacred ground by a tribe of death-worshipers who, in the daytime, shot furtive glances at the sun that, were it to notice, would scald its surface with a hatred more poignant than a left over game of pick-up-sticks gathering dirt and moss under a tree in the middle of the rainforest a thousand damp miles from the nearest doctor’s office where a toothless old woman’s skin ripples with tanned wrinkles that contain rings within their strata that rival the concentric, irregular circles that grace the stump of a tree awaiting the bulldozer that will rend it from the earth as gently as a team of archeologists prizing the lid off an unknown pharaoh’s sarcophagus with a child’s set of pick-up-sticks they found completely fossilized jutting out from a cliff face like a set of cockroach legs carefully cut and arranged by a former florist who has made up his mind to sell no more bouquets of contemptible roses, setting up his new business under a replica of stone henge made of precariously balanced dictionaries that could crush him and his shop beyond recognition with the weight of their ink alone, but when he makes his way to his shop each day, it isn’t the weight of the ink that bothers him, nor the weight of the covers and the pages, it is the weight of his heart which has been metaphorically exaggerated beyond the weight of all the ink in all the squid of the world, even if each one of them was simultaneously grasped in the mouths of a countless battalion of bull sperm whales who meticulously gathered up all the dark fluid they released in their fear with tiny butterfly nets stuck absurdly between the peaks of their mountainous teeth like decorative toothpicks. Not even if all those whales were so deft in their motions that they gathered every molecule of ink in their nets (though they were rearing to show to us all that they could) and amassed the black excretions into a disk that accreted together from the force of its own gravity, not even this weight would compare to the weight in the old man’s heart, not even if every world revolving around every star was filled only with oceans and squid and pods of assiduous sperm whales, so hyperbolic in scope was the metaphor whose comparison was applied there in the heart of the old man’s heart. Yet the old man couldn't feel the full weight of this figure of speech anymore than a jumble of cockroach legs feels the metaphor of a child’s game of pick-up-sticks on the obsidian-like shards of its spines, didn’t feel it anymore than the death-obsessed tribe felt the extreme anticipation of the team of archeologists hefting the lid of the pharaoh’s sarcophagus with the pick-up-sticks like the legs like their razor thin knives of volcanic black glass that they pinched between their fingers to spill blood from the throats of the fair for the thirst of the gods of the forest. The old man was much like other old men, with his slow, measured steps and his thinning white hair so the weight in his heart might as well be as much as it would if it weren’t really there.