well WHAT ELSE? dry spiteful speech, jailed conjunctions, metaphors machine- gunned where they stood, rat tat tat tat bayoneted underwear, famine, fevers burning what’s within, prepositions lying in the fields, ell-bones showing through their kinks and connections, snow in the south, trench mouth in the north, shrouds on the soldiers advancing on Finland, waves of remorse, tides of verse and floods of piss, garish and pimpy rhymes, rotting teeth and silver-filled feelings, painted nails, cruel valentines, inappropriate gifts, reproachful children, a fungus forming in every crack, within a grin or course of brick, in any line, a letch for anal copulation with clichés, with the elderly and infants, with little tat epidemics of typhus or the trots, tat outbreaks of tantrums, tat the giggles, tat tat violent sneezing, tat tat tat tat tat tat O cocks consumed by their sucking, ah! utter apathy, outbreaks of silence, a steady unoccluded sun, depressed italics, terror, quakes in the inner ear: adverbs consequently fallen on by nouns, real worse symbolic rapes by the same vague smegma’d shape, loyalty O loyalty licked by a treasonous tongue, total word war, tat and letters which have thrown away their arms and flea the kont, tat not to mention tat those lost in service tat down in the fight, all the gone into the repeated spelling of ‘hell,’ so we are -eft with -ifs and -aw and -ove and -onging, -itt-e more, as if our thought were starting over in its mewling infancy, inside its seed, although the spirit, ah! the spirit, O the spirit has stopped. tat. stopped. like Woody the Butcher Boy’s Block stops the cleaver THWACK! or a sand-jammed gun goes snick, down dog, down tock, down hickory dick. tat. stopped. tat. stopped, an eon ∞ empire ∞ ages ∞ egos ago. please: a morning only > please: a moment more > please: a breath before at last! the long Last tat or after tat WHAT? on liptoe WHAT? at liptip WHAT? at pitlip O in limeslime What? what? what?

General Weathering, sir! What a nobilitating tide! Yes. For the war of elements. Yes. What a foofaracious nomination! Yes. For the heart’s rage. Yes. What a flatulent vocis! What a noxious wordturd! Yes. I see typhoons of wind-driven saliva; notions blown away like birds to light before strange eyes on stranger trees in stranger minds. The edges of distinctions fray, General. General, the centers of our symbols wear like stairs. Sounds, like meat, slide off their bones, and a word written ‘body,’ if often enough stepped on—stomped, kicked, scuffed, screwed—is soon smooth as ‘ooove’ as it hastens away in the hollow shape of a whistle. Syllables catch fire, General. Towns do. Concepts are pulled apart like the joints of a chicken. Substance. Listen to the mind munch. Consonants, General, explode like grenades. Vowels rot in some soft southern mouth, and meaning escapes from those oooos as from an ass. And I’d my privates pulled on by a boy in Prague who told me, Mister . . .