The muses of excuses? I am the National Repository. And I take in no more than I pay out. A securely failing institution, books so finely balanced there’s never been a profit. Façade of granite and custard. I should call upon Mme. de Girardin, perhaps, La Muse de la patrie, or a lesser but likelier sort, La Muse Lintonière, what was her name? Charlotte . . . Bourette. Well, there’s nothing my firm doesn’t know about weaseling. Procrastination a specialty. President by my own acclamation, I’ve made a profession of putting off payoff. Why diddle Dido when you can found Rome—-is that the question? What dumb dong could not contrive a dozen reasons? I’ve run out of ones for nonfucking the wife, though. It’s been a slow, that is to say, a flaccid season. Lust no longer a loss leader. The same stock stands on the same shelves, nightie after nightie, as I make a joke of it, this life without tumescence, my wile’s response beneath a layer of talc. I’m overculpensating; that’s my problem. But if she would suck at something other than a soda straw. If I could get one pant when I took off my trousers. If she would slide her tongue’s tip tightly along the long bone of my back as Lou once did. If once. Once. Ai! that fat bitch . . . that wet basement, barnyard, Yankee slit, French trench . . . that German ditch . . . if, once . . . she lit that faithless cosmopolitan clit . . . but once. Ai! Ai! That ham’s hock. Length of light like a pencil in the passage. Down there in the dirt. Down there. That ox’s muzzle. That cattle’s chest. Ai! Ai! Ai! There’s a Homeric yawp; but what’s the use of howling? who will hear and what will change? Marty remains, and Marty’s large, hard, hidden tummy, pale as a vampire’s victim, once belonged to a turtle—that’s my claim—and the shell’s not even charitable in soup. Believe me, she carries a cow’s cunt below those fatty stairs of hers like someone boarding a bus with a bursting bag . . . her shy lower lips like a rooster’s wattle. I should crow in that?

Then Milton, also suffering from batteries gone shineless against the guarantee, had to ask twice like a kid for his candy. ¶Nonetheless, those ancient bards, they had their Heavens and the ear of some Almighty, a palm, you might say, to put a petition in; but poor Rilke, remember? could only wonder who would hearken if he did cry, Help me! to the angels.

O goddess of the risen gorge . . .

Everywhere nothing now but a revocation of the muse. Cancel Clio, cross out sweet Calliope, for history’s been buggered by ideology, and farts its facts in an odorous cloud, while poets have no breath whatever, are in another business presently, where Parnassus is a pastry, and produce their poems promptly on request like short-order cooks shake forth a batch of fries. Mark out Melpomene. The lines of the anonymous are nothing like the lives of the saints; a celebrity is but a draft from his fans; crooks establish dynasties on stolen dimes, and slips of policy feed greasy Sicilian Caesars who are all, one hopes, predamned the way our postage is prepaid; then politicians, nowadays, are as unlikely subjects for tragedy as dung dropped from the bronze horses of their predecessors; while the otherwise so-called great have all the substance of a cunt-encouraged cheer from the stands. Of Thalia make a laughingstock. Erase Erato as well, since sex is Smut (a kind of commercial cleanser); Euterpe too, because the flute which gladdens is a kid’s kazoo, and comedy a laughingstock. Tear Terpsichore in two like a losing ticket. We do not dance these days, we march. We stomp. As for Polyhymnia . . . where everything’s a sewer, what is sacred? soccer? and the heavens, like Urania herself, were buried long ago beneath the battlefield where we did in the planets and drove the constellations like fattened cattle to the abattoirs.