carry on

tigers in the bottom of the barrel
sunglasses-wearing felines &
fallacious arguments about science
kids w/ rocks 'n pasta, postboxes 'n
sandwiches w/ swans. i met (truly,
Ulysses) a mercury-sweating
caldron in the lobby with Margaret,
boy, she was acting funny.

it's like the lights-out w/o the lights
on, she said that's what depression
is. "Depression, call it depression, it
goes so, what are you gonna do about
it, that's what I'd like to know."

take off your sweatshirt when you're
talking to me, honey, i've got
my beeeeeeeads on

& again with proctors and the Lancelot-
lovers, the corn-muffin bakers & the
ice-queens whom dance in the corners

yes i was also a man once, when the
circumstances allowed it

but i tried, Dan, i tried i tried i tired,
like i'm looking in a glass here, the
mirror opening like the moon becoming
a body of water in which to swim
a cold hard woman that's looking
to knife you.

i believe in foster children's toilets
& magma machines & pushups.

please carry on.

Dan's morning routine

Dan's home was practically a museum, built out of white marble slabs and featuring low-slung windows that looked like those in a post office. Indeed the whole monument had a feeling of a civic gathering spot, as opposed to a house. 

Dan woke up in the morning in his king-sized bed, draped in purple satin and redolent of potpourri (his maid, Linda, who he had a crush on but had been afraid to ask out, loved the stuff). Plenty of swords and medieval weapons adorned the walls. There were also several televisions, most of which he had never turned on or set up. 

After rising at 10 a.m. – an hour that never deviated – he brushed his teeth and strolled out of his cherrywood doubledoors, emblazoned with silvery chicanery (objects, symbols, political gain, chevrons). He strode across the strip of grass along LaBoutain Boulevard known as Dan's Park and then entered the Refinery, his sem-private "lunch club," where a team of doctors and surgeons waited to examined him. 

His bladder, kidneys and tonsils thoroughly prodded and interrogated, Dan sidled up to the breakfast bar, where Lorraine (his kidney doctor's wife, a real gem) ceremonially asked, "What can I get you, Mr. Fontaine?"

"Eggs Florentine, ma'am," he replied, as always. 

His eggs came bedecked in spears of asparagus and slathered in Mackerel Sauce, which contained equal portions of Clove Oil and Spearmint. Dan really was a maniac. 

After the eggs came a hunk of whale blubber, as well as a tidy bowl of pure ASPARTAME chunks. He loved these, and loudly made suck of them. 

Then, the salad course, which he never ate. 

Finally, desert. Rat-tails crusted in real sugar, opossum eyes and arrangements of gumdrops made to recreate scenes of mastodons fornicating. 

After breakfast, Dan was often frisky, and he went into the basement of the refinery, where Jill and Jo were waiting to tickle his scrotum with ostrich feathers, and stroke his cock until he ejaculated into a pot made of baked mud. The pot was never emptied, a point about which Jill had complained, only to be stricken by Jo, who was a violent and dangerous woman, and whose arm-grip strength could choke a pregnant buffalo. 

Sated, Dan then sometimes went out back for a game of tug of war with a pack of measles-infested children. Dan was oddly immune to this disease, despite never having received a vaccine. Predictably, the Fontaine's loathed vaccines, almost as much as they loathed diseases. They didn't mind rats, however, prone as they were to loving the darkest and foulest corners of our human-created world. 

Jim DeBelsh, Dan's foreman at the cemetery, would then usually give Dan a briefing about the daily body-rearrangement ceremony, and the grave-digging initiative. At 12:30, Dan would plunge his head into a bowl of cold water, and yawning, retired to his bed at the civic center for a nap, and, occasionally, quaaludes.