I don’t know how long it’s going to take for me to expel all the ‘repressive sublimation glub-jub, life-is-a-sweet-fucking-fruit goddamned pomegranate orange-asm with squirrel guts inside crystalline orb-lettes, whisked eggs, intent and peduncles, wild, impressionistic golden hairs, paved with bricks and lined with Edvard Munch police, lanolin buzz bleep torque, sharp spastic dressings on golden knives stabbing violently from sirloin encrusted mittens, and other streams of garbled emissions that had no communicative value to them whatsoever’. Quoting Joe is an old habit. I am sitting on a veritable trove of his psycho and “pseudo-suicidal babble” he penned over the years as the clown without paint or the mask of the gazelle, penguin, gorilla, Draconius Pants Monk, Whispering, Antichrist Jr., Mr. Tree God, Momar Smudge, Bozo, John F. Kennedy impersonator, Bugaboo, hopeful monster, wilted grasshopper, and the sphinx, unveiled, and not there. I have concluded fucking nothing [from these] but the fact that the microphysical aura is the abstracted problem, that he liked Peter Bogdonavich, Marshall Hammond, basic bitches on the subway, big fucking bombs, the deliberately incorrect usage of the word ‘bodice’, odes, cilium, his grandma, his brother, Danny Glover in Predator 2, Kabuki dolls, ice cream, and for whatever reason, he really fucking wanted to go to the zoo.

I’ve talked myself in and out of circles, up and down fecal creeks with no oars, all the metaphors. I’ve repeated myself to so many people this week; it’s the psychic equivalent of sprinting in place. I wish I had any God-damned grace. I just don’t. I’m not even going to blame the grief. I appreciate most of the anecdotes about Joe, but some of them are unbearable. The memorial service was all but unbearable. It’s with a cod piece for a muzzle that I say how I hated seeing all the Lamplighter fuzz. I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry for everyone who knew him only as that “hot bartender”, and are grieving his absence from that venue because it is uncanny insofar as it was ever-present. I am a disgrace. I feel territorial over a leg of his memory as it occurred to me to a minimal degree, but with special respect to that toxic wigwam in which he withered. The first time he took me there with some people I was 19. Shirley was still there and she ceremoniously tossed us all out on my account. I was so embarrassed. Even when I finally was of drinking age, it seemed like no one was there when I went there with Joe. I remember sitting with him by the door on Christmas Eve and I gave him the clock without hands and an origami crane, which he popped into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, opened wide - “No hesitation.” “Sh-boom and the pants song”. Pants pants pants. What does any of this matter now. The point is that I can’t stop telling the truth, and the truth is a sullied Bozo. I need to talk to Joe. I need him to tell me to stop being such a prick. I don’t think he would have done that because he was such an advocate of prickery, whether in theory or in jest. But I need to talk to him nevertheless. All I can do is hold up the mic to a seashell, a daintified doll, a peace lily, a post-apocalyptic pop-up book, a suitcase of ashes, a cookie jar urn…

“To my fellow sufferers, who suffer by institutional association with yours so truly, I can give no solace other than my absence.The great bright hour has come, “many are born to endless night and many are born to sweet delight.” I believe that William Blake spoke truthfully in those cancerous prose. I have imagined and postulated the outcomes of tactful action and can posit no longer the absurdity of the thought process, “for what I would have myself I would deny others” (Ecclesiastes 9/11). Is it that time? Has the beast come for me yet? We will see what is grasped in that lonely left fist of hers.  After close inspection I’ve found that it’s the kerchief that was spoken of in some obscure concept of eternity (wherein the blasphemous hawk flew like the miscarriage it is over a great spire of a mountain and dropped the handkerchief upon its peak, the mountain’s erosion exemplifying the absurd fallacy of eternity, of new temporal plotlines and pentagrams whose axis are all askew), goodnight fair mistress of repetition.  For there can be no eternity and upon it’s wilted corner is sewn the brilliant initials of the most martyred of the saints. And so in the twilight hours, the crepuscular midriffs of the beheaded gleam blue in what will soon be cast in clay light. In this long sleepless night I will undoubtedly suffer remorse, but I will fast on the glancing, abrasive jive of the bugaboo therein…contesting steel with flesh! Goodnight moon!” 

-J.E.G. 2008