The Game that Nobody Understands Game

"You can look deep into my eyes, like I was a supermodel."

.. and under the hash browns, the fat gurgled and simmered with a plashing kind of roar...
...marbles rolled down the slide, into the mouth of the stuffed bull terrier waiting at the bottom ...
...molten wax spread over his fingers, and Tracy stroked his buttocks tentatively, lightly ...

big blue fluffy flowers

Ooooooh, the Chicago Manual of Style came in the mail today! Yummmmmm.

This is my Great-Uncle Leicester, who was a baritone in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

The Portobello Pizza, courtesy of the South Beach Diet, looks quite disgusting.

yes i, i, i dont know really. dont know really. no sirree, i dont know. perhpas its just those ... those ... moons. whte moons. cause its a really bright nighth, outside, you know that? i know it ... cause <whispers> cause somebody told me ALL about it. they had - <purses lips> - they had beautioful pictures and rainbows and black beauty was there and spiderman and i dont know, but it was very beautifl. <nods>.

and now i have to go to sleep, i think i have to go to sleep. but i cant sleep. i can never sleep. i just see pictures and words and lots of different words and i think of words to forget the pictures. i write a lot of them, and i read a lot of them, and then i dont have to think. anymore. <silent> la-de-daah ... la-de-daah ... my friend said, my friend said to me, drive - no thats a poem. for chrissakes and look where you're going, jim.

la-de-daah!! i am so sad. and i dont really know why. <confused>. just because - oh there's the chocolate sprinkles, i still have to clear away - aWAY ... chocolate sprinkles. and mice. and ... and ... there's sticky tape on the table, and there's pins, and a microphone, and three tapes and a phone which sometimes doesnt work. that really sucks, when that happens. <nods>. then i cant hear, suddenly - they leave, their voices i mean. and there's a lot of papers i still need to do something with, and a cookie tin, old. old cookie tin. i like my cookie tin ... <whispers>.

did you, did you ..? <shakes head, annoyed> BUZZ. buzz in my head. i dont want no buzz <sad> buzz buzz buzz buzz-buzz in your eardrum. i knew someone who had noise in her head sometimes. i dont really have noise in my head. not a buzz. its just this feeling, like everything falls into scattered pieces. like all the world, sometimes, it breaks into tiny shards and they all fall down at my feet. and theres nothing behind them. i dont understand! ... <plaintive>

i want to go away. perhaps i should go away. but i have to sleep now. sing a song for sleeping by ... its time / to say / goodnight ... no. no. thats not how it goes, no <shakes head>

<opens music player> <fiddles with it> the sound doesnt work! why doesnt, why doesnt it want to work? <panic>

<finds the right switch on volume control, crooner and thirties music resound from the speakers>

<someone who's not there calls out: "its henry hall, dear people! henry hall!">

<sways with the music, hums along>

its time to say goodnight
and its time to close your eyes
lets put out the light
till the dawn breaks through the skies
while long shadows creep
may your dreams be sweet and bright
in a moment you'll be sound asleep
its time to say goodnight

<sways with the music>

<crawls up on the big sofa, with a little blanket and closed, closed eyes. the world will stop ... it will. dont you worry, kid ... don't you worry.>

<waves goodnight>

Bravo!

I


?'I don't know why, but I often look for poems on the Internet that I already have in book form. It might be a waste of time, but then so was going to see my great grand aunt in one of those houses that, despite being ?'clean' materially, seem musty and old in nature. Only in Ireland could one have great grand aunts who play weird old songs about Bambi: planning one's life around a barometer and offering chicken legs to everyone are the after-effects of tasting the springs of life, which must be, by now, radioactive and full of discarded manga comics. Anyway, I still do it.

And, this one day, I was looking for ?'Lesbos,' by Sylvia Plath, my favourite poet. I clicked on the second link on the page, due to unexplainable tradition. From the description my search engine gave to me, it seemed like a legitimate poetry site.

It shocked me to see that it was not. It was, in fact, a link to pay-per-view pornography! ?'What does Sylvia Plath have to do with such degrading filth? ,' I said to myself, disbelievingly. Disgusted by the adverts for teen sluts and anal penetration, I sighed to myself and clicked on the third link down. My custom had been penetrated, in every sense of the word.

I had to get off the Internet, as I was still living with my mother; my mother thought that trifling chitchat with depressingly vacant colleagues was more important than my own enlightenment. There is something ever so urgent about gossip.

So: I sat down, slugged through Jane Eyre, ate whatever my mother tried to offer to me, and went to sleep.

Well, strictly, I did not go to sleep; rather, I went to bed. My pottering thoughts about what kind of freak associates Sylvia Plath with badly directed erotica made every other thought bland. Eventually, when I needed to go to sleep, the half-sensible part of my brain?-obviously female?-said to me, ?'O, would you think of something worthwhile already? It was probably a joke: they matched the other meaning of "Lesbos" to piss off people like you. Now go to sleep.' I was subservient, and agreed, and the whole thing joined the pile of my ridiculous ex-wonderings.

Well, I did banish it from my thoughts, until I was looking up Plath again: I was looking for a poem that my books did not have. My mind returned to non-poet-porn thoughts, I clicked on the second link available. And, voilà, another link to pornography. How could Frog Autumn have anything to do with copulation?

I stuttered in a minefield of doubles entrendres, and again decided that it could be an elaborate joke. My argumentative side, to which I?-more often than not?-pay much attention, screamed about the unlikelihood of Plathite pornographers. It could envision no one who would go from ?'Hot Asian brides' to ?'Crossing the water.'(Well, not Plath's ?'Crossing the Water' anyway.)

OK, I thought; I shall get past such innuendoable Plath poems as Virgin in a tree and Goatsucker. I thought that I would see whether Parliament Hill Fields led to pornography. It did. And so, I?-as if under some spell?-spent myriad hours typing in the name of every supposedly un-innuendoable Plath poem, and all apart from Edge fetched the same base result.

Trivial questions are like my religion, their answers my bible. I should think that any question that lies unanswered deserves more of my attention than answered ones. I remember that I once went all the way to Chalk Farm to find out why there is a dieresis over the name, ?'Brontë.' And I started up a ?'site in German to find out why some Viennese people call Louis Armstrong ?'The Big Onion.'

However, this was different; weirder. So, every time that I meant to be learning subjunctives or speaking Middle English aloud (even though I had intended to speak it in my head alone,) I instead puzzled with possibility, until I could take it no longer.
I had to take action.

II

?'Why, hello Vicky!!!!' I say, in the feigningly overenthusiastic voice that I call my ?'quadruple exclamation mark' voice. She, in turn, greets me with her quadruple exclamation mark voice. However, her voice is always stuck on that, as if she swallowed a bowl of punctuation when she was a child: the punctuation hurt her, especially the exclamation marks, so she tries to excrete them. She can get rid of everything except exclamation marks and question marks, which cling on to her innards like hooks. So she throws them up while speaking, four at a time, in the hope that she will?-someday?-be exclamation-free. She obviously doesn't know how well they breed.

?'What do you want, mate? ,' She asks. I say that I'll tell her when she lets me in! With that cosy exclaiming intonation, that sounds joking but is actually testament to my being pissed off. This should give to me five seconds to formulate my plan, as I can't tell my real intentions to her frankly.

She ushers me through her house, up to her bedroom. Her ?'parents' are not here. The house is completely unremarkable: a beige and doily set-up, with a few chairs that IKEA rejected. We ascend the minuscule stairs, lined with cheap carpeting and out-of-date family photos. I amuse myself by looking at those ?'professional' family photographs that some people get: the smile of the children says, teeth grit, ?'let's do it right, or we'll be here for another eight hours,' and the smile of the parents?-especially the mother?-is ?'hold it! Hold it?-?' as if they were juggling an elephant?-?'Hold it! Sandra-May, if you're not smiling, I'll give you something to frown about.' This is yet another O-so-fake family institution.

Finally, after the acres of beige or ?'off-beige,' we arrive at her bedroom. Its walls are the wonderful combination of pink and baby blue; at least, that's what I see through the gaps between the pastes of posters of her ?'idols' who, she dreams, compete for her lascivious attention every night. I have the inclination to see everything that could happen in a room burst out in front of me, which?-in rooms like this one?-is very unfortunate.

(dròm, did you write that? Because it is great fun to read and well written.)

Following high school, at the end of my last summer at home, fifty people showed up at my house (I counted). I still have the pictures. I wasn't having a party; there was no alcohol involved. People just gathered there. A few of us had seen some girls at a gas station when I was trying to find "decent" cigars; they came over with free Cubans for me. They brought their friends. Others just knew that you could often find people at my house. Friends from elementary school just blended in with friends from high school. Since then, the furniture in the big room has changed, the walls have been painted, and I hardly see most of those people.

(I did, Smog, it was just a random little story that I may finish one day.)

(Did you write yours? I found it interesting, and I'm wondering what could happen next... if that were the start of a book, anything could...)

(I enjoyed it! You should finish it up.)

(I was just looking at a picture of that night and wrote that. Nothing special, and not the start of a story. Just a 5-AM-vodka-coffee-buzz rambling.)

I have two toenails that bother me more than the others. Coincidentally, they are both next to their respective big toes.

(I will then. I thought that it was a stupid little story, but I'll carry it on, now.)

(O, cool. Vodka followed by coffee in quick succession? Was it a true anecdote?)

(Wonderful!)

(Vodka-based drinks followed an hour or so later by coffee. And yes, it was true.)

Eden, California

The first mistake he made
-------------Was banning it! Boy, does that rile
------------------------- Just anyone! Doesn't everyone know
That banning something makes
-------------People who wouldn't do that something
------------------------- Do it: to be bad,
To fight for liberty?-
-------------It's all the same.
------------------------- I can safely betcha
That if old Papa Dieu came out today
-------------And said he was banning
------------------------- People taking pleasure from
Being tied down
-------------By North Korean fish-maids
------------------------- With greyish French chastity belts
While dis-eyeing them
-------------And putting said globes into
-------------------------A suspicious soft-drink from Osaka;
Or said he was stopping
-------------Men from being corseted,
-------------------------Whilst rabid halitosis-problem
Ex-girlfriends
-------------Heave over the men's
-------------------------Humiliatingly frilly
Bodices, take
-------------A fine bite out of their red spleens,
-------------------------And whisper gently
'You might love me no more,
-------------But I'll always have
-------------------------A piece of you in me,'
Whilst singing their own?-
-------------Award-winning, if attractive?-
-------------------------Version of ?'I've got you under my skin,'
The attention God foolishly gave
-------------Would make it the next craze.
-------------------------People would do it?-

It is their right, of course.
-------------And the good people of Eden
-------------------------Paid their taxes and voted Him in:
They deserve the fruit
-------------Of their own sideways labour.
-------------------------Everyone is equal?-
And some are just communists
-------------Spying into the country
-------------------------With Fisher-Price telescopes.

Anyway,
-------------Dear Eve claimed
-------------------------That the whole thing
Was a great fiasco:
-------------Completely undemocratic;
-------------------------Against what they should stand for
And that God was really showing
-------------His ?'side' now.
-------------------------And as sure as
Icicle pops in Mid-Summer
-------------Or scavengers behind the rotisserie
-------------------------Chicken depot
The one thing they craved
-------------Was the thing they could not have.
-------------------------So, God threw them out
On an eviction order?-
-------------The court of human rights
-------------------------Will gauge the whole situation
And the poor, maltreated couple
-------------Should be back where they belong
-------------------------Before the next TV season.

Going to bed, despite the facts that the sun is just hitting my pillow and I feel too awake for sleep right now. But sometimes, I let whatever bit of good judgment I have take over.