THE SHIP Proving This Is A Science-Fiction Story No Matter What The Author Says This is not a story about a ship about a story about a ship called The Inadmissible, originally known as The Impossible, once built, re-christened The Unattainable, which, once rebuilt, again rechristened The Unattainable, with names sliding off it like a great goaféd awf from the fromes of fawg from then awn. Anyway, The Unattainable! built within its own, top-of-the-line, groove-of-the-arc, crazy-iconic-built-in exclamation poingy-oinks (!), a product of the people so incomprehensibly rich they fall right off the SussScopes®, & can thence & pretty much by the flance of Goddes will it would seem‑‑not saying what that means to the impassible to aptain, I mean, not saying what that says about God's Gospel will or his infurragers or whatnot‑‑buy whatever they want, without moving, or making anything else moving, but not by anything mystically appearing neither. It's just‑‑there it is, in the fog, some new thing, some Unattainable... I meant story about a ship called The Inadmissible.  Did I say "ship about a story"?  Why did I do that, & send you down the tunnel to an alternate universe you were never meant to see.  At least not without going mad. You're not going mad, are you? Now back to the story.  Her pregnant hull & massive armatures carven from the famous "liquid amethyst" or to the spiney little miscreants of that sphere, "liquid brick" we were stealing the bricks & the amethyst, both liquidly, from (though you'll notice you see no moving hands, no wand, nothing...just gone!), mined at costless [O but not costless to me nor you! O no NO!!!] expense [O!] but this dizzying expense so far Beyond Coste© that it come back right roun into yer lil lap again, it came back around, as I say, from its circumnabulation of the Expense Dimensions & you imagine what kind of cube it take to charge up anything in that infamous plot, with its crystal skating pools & its ruleless gaming rooms & its positive attack manic rack-a-toons‑‑or if you can't, your imagination can't Imaginationcant imagionationcant imagionationcant imagionationcant imagionationcant‑‑that sound is so chilly, pestring the eyes with its yea with its pestulent Woolle... & as the imagination of the cant was finally actually tallied, so just then (i.e., now) were (e.g., are) the seconds of our lives as short as nasty little shocks are tallied & are actually tallied up on the up & up, by Mssr.s Céderen, Paskstrertian, Covostononinger, & Smourt [excuse me!] CPAs of an earthier universe gone so far past palming even that clear, sheathy stuff they clear saheathy stuff they have at for money back on Nigel Frore they could counter up your lives with the bat f that single eyelash, lost, in the snow, momentarily, of what was not bestowed. This is all a little obscure.  Obscurity costs money, too, so you can bet there's some kinda $erious $ecurity behind these scury words which ibb & fluowe, though I'dna bet if I was you. But then if I was you, my vox wouldna sidle like the skeins off a colorless cat, etheric, vain, with a purr beyond even anybody's means (& they say Anybody's pret-ty rich...). But getting back to the ship, which like my subserviant companions actually tallowed with some kind of superburgandy fumes themselves too expensive to enrich the very rich, much less the energies of the very rich, much less the rich flagrances of glosses which positiviely owned the very rich. Anyway, this was a Qurome ship, nothing less, built by nothingless than the thousand Most Expensive Technicians hoovering like magnets or magnifying glass over the cleanse-pure surfaces.  It had to be clean, this ship‑‑hygienically free of any body matter.  Unlike most of our activities, the building & rebuilding of The Inadmissible actually had a point, which I knew only when, in a later personum, I stole the thing. SECTOR OF THE UNFIT WORLDS or     CONSTANT SYSTEM CRASHES We five & Intercollating Hunks were working, in the sense of founding ourselves without memory of birth, as janitords lording all over the lordless jaglinqued segments of our own mental eternity‑‑which YOU can DO TOO at only a FRACTION of the proper cost!!! SubsubsubsubBasements™.  Long-looping sexions of Eternity like somesort of jagg'd or jagassed handwriting which it was if you look at it that way, segments in this sector of the segments f eternity (sector Rö) within a hop, a jump, or a short rö aborade I mean aboard a fleet-and-subtle transdimensional shuttle, worth a week's (where "week" is "a constellation shuifting swiftly in the glance of the dazed Timetraveler") pay just to get there & help clean up. Actually... Did someone say something? Actually, we have black-outs. Was that someone saying something?  & who the hell is speaking for us?  Who's doing the writing? A:  No one. O.  OK.  Anyway, we'd actually originated & actually had respective childhoods if you can call the chintzy crap they bought us as experiences.  I could write a better childhood anytime, & maybe will.  Maybe (I'm the guy to do it, right?) I ought to write all childhoods, smelt in the melding oven of bedeviled recreation.  Aliens are approaching. So we had these mass-produced, store-bought where store stores the most goregeous if somewhat rubbery-bubbery image of this most laughable Soap Bubble hanging in space, giggling, laughing up in the stratosphere of Beeloox, the largest city of all, & once we'd et them or fezzed or muubed it or whatever it was but at least it seem'd long.  It lacked detail & was utterly void of orginality, but it was one's childhood, after all, & it seemed to me like one very long if ill-refreacted refracted-reflected reflected-detected detected-infected infected-incollected recollected childhood indeed, full of wind along the rivers & my mother's face, smiling in the midst of that bubble & therefore visible to ev er y soul in Beeloox! unknown as the Big Bee Here are some mubes not to be mistaken for nudes ntbmf lubes I took of our visit to Beeloox.  Everyone has to take a visit to Beeloox just once in one's short little lives, or at least, that's what the Remembrance of Law which is the book someone copied from the book that purporped to be a copy of the original & accurate laws od governance.  Fat chance, though we are pretty accurate folk.  We are quite accurate folk, homely though we are.  For example, you'll note there...no, over there...no...no there in the brink of the alleyway where a certain cluster of gorgeous Gördoonian beelets flee the wrath of am anaimate splatch which is a splach‑‑you know, water‑‑only sentient & self-animate & with,for a form of water after all, an unduly bilious attitude. Well anyway, I'm not very sharp, as grames go, & yet I can safely tell you there were 1301 bees in that murmuring hermitage, an assertion we could test by capturing & killing all the bees & then counting them & then bringing them back to life & then forgetting we had counted them & then‑‑my favorite part, if I ever remember it‑‑setting the bees free. A moment in the alley.  I am sitting against the bricks, & I move my knee. "That was beautiful," I say, beginning to cry awfully horribly, crying straight into the little-written-of mucoid phase faster than a hive of beelets eats the glow in your esuriant youth whily you crouch in the alley, next to me, the phrases from the Second Great War of Phrases flazing over your head where head meant dead solider too overzealous to stop dancing, ruining the party for everyone by killing everyone & then‑‑& only then‑‑dropping truly dead. "A moment of joy in the alley!" That was lovely.  Can we get back to the story now, if you please? Our canned childhoods were simply but amply stamplyed on us‑‑as if to save years, where time as implyed by years purrs as a very light, light blue fire from some sort of small, hand-held instrument coaxing thoughts of a new stylishness & subtlety from your heretofore hoarse & horeish mind‑‑we were five grey guys, only more like sad cracked beakers rolling out a portal into an infinite, infinitely dangerous alleyway (just think: you are going to die in an alleyway), pleasurably cracked guys carved from the Cosmic Plasma which is the depository of our race. I would call it Mother if it weren't so fatherly, & brotherly, & oft like a stranger, too, oft like a stranger, too, so I guess it amounts to more of a big pad absorbing proportions of our heart, & it is very clever, a bit too smart, & has been labeled with the dim yellow Switch of Potential Danger, only it's not danger here so much as disruption of certain sacred formulae, by which this universe‑‑quite a throw from yours, O distant friend & we were not quite four separate guys but were emissions or minions or emission-minions of certain faded areas of the faded areas of the lost areas of the formular floating alone that does not click, & therefore four infinitely different yet also infinitely interconnected fine marble columns, only we or our forms or the jolly friends of our forms which cluster round us like bees exactly half of the time, only the bees were more like some deep irony you felt yet could not catch, like the meaning of life only it was never life, quite, here but columns from a great crystal palace of the past broken & jagg'd on the hillside near the auditorium, or the act of hearing itself absorbed briefly to the shape of a great shell made for gigantic rhythmic orchestras with guitar players breaking chords from hell & the heads banging constantly, only they were the passionate obsession with pine trees, beautiful in their furrows on the famoius Hill of Conntectedness, which was less a hill than a blurred & grainy photograph of something someone once heard, back when they had hearing. We were all also under psychiatric care, but irritated us & we gave it up, agreeing with one another‑‑& tossing this agreement like a ball round the circle of ourselves, which was the Hindu Cosmic Circle of Lies, lacking only one participant, throwing so as to fool the eye, like Harlem Globetrottters of the invisible world‑‑double trust, backwind, handflip, fingertwist, changing record IDs in a record time. Uh...It's not precisely time we have here‑‑it's really a crystal vision of prayer, & it works for us, wherever God forgot himself, right? So the prayerlosing its focus constantly keeps us changing you know & "emanating." We don't really have the spectrum soft to hard here‑‑though I can tell you we ordered it a long time ago & we paid relatively good money (ashes) too cloud cloudthought cloughtthought horizon cloudthought enter horizon cloudthought enter event horizon covered with ornaments, but rather raveled like a superhuman & I say human wretchedly‑‑that's part of what too means in these parts, podner; now I have to go.  I close.  I close & I go.  I go. spine spinning endless down the dim horizons of dawn, if something so unsystenmatically pondered & existing more as a fest of liturgical garments as far as we're concerned can be calléd dawn.  It was like that. & we were capable of some very guy-like behavior, even if we were connected dismal twins from the ghostly firmanment of our central mind, to which we would return if we possibly could, or be returned, if we could possibly arrange it like the flowers in the pot of flowers in the house of flowers of your grand mother of all flowers on a visit on a blooming Sunday day or have ourselves shipped, if it's in the Shipping Zones, only it's not exactly distance we're talking about here but a profound convolution of the heart, & I mean a profound convolution of the heart, man, & the last thing I remembered uh uhuhuh huhuhu only it wasn't memory nor the loss of it so much as it was the fading of laughter, the fading of laughter way down to that nimbus where you think, There is no mirth here, only you're full of mirth, so anyway the last thing that mirthed my fat ass was the part of the mubie where the four of us got our delicate brainstems blown, only it was more like the silken swhish of a spider's web on your face when you entered that cave at the edges of the moon so we got O! O! O! O! O! O! O! (Orgasm deleted.  Author apologizes.  Author has completely cleaned up the place.  Author is ashamed & sorry.  Author is humiliated.  Author will now commit hari-kiri right here relatively close to the start of this novel evolving slowly into a poem.  Work is already written.  Work will continue by itself in ghostly fashion, written by a long-dead author with an attitude waving its magnificent cock in the Gentle Kapha Reader's face, so to speak.now return to our story.) Where someone is talking about this incredible feeling of déjà vu eveyone is having, due to the c cc c c ct tch cntn ytmcahs constant system crashes. so many brushes on which of the four identical faces we were in at the time, brushes that made us kind of spaz out, in a way you wouldn't recognize, except to say that when the nimbis of the webs brushed our eyes only they were more like piercing attitudes of change than corporeal eyes, for as I suspect, you're beginning to see we don't have a real hold on corporeality here.  It doesn't mean to much, & it doesn't appeal to us‑‑rather like a sport no one wants to watch, much less play.  But we were brusheed to a fare-thee-well by these little blue nimbi that you waved round the etheric eye only like I say it is only the white thought of an eye at the top of your big log heng, only it was the open window of a very tall building facing a very vapid light, & the edges & corners of things were very clear, infinitely clear,in fact, thought we don't necessarily (we're not sure) we have "facts" here, though we do have Clouds of Occasion which seem factoidal in the rather snooty heft of their appearance & forthcoming behavior.  So the brush across the poor anemic thought & the brightly opened widow at the fourteenth floor creates in us a sort of pleasurable, driving panic in the form of a field of strings, if you know what I mean.  This was called the Universe of Ghosts Meanwhile I wrestle with the reality by witch I mean spell of being a nun, the infinite, eternal spell of being a perfect nun, white & caped & glorious, flying high oer the cocks lifted up to the sky aching to fucking them.  That was I, where I is misunderstood to be a very long word with some missing sylables. This would all be achingly self-referential were there not so much love involved.  But in a trice:  Sumorr contained my word-hoard, Vekk occupied the digital spies of my sights, my mathematics, Balb was fairly empty, with a discernible clutter of memories winding right toward the cold Soil of Despair the city of despair the state of despair the great & independent state of Despair passes its vote to Despair for the greater mastery of Despair, survivors of the Wars of Despair I grew up within (all those fistfights with mortality, with everyone taking on everyone else (I am speaking of guys here) & beating up despair.  But despair still rules, eternal in the hallways of that school.) & Bictor, so far as I could tell, contained precisely the same stuff as me, so he tended to echo me, a priceless new experience for me‑‑& all for free, setting aside my assets, setting aside my assets to look again at Bictor, containing the same clustered thoghts at me, but without the me.  Bictor‑‑a strange & selfless fellow indeed.  He was so like me I hadn't a clue as to what he was thinking, though I thought to read his mind several times.  Bictor was my self plus opacity of unself-matter minus velocity of self-creation times creative negativity (normally reserved for women, but we were somewhat women, too) to the blissful exponent of nonthought, subdivided by the vector of our lives, which was abducted at inception by some force far too inscrutable to know. So that's the family, here in Poorsville, named after us, The Poor, descendents of General Bixou Poore & the black slave Eva, Eva Poor.   You can see immediately why everybody had the name Poor.  Actually, it wasn't confusing at all, after we got used to it as we were getting used to everything by which I mean the nothingness this huge family had in stock for themselves. It was touching.  I noticed you could almost see the rich, in the same way as you almost see that grey alien phantom pulling you off the bed by your feet without warning, & you could tell that they wanted to be seen, but they were just too lush, too too luxuriant, for us to see, so we spent a lot of time shuttering our eyes to the sky with hand braced against eyebrows, falling over backward, asking each other excited & pointless questions, even our comprehension of our poverty having been poverty having been long sold, so down the river we go... So now you look down at your hands & see you're an adult, a big, working adult.  & we were always polishing & cleaning places that didn't need it.  Poorsville was pretty cleaned out & up, if you catch my drift.  We brothers were the Second Unit, the Redundant Polishers, wading into great cornucoptic stables of dung & making them shine, making even the dungshine!, but we fancied ourselves pirates.  Our pants fell down‑‑all four of us at once‑‑when the idea We Are Pirates first cabined itself in the forests of our boarded-up minds. They were the best ships, the most exqusitie ships except they were not really ships but each an intricate white doilie poised at the center of a solidified, spherical black thought of a thought of a thought, or else butterflies preserved in some sort of perfect white smoke (note perfection motif (note self-referential (protection (perfect protection) againstthe all-ensorbing Janitor. THIS WAY: It worked this way: if you start cleaning up, you're hired.  If it is perceived by the various All-Perceivers (possessed (if I may say) within each jag of atmosphere of the sphere of which we can & have to enter here) entered here.  So we'd just start picking up, in our many-bagged, megapocketed janitor's jumpers, & the ignominous crown of service would form over each of our silly heads, & we would just keep working like that till one of us flipped his lid or blew a gasket or popped his nozzle or threw out his cam or snapped his twizzle nor foff his chump nor doffed his head with his hat, where heads & hats exist as machie parts of some huge Refinery, which was, one simply knew, ultimately & finally going to expel its O healing liquid.  Our worlds were very very big on healing liquids, & faux versions were peddled on one black market beneath another. I once bought a nice vial of "rebirth-agua" at a pretty penny in what I thought might be the deepest black market, Fossolia, buying & sellling far below the second-darkest black market, Bonnswoggle, but you can never be sure.  I drank the agua & was born again forever, so it must it must must have have had had some had some kind of worry to it, dontchya no? & when they straterted letting us clean the grids & faulty outer surfaces of the whiff-machines aboard the Super Ship, S.S. Unattainable, we began youknow pocketing stuff.  Any mini-gaugue or molt of Designated Software dozing atop the shoulder of a chair, if you can call them emotive ravagers merely chairs‑‑we'd take it, as we would any & all thangs that fell as it were withing as it was our pockets‑‑& perhaps I have not sufficiently nor distinctly enough told you just how many pockets we had to endure in these puffed-out suits. & we'd emerge, the ship too clean for use, useless, sans use, half-emptied of its expensive instruments (on account of Vekk, in his more expansive moments, could make things small, so he would, like, shrink & take apart every snaggle of control room into his suit, & then come out), where they would empty our pocketys & take back our stuff, whereupon we were not fired‑‑not at all fired‑‑but forced automatically through psychiatric care‑‑& our psychiatric care here has some kinda hairy balls on it, let me tell ya!   & so it went, day after day‑‑where day exists as a stray wanderinf\g of sleepy sheep from the fold, in the perfect silence sans predators, without conseqiuence, cleaning, stealing to our festering garments, being relieved of our manifold immense & absurdly optimistic thefts, which‑‑thanks to our therapy‑‑were now the cleandest durnd thangs in the world, where world is understood as a defluxive copy of something that was once thought real, but which now exists outside of thought forever, happily dumb, as our minds‑‑as the groteque & rapaciously invasive therapies went on‑‑gradually eased their little asses where minds have thinking asses into the world we were as I said working lowly in. At the point‑‑i.e., the small vial of poison, incredibly potent for such a hypnotically beautiful handglown beautiful vial‑‑on which quit being Vekk, stepping off the dimly glowing platmform & bowing to my successor, the evil crowd hissing invisible in the black substance these exchanges of identity occurred in (because were ashamaed, all right?  Ashamed of each identity, so we switch like this, or rather nature‑‑a gorgeous fishcue, popular on Reticula E, wouldn't you know, of solid gill-less glass‑‑makes us switch like diss, as if to ease the burthen of being any self at all, though they were not selves in the psychological or philosophical sense but rather little ornaments on a building where the wet rain falls (some excited businessman argue below), but it just made matters worse, so our lives (that is, our delicate, sweet dustbunnies) were these descending cobwebby spirals into more & more shame, as if we were the Adventurers of Shame/ But at the point I surrendered my maignant, inertial form of Vekkness, Vekk became quite animate & started cooking up a storm.  I watched him as Balb, my new identity, feeling very fat but looking thin as an insect, the new Vekk SOMETIMES GALAXY Don came in with a barrel of flowers.  They were surprisngly small & dirt-covered & repulsive.  Each one had a bouqet god damn it that would knock your soul right out, not to mention popping the popping the silvered glasses that we all affect.  They were mud-flowers, flowers, that is, of the Great Mud Swamp, where no one‑‑except, apparently, Don the big dummy‑‑dared to go.  But damned if there weren't moire flowers there. "It's no use," Bictor dictor.  "We'll never get out of here." He meant leaving the Foloria, the Planet of Flowers, the sad planet of the multifarous flowers, the sad dungeon of a hundred wreckéd spaceships. We'd been looking through these old spaeships endlessly, the minute we discovered that everyone crash lands here, through some deliberate glitch in the forcefields round this as with every other planet in our Galaxy, which we called Galaxy One, not your galaxy at all, but ours, or somethimes galaxy. Don himself was a flower, by the way. At the point‑‑i.e., the small vial of poison, incredibly potent for such a hypnotically beautiful handglown beautiful vial‑‑on which quit being Vekk, stepping off the dimly glowing platmform & bowing to my successor, the evil crowd hissing invisible in the black substance these exchanges of identity occurred in (because were ashamaed, all right?  Ashamed of each identity, so we switch like this, or rather nature‑‑a gorgeous fishcue, popular on Reticula E, wouldn't you know, of solid gill-less glass‑‑makes us switch like diss, as if to ease the burthen of being any self at all, though they were not selves in the psychological or philosophical sense but rather little ornaments on a building where the wet rain falls (some excited businessman argue below), but it just made matters worse, so our lives (that is, our delicate, sweet dustbunnies) were these descending cobwebby spirals into more & more shame, as if we were the Adventurers of Shame/ But at the point I surrendered my maignant, inertial form of Vekkness, Vekk became quite animate & started cooking up a storm.  I watched him as Balb, my new identity, feeling very fat but looking thin as an insect, the new Vekk was going to make us eat flowers come bust, & this time he was burgering them up into little patties & baking & frying them & puttin g them between two sheets of the strange, disappointing, transgalactic smatter that was just going to have to serve as dough, or pose as dough, like the actors Xeptany & Figgis, who wound their wondrously woinding unwounded unwoundable unwionderable wonderful limbs, so as to create an actorer's illusion of dough.  It was a great show.  We watched it entire lots of times.  Hell, that's all we watched.  I'm not even certain the other mubes would work at all.  We never tried them.  Probably not, because this here flower-infested daisy-bleached broom-dutched honeysuckle-hounded larkspur-spurring little planet did some sort of deal on you.  Our instruments worked, but not truly.  They had been, ah, addled in some way, so they gave out pretty much nothing but sarcastic garbles, so in truth we couldn't figure out the atmosphere (which kept us alive, but only in this deep trance I invite you into too), or how the gravity was so hard (it felt hard, not heavy or massive, even though it instanteously crushed all our skulls skulls into a rather better pattern than before), or what kept all these bloody flowerrs going‑‑liquid essence of gladiola, anyone? bluebell syrup or flax-funk or campanula-oil or columbine-residue from deposits on the noses after the end of their eerie smiles?‑‑so we were a shipload of idiots, with none of that God-given autofood from the Autofeeder©, much less the fine invisible wines it churned out day after day as we careened rather drunk through the cosmos. It wasn't wine, of course.  I just said it was.  It was actually more like (but not exactly) some sort of pleasurable, driving panic in the form of a field of strings, if you know what I mean.  But I transposed it to wine, as I traspose us into "people," as I transpose "galaxy" from its true nature, here in Labyrinth 3 of the Endless Illusory Worlds, in the Universe of Ghosts, in the flights of the galaxies of fantasy & the flights of evil thoughts flowung through some violin-maker's head.  I don't know. So for a while we were certain we had only ourselves to blame.  That was before we started stumbling upon hundrends & hundreds of these crazy SHIPS! Our brother Gip kept molding himself in & out of the Sorcerer's Orderless Disorder, which was perforce a Reordering, which is a minor & quick disease (you have so quick you don't have time for the little sneeze of quickness we calll snik!) we we we have, and‑‑carrying the strand of upstartedness that would make someone do something like this began fondling the controls in a way that made our invisible (because nonexistent‑‑shhh!) lips smack like colliding craft crashéd together, crafting his eerie infra-nuanced "palms" which were energy fields themselves of the finest comlexity, as btroad as a barn & with a wing span rivaling that giant, pleistocenic buzzard flying overhead waiting for you to die just reading this, my kind friend‑‑just oer the burnished silverneer of the layer of massless masss, or more accurately minor half-mass, or too precisely halfassed nevermass© & into the actual solidity of that control panel complex as the map of a vagrant nervous system. We have these here‑‑nervouse systems that nevous systems that just now & then leave their bodies as they slept, leaving them if they got their way forever, which was uually true: forever is usally true, for these here free nerves or rogue or runaway neurons tened to grow new bracnhes‑‑you know, branches of nerves that would make no sense to a living body, thought they damn well made sense to the fucking nerves and also of course combining with one an other, such that our world or nexus or shattered glass plate or whatever you finally land on from yourinfininte free fall through this prose was cluttered with massive, incoherent, bodiless plexes of nerves, which made things difficulty, difficult, as these nerves would zap the poop right out of you if you touched or even dared to come near even if you were safe within the haven of the nexus thinking of nerves.  Therefore one can never give thought to nerves. This is a statement of science fiction fact: You can never give thought to nerves (because the nerves would kill you). There's Bictor mounting the controls like a great sequential lover, making with the bobs & the touches, the taps & the occasional beautiful bouquet of flowers, presented shyly with the toe stuck imperatively , & then he got hotter in a distinctly sexual manner (a manner bound to righteously miff our sort‑‑such that he was even as I describe happening as having happened miffed off himself, & nearly driven to a hissy-snit. But he stood there suddenly in dazzling sequins, & with girls & boys squealing all around like some invading insect army of exsufflicate love, the Rock Star More Glorified Than His Hair, & taking Dynamix Stance Number One, hup, then Positix Stance Number Too, hey! & on to Inevitix Bumo-and-Granch Number Four, with a little singing in the middle space (a dense pocket of amusement which has never been successfull cracked by the Scientific Enterprise, which is a big corporation here), he started to flipping the layed-out artwork of the pattern of switches of rewkidorr to no possible end.  & Bic was wont to said, ripping a smile the width of seven ripped Yrordial rainbows, which are fat as you could want through the evil shades we wore, in lieu, not just of eyes, but of solid facial matter of any kind there & therein & therehownow, the shades flipping from black to eons & from mirroir to ego, all in a trice, he'd say this way & with an emphasis spelling out the latter part of the upper echoes of Lattisimor's Last Symphony No. 6 as threy blew out the stratospheric balconieres, adding to the furious (& unstoppobable (& uncontradictable (& waffleing (& baffling) & tuneful) & spirited) & white-horsed) strain the equally inadmissible strains of all those people dying‑‑at this, or that, the first, & last, performance of this great Symphonic Ego Who Wouldn't Die's sixth last to the last-nth spathy, as I said.  & in like manner would the Bicmeister just bragged on he use Special Alogrithyms of his own discovery for our empty flight, so it would be in the farm of a form of a form of a magnificent fountain of light (!) or     succession of cascading rapids, as if we were you know flying three ships, so even all those cops would never get us.  Now the rest of us (when we weren't being him, 'cause we was still spinnin'!) thought the chances of Gip‑‑even the crafted glass version of the caxted graph virgin of Gip that was as I say working the controls couldn't dodge this magnitude of cops, cause I mean they had some magnitude of cops here, if I could only find the words, each a world each full of sylphlike figures wrapped in wavering cloth, each on a lone rock in the midst of some corny yet incredibly effective sunset, each with a tiny yet real heart, each heart containing within it the emotion that I am looking for, that I need enough to do anything to anybody else‑‑& that's the kind of thought a soldier needs. Now & then this idea that one of us is a warrior [passes by.  It just passes by, on a horse represented by the stealthy beams of a sun shying its way up (or is it down?) behind mountains.  None of this can be explained & I suggest you avoid the thought I cannot avoid the thought you can avoid me thinking the thought you should avoid even when you are inside of me. Avoid this thought. We have to excuse ourselves from time to time: "Excuse me.  I was just seeing myself as a Warrior," at which everyoe would either mutter solicitously, or just eat faster. But Anyway, we figured the Gipper was simply & ultimately freaking out, reaking out into pastel horizons he could see but never know freaking into endless stutterings & stutterations of his stutterinity (or stutterability (or stutterbuggery (or "The Stuts") or stuttification of his stutterosity) or hammer-doubt stammerings, which is my personal favorite, but back to the story now story now sotry now & the story now... ...putting random hits around this Sector of the Unfit Worlds, & that's what we wanted.  This is where we got on the rewkidorr, for reason which I thought I'd never knew.  But we went into clear regions, & perfect ones, & it enhanced the startling gaity‑‑the soprano cackles, brute winnies, & harklebarks of four grames cut out of the great Plasma of Gramery, from which our deleterious race doth spurt. Not to worry. None of this occurs near your fucking sector, much less in your cocksucking sector, if I get the phrase from the endless mubes about you, like you were acting out stuff for us, which you are (which is why you always hear that invisible laughter behind everything you do, everytime you bent over to crick a crowbar & everytime you hogged the ball all over the field, the stadium, the bleachers, the tiny white-haired towheads with their idiot baseball capps & you, you, dribbling or fumbling or punting in their minds.  This tickleth them endlessly, & that t us e, so to say. & also sts, our evidence indicated all & with a clarity so too startling to our world that we screamed & wriggled our fingers at our chests for a very long while, which is dismally unqueeractoristic, once the data got mubed straight into what passes for our hengs & we all knew it at twonce, & we all felt the same dithering little cosmos flashig our ye-en at once, & so you might say it stopped a few processes in our trimadod. Everybody else said as they died & I held their fading hengs, one by one, that they remembered everyfing (known as boasting at the time of death, boasting at the time of death), but the last fing I the one who lived a bit remembered a bit before in fact a long sagging time made out of some oily fine cloth stretched in a sag across the gloomily windowed loft of some artist mad as a rabber, before, & all this while something raining impossingly hard outsign, on the macrorubber streetes that we never sweep (because we like all that crud you see) so hard it hurt, so hard it crushed your toes as you ran from it, so hard it began pounding & pounding the keys of your little typewriter, the little glitz aluminum joke-typ-er-write-er Jeggs gave you as a joke‑‑it was as a joke, don't you remember? Anyway, the last thing I remembered ere I start remembering again was the four of us getting O! so high on these little blue nimbi that you waved round the etheric eye at the top of your big log heng.  Twas not unlike though pretty much unlike your drinking of wine.  It wasn't wine, of course.  I never said it was.  It was actually more like (but not exactly) some sort of pleasurable, driving panic in the form of a field of strings, if you know what I mean.  But I transposed it to wine, as I traspose us into "people," as I transpose "galaxy" from its true nature, here in Labyrinth 3 of the Endless Illusory Worldthings or Worldlike Things, in the Universe of Ghosts, in the flights of the galaxies of fantasy & the flights of evil thoughts flowring through some violin-maker's heng.  I don't know. MANY A DISMAL BEACON'S WAY FROM TALK Gip flip switches to no possible end, drawing forth Propulsive Emissions as enigmatic as the power of Power herself‑‑& with her face as well‑‑sss! Gipid gush forth in his way of speaking, many a Dismal Beacon's Way from Talk, you'd best be assured‑‑smiling through his own special, evil, mirrored shades like the ones we all, but for, of course, the evil, ware‑‑he was using special alogrithyms of his own discovery for our flight, but we figured he was just freaking out, putting random hits around this Sector of the Unfit Worlds, & that's what we wanted. This is where we got on the rewkidorr, for reason which I thought I'd never knew.  But we went into clear regions, & perfect ones, & it enhanced the startling gaity‑‑the soprano cackles, brute winnies, & harklebarks of four grames cut out of the Antibiotic Plasma from which our deleterious race doth spürt. (Yuck!) Not to worry.  None of this occurs near your fucking sector, much less in your cocksucking sector, if I get the phrase from the endless mubes about you, like you were acting out stuff for us, which you are (which is why you always hear that invisible laughter behind everything you do, everytime you bent over to crick a crowbar & everytime you hogged the ball all over the field, the stadium, the bleachers, the tiny white-haired towheads with their idiot baseball capps & you, you, dribbling or fumbling or punting in their minds.  This tickleth them endlessly, & that t us e, so to say. & also our evidence indicated all & with a clarity so too startling to our world that we screamed & wriggled our fingers at our chests for a very long while, which is dismally unqueeractoristic, once the data got mubed straight into what passes for our hengs & we all knew it at twonce, & we all felt the same dithering little cosmos flashing our ye-en all at once, & so you might say "it stopped a few processes in our trimadod." Everybody else said as they died & I held their fading hengs, one by one, that they remembered everyƒing (known as boasting at the time of death, boasting at the time of death), but the last ƒing I the one who lived a bit remembered a bit before in fact a long sagging time made out of some oily fine cloth stretched in a sag across the gloomily windowed loft of some artist mad as a rabber, before, & all this while something raining impossingly hard outsign, on the macrorubber streetes that we never sweep (because we like all that crud you see) so hard it hurt, so hard it crushed your toes as you ran from it, so hard it began pounding & pounding your little keyboard, shoving the mouse way the hell up your arse, the little glitz aluminum joke-typ-er-write-er Jeggs gave you as a joke‑‑it was as a joke, don't you remember? Anyway, the last thing I remembered ere I start formally Remembering Again was the four of us getting O! so high on these little blue nimbi that you waved round the etheric eye at the top of your big log heng.  Twas not unlike though pretty much unlike your drinking of wine.  It wasn't wine, of course.  I never said it was.  It was actually more like (but not exactly) some sort of pleasurable, driving panic in the form of a field of strings, if you know what I mean.  But I transposed it to wine, as I transpose us into "people," as I transpose "galaxy" from its true nature, here in Labyrinth 3 of the Endless Illusory Worldthings or Worldlike Things, in the Universe of Ghosts, in the flights of the galaxies of fantasy & the flights of evil thoughts flowring through some violin-maker's heng.  I don't know. THE DROOL THAT SERVED FOOLS We came to this tree-flower the size of your palm if it turned into a tree, doing that little upper-back bend that explorers always use to indicate (to watchers?  is this being photographed?) they are Surveyong Something New. Balb even took his kadok out & started signaling the rest of us to stand by the trunk, which was way too dark to get any inclusions of gravity, I mean a good shot, a good shot in this or any universe being but an occlusion of gravity, litte-known fact of inter-universe phsyics, little-known branch of the science of vipary to wit, the science of how facts dissolve into pixels when they are placed, using tweezers, from one universe, existing as a petri dish, to another, existing as that {huge blue vase} full of {silken flowers} as you sat in your {grandmother's house}, sipping a {strange tea}‑‑not what you expected from the old woman‑‑which caused you to sit quite still except with a tension, a tension moving from the & into your skeletal muscles, so your were tense indeed except for the odd spike or twitch, & you could see the utility of grandma's Paralysis Tea, as it allowed her to say the things she had to say. I mean, she had a countless number of important things to say, when here her children & anyone else whom she considered still young were hopping about & running off & in general not listening, & so she had to take steps. & the background hallucinations of the tea was the instrumentalizatioon of these three geeks in extra-bulky clothes standing at the trunk of a Tilden tree-flower, a redwood tree of a flower with petals toughened by the wind into these tough sailor types, with few words unless you gottem shtonked, wizened & stubbled, etc., looking up at it awkwardly, not really noting anything but bloody faking it, as if to minimize the fact they'd blundered like a group of drooling idiots there, their drool itself more intelligent than they, a luminous green substance pouring its vectoreded sectors into one Central Drool™, the Drool that Served Fools regarding them as fools, but never deigning to become animate, much less to send its billions of simultaneous thoughtforms up to the idiots' heads, just for the pleasure‑‑nay, the vengeance‑‑of watching the drooling heads blow up from DRO or Data Reversal Overload orro daolrevO lasreveR ataD roor ORD, except the drool was much too proud, & acted inert‑‑the most lively intelligence in the universe, drool, is so proud it acts like this dusgusting substance, a fine substance of study for the science of ick, which is the science of grossity, a science unpracticed but existing like a lonely tube waiting to light. So we looked up at the wideblown flowertree like fripples seen through the eyes of a myriad jyt, its xylem & phloem rutted like muscles or seasonal changes of one kind of light for another Winter Brittle, Spring Dizzy, Summer Butter, Fall a Small Child Crying Wildly, trying to get attention, but he can't because this is his OWN UNIVERSE, something before he was born he would have & may have said was something he wanted more than any world, & now no help is here, not behind the inches-high door labeled Help, now beyond the miniature bushes labeled Help not in the vermillion canyons we see flying at some sort of record speed, but we don't quite know who's keeping the records here, making us hot, making the child cry some more, we stuck in a box with the kid no taller than his toe, wondering how it's going to be to die at the flailing hands of an infant taking us apart for love; this was a Bad Scene & I'm sorry I wrote it, men.  So much for the Light of Spring scuttlebutt light, black-market light, light of illegal dimension & compostion, mixed & crusted varieties of light collected by the Higher Powers of the universe, who are very acquisitivem if not avaricious (please don't tell any of the rapacious, pillaging buttery Powers of the Universe I suggested they might be avaricious, OK?), & all of these kinds of light illuminating the great cells that make up this puppy... YOU HAVE TO BE FLABBY TO HEAR A THUMBP Floating through faint, turquoise Galaxy 99, the all-chrome galaxy, was another galaxy, which this time was a galaxy of an idea, which was a diamond necklace, which consisted of Sumorr getting an idea. We all heard the thump.  We all heard it happen. We all turned round in the bus to slap the numb arm of the person behind us, who was us made just a little flabbier, & asked him if he heard the thump.  He was asking the guy behind of course, but we knew he heard it, since you have to be flabby to hear a thumbp, & the flabbier you are the better you hear the flump, & the flabbiest flump in the universe can hear the Nothing Flump.  It's one of those logical things I ate as a kid; it works that way... New ideas are dangerous, so we formed a ring pressed against the outer perimeter of the convolution the untelling this story was not taking place within.          Figure One: Big Idea The idea was crudely packaged, a clear candidate for Bomb Control Unit Bomb Confuckingtrol, which is why when Sumorr who seemed to be some sort of inexpliquable Southerner from the poorlands of the South even more vapid than we, when he drawled "Lessgo..." he was actually trying to get up, to employ all his words in the effort to get up, thus risking his eentsy Salvage of Sanity so to speak which so far to speak as can be determined determined to be the nature of our world in the first place.  Have I said all this before?  Have we done all this before? Anyway, nature of our universe inasmuch as someone kept creating us again no matter how many times we decreated ourselves, standing naked & confused, giggling with our momentary triumph...then back to work, with the poor 'Morr trying to get up too early for him to get up which is that strange & beastly time before the idea of getting up even fucking exists, if you cache my driff, but anyhow Sumorr's spine way too luminescent spine way too nonexistent for that, which is why the statement came out defused & wet. "Let's go to‑‑wha' they callit?‑‑the..." & he gurgled in his own words for a moment, then turned to us for help, even we were all upside down!  I mean, we were all feet ti him!  & still he asks, & he say, "Whatsat...that...that, you know, place where they have these...these uh...you know...that sector." This caused quite an argument.  Arguments over nothing are always the best kind, & now camera ZOOMS DOWN from direct-overhead view as we pull out synchronously from the fraggy fray to reveal the Unfit Sector. "You wanna go..." began Sumorr, who became Bictor in midsentence, which I believe has happened to all of us, mirroring through false & spinning quantumirrororrs into nothing more than Bictor‑‑the tattered guy, the sadsack of this motely brunch, the echo guy, whose words echoed the thoughts he echoed from others, & very unevenly.  It's happened to anyone who remembers, who believes, and/or who is not afraid to admit, & who was sporting enough (which aren't always are, I'll tell you that mush) to finish, "...to the Unfit Sector?" "Yea!" nodded Balb, like The World's Greatest actor performing a play that was entirely him saying the word yea‑‑that's just how rich & young & well-proportioned this yea was. It is currently onview at the Onmuseum of Cunhouse, down in Lower Lowalellia. & after a few more swigs of punch, going to visit the planets that had before history, before phiropology, before thought, before mistakes such as God (who was don't you agree a big mistake?  You'd betternot gree with me) been rustled into the Unfit Sector (with no sun but just a single, naked, unfrosted‑‑but obviously pretty big‑‑lightbulb hanging on a swingin' wire to light all of them), & laws passed forbidding visitation, but these were a tye I mean a type of law we have here called sometimes the singular law, sometimes the causeless law, & sometimes a timorous clamor like a great uncomprehending sneeze where you forget where you where are...and these here laws were nonenforced. Nay‑‑it was strictly Against the Unknown Law for the ka-CHOO laws to be enforced, & not as insanely as you would imagine (for you would never, in our terms, imagie insane in the first & manic place), because they enforced themselves.  They perfect, self-embodied, self-upholding laws, constituting 99.99% perƒcent of the laws up here except for some, like The Law That Makes You Fall From The Limb you were high on here‑‑now a giggling child, now a cripple & now a giggling child, now a cripple & now a giggling child, now a cripple & now a giggling child, now a cripple & now a giggling child, now a cripple & now a giggling child, now a cripple & now a giggling child, now a cripple & the cops hated them.  It left them nothing mandated to enforce other than gravity & a few attitudes, so they could go round you know enforcing some basic physics (not much of the time) & hammering us with attitudes.  They were OK. Anyway, sententiously spake, there no cops nor walls. the CHUTspa trepassing law would enforce itself, as always, & so who could resist going in, if only to see‑‑perhaps at one's regret‑‑how the damned thing was enforced, & what this said about the civilization we had going here, & about whether it would just be, say, an irritating alarm soung in one's inner ear from here to kingdom come (to which you, not hearing the call, wouldn't come), or one of those multiple executions they had back there‑‑now where was it‑‑on that quasi-planet of birds? * had a little tiny booklet with the reasons for unfitness of these stars "*, because they feared its flowers."  Raucious laughter.  You couldn't see us, but you could see a phosphorent polymer sust shaking off of us, like we had Comic Dandruff or Cosmic Dander, as the thought of just how funny this sounded leapt into the room, sword drawn, his pale-blue features vivid & ready (& then you got watch those featurees sag as he got slow & he...forgets...) Push-button Guide.  "This is the Mylxiar, the basic flower of love, the aromatic essence galling your juices flowing, the great conduit of divine & earthly energy, the floweer of truth, the flower of knowledge, the flower of having good manners & being a good kid, the slight edge to the essence suggesting darker things...like murder, perhaps."  See See See Mirror Section. SEE SEE MIRROR SECTION Types of Flowers Found.  The Unbanded Noseblough, dressed in One Plush Blue Skirt fandangled oer Another the skryxt, passionate yet somehow nastily generally black with coxcombs of red sort of flower the moesenstryp bitterberry‑‑a plant in the true spirit of molasses, a molted or if you will deliquescent sort of a dawn-rosy syrup of a flower, seeming to shimmy mongst the Stader Breeds the yngsht, which was always glad to kill a rising species, & yet kept through astral means the secret of its insurpassable, unsurmountable, nucleic puissance of poisoninity the yearnling pushover, generally regarded as a plant that fucked, a plant who wore too many tight red sweaters :) too often during our year, which is not a year but rather a series of red sweaters pulled over the face of the One Father you suffocated in the steugh of his own thin juices & the passionate pullover, this time employing blue sweaters, & with a Very Good Rep, cheerleader, would Never Kill her Dad no matter how much he kicked her during his dopplering series of dopplering series of dopplering series of endless drunks oh yes & domesticated varieties of femp, drens, plants so basic & simple they have no spelling, no log entries not even in the incredibly delicate Logs of Meng Enteriety, by Meng Enteriety, scholar of plants for the Quadradod Museum of Jempempety! no phylogenetic classification (not even in the computers programmed to program themselves to roam round doing phylogenetic subtaxonomies of the most fervidly hopeless order), no particular size, dictation of shape, nor color that anydumb recalled‑‑background flowers woven by weavers into medieval backdrupes, & some eight million medicinal uses, such that, without them, we'd have no clabbering world about which to snout about ...moving on to other plants‑‑the swingswong & the dappledeer, which were ƒnooty as that ƒnout I writ into the preceding clause & were holding some grudge against one another, hence Were Naught Speaking, much less growing, in the midst of oneanother's midst (one of them may have gone extinct but we cannot get documentation on this crucial Undocumented Matter) breathing undocumented matter Uh...the gnomenglitzer, which was really more of a machine, & a dorky one at that the purl (A!) Disgusting!  Umm umumum...the flymsy syllable, which was a word uttered by one of the brown earth-gods back when they had utterations, & had lived through all the sweeps of extinction we had ever had‑‑which were at once uncounted & uncountable the neurotic neinheimer, which made a comfy seat & was always in the semblance of a comfy seat (though they did move sometimes...just move a bit, under your butt‑‑where butt is understood as a metaphor for movement underneath the butt, the limping meters we hear all about ourselves) the olaryorchid, the snurf of which would putchya in a tizzy tense muscleboughs, with their veins & oil & divinity, musculabri sasculosua, which'll punchya & muffya the laughing wad the wadlougher the wadloughpolliteripough the laughing percoshie, the swive, the bouffeigh, Dante's Inferno, the hollow dandolils (at the microscopic level all these flowers minus the thrills, which made them all one pasty little flower, impossible to pin down its infmate ramifications), & of course kentch, lollygags, lollwerwallers, & lallapaloozas, as well as pure, simple flowers limpid & tinier than could be, quivering to your slightest thoughts & so capable of being destoyed by your thoghts that you quickly stop all thought! & hold your mindless breath like a mindless berry, hearing things so silent they had never been heard before, & other plants that dies when you slowed your thoughts down & which then flourished as your thoughts sped up, so you had to crank up the old "wetwater machine" & think yourself into the most dizzying circles of madness that could be until you fainted, to awaken with the dead plant lying sweetly on the cove in the glen of your lidded eye Somewhere along the loop of the great moonhorn‑‑for this sun had a great long moonhorn lumescient with bright eversentient yet unbelieving leaves, each with a glistering leaf of disbelief or two‑‑the obsession got going round & round like a roundel of moonmöd gnatz that we had to find every sunken vehicle.  We'd even voice it to our parenthetical hearing: "(Must find all alien vehicles crashed on the planet (where planet thinks, '(Must remain illusion of a great unmustering tower, full of symapthy & even woe for those who fall beneath us; must levitate, musat render myself  as vaniashing as the Master's clown-white cream)' which I believe deserves & believes & deserves explication right at this point,) whereupon one crashes doewn into another alien being, by which I mean the glow on the lamp as it hits the brass, by mean I wish spacecraft, which glower back at the brass & flicker, miffed in their reality.  Snuffling dwarf steps forth. The ships became more & more disgustingly alien, & more & more ugly too, as if the ugliest specimens of all the races in all the regimes in all the geometric constructs of stars were cleansing themselves of The Ugly by means of this flower star, It was not a car, I mean a planet but a star.  A big great blazing blue sonofabitch of a goddam star we were langing on. "We can't just land on a star!" "Well it's not like we're made of molecules or anything!" cried Sumorr, to a positive thicket of weefs of stars of lives of guides of times of belittling tears of my mother's sad, belittling tears, of the great blue tears of the Great Mother flwoing at last down on us, right in this sequence of metaphor, which we did not see but rather felt coming into mocking laughter. despite counnltess numberless redundant systems designed to save anybody's ass. THE SUN TOOK ALL OUR CLOTHES Sumorr, kept shoutring "I can't believe those redundant systems‑‑sixteen...count 'em: sixteen fucking redundant life-saving, crash protecting systems & we're all down here!" & on & on, while * was hooting how we should climb up on the broken ass of our ship, its clippered butt, so to speak, & get a phase-contrast sort of microcosmic (he was into that) view (into that) view of the whole affair, meantime trying to figure out how you climb up the coruscationg walls of a perfectly massless ship, & * was moaning about the pain, all the lost pain he'd received during what the madman depicted as a terribly violent life, with a brutal upbringing & fatherly fists aplety,. etc., all such malarky, & how here & now & for reasons intuitively yet never really known all his buriéd pain was like coming back, & as he increasingly delved his little nose into the opulent cleavage of the notion ogf the cleavage of the notion of pain, he began writhing & foaming in extremis, almost enough to make nough to make the panicke stop. But it did not stop.  We are terriby verbal, if I do say so myself, & Sumorr was spouting theory after theory about what had happened & who was at the controls, while poor sad fat globular * did in fact sit tightly at the broken console marked as his territory I guess on his lap against a needless touché flowery rock. "Fucking flowers!" we bemoaned. But our echoes came back s flowers, fresh & young, as our own voices once so fresh & young, at our own eerily known yet unrecgnizable pretentions of a false & perfect childhood that did not exist, & for a time there even us tunnelmouths had to tunnelmouths had to curb our gabbing & vep in the exflorescence of the wonferdul new rain of flowers that was raining from our own crude shouts raining freshly on our heads.  That sort of thing. So what we did, see was to like climb on top of the busted ass of our ship or the asted bust of a broken-twig shit & looked out on a horizon furred with the tops of the mighty flowes, the sun's undulant strenbgth reckenong them disaway & dat, & lo, we saw buildings, most particularly one tall spire of what we called againsand again to one anothe aspirant gold.  Of course, a sun has no horizon, so we stared into the bedeviled atmosphere, all of us naked suddenly (the sun toook all our clothes) "That tower's not looking so good," ventured *, who was I might add quickly struck across the chops, struck savagely & by both * & * in turn, for the twin fractures of our hopes & dread & fire & lead & dopes & dead & flairs of ebb.  Sorry about that, you big dummy.  So so very very sorrorry a ab about bout that hat, my fri iend. But the meaning-fields around Sumorr meant he was right.  We had a change of heart‑‑it was an ***AMAZING! SIGHT!*** to SEE!, watching our skins turn from a deep, cruel blue to the pinkish, twinky twinge ofresourceful mangement, by which I mean  sudden kindness, pink love going just about as far as a pink house can go, recalled at the corner of that squalid little development with its plat likes in full & naked, disgusting, sexual, unknown review, which is why I say what might seem to be appropriate resourceful management, which is shorter and‑‑even though or even because the words contained nothing but wrong meanings‑‑more resourceful, let us say.  We pinkly pulled up our friend, who was of course crying & covered with maggots & the color of a bruise (we take a lot of physical abuse I think on our trimadod & in the constantly oozing, eternal endless Wall of China of the glob we were once all fashioned i.e., departed from.  Pink hands pulled up a twisted, maggoty mess the color of a deep blue bruise in in indeed, but * had the hallmark of righteousness which we knew would sooner than we wished heal him to his wonted gold, his wonted fucking gold, & we gazed forth once again at the tower of perfection in the city covered with the very best breeds of the best species of the best flowers on this world, I mean trimadod, I mean sun O! Sun of Flowers! O1 O! Stolid sun!  O! Sun betrayed by transfixed pollution of Others, such as these bruise-colored (for, lost in the god damned phtrase, we were all bruisishly tinted too too too) parasites arrive, arrive to eat the flowers (eat the flowers?hell, we'd never thought of that, not even when * was cooking various forms of them & actualy tasting them with his neck fucknig craned over the ladle like a buzzard bored waiting for this boring carcass to to...transdform itself, by simply & finally, slowly, dying into something glorious & edible indeed). Yea well, we turned again o the tower, the tower the tower the tower, severely closer now.  Wait a minute...far more closer than it shoulda been, given Sumorr's comlex & notoriously, obnoxiously calculations of distance varied by weed-trim corrected for whim-spin (which is a hell of a correction to make, like when you''re wildly waltzing with the bride of someone else whom you severely love & you lose your count & start dancing in the dreaded four four) Yea so we were beginning to not precisely see‑‑because the lightwaves aboard this cross, resourceful, funny old sun made pure vision, unobstructed & shattered-like-a-crystal into the universe's finest sand, now available at your local sandstore or Store of Sand or whatever you walked on desperately through the duns thinking, Where there's desert, there must be water, over & over to youtrself in pluperfect synchronization‑‑the work of the devil‑‑with all the others marching or having marched with you or who will marfch to death with you in the future, finding no water, never seeing water agaiun, dying with their little skulls, little skullls, as it were, full of water & the watery thoughts of water & children who have just had lots of lemonade sudenly got lost playing in the water as you watched all your future children die within...the lightwaves weren't straight, nor very longlasting.  They were more dull rocks than waves, more mounds of flushéd light than any quanta... ...well anyway, we came to perceive through various clever visual or even eyelike moadlities‑‑I like that...eyelike modalities...I think I'll put in in the title of this section which is clearly going to expand like a redwood on meth into a whole essentially pointlesss fasntasybook of a fantasy book of its own now available at your various fantasy sandbook smores‑‑began to "see" I like the brutish white flowers of our flowery May may say in what had seemed a permanent facade of grandness shielded by a million redundant-mirror mirror-systems (we love redudant systesm, as the redundant systems of your eyes flashing their nexus to your brain should tell you that; we like redundancy, & we build it & insert it manifold into whatever we're doing, whether whatever we're doing means I mean needs actual reduncandy at all, like this) flowing through & through the excandescent foglike air of this flower-sun. But lo, how cracks appeared in it, how the huge, vacant eyes of lunacy & the pinprick, tiny eyes so packed & filled to their teeming brim (yet too dry to cry!) with the lunancies of gods & the falsehood of all prophecy, & this triangular castle began mre & more to look like the crashed shattered, verily rendudant & yet wholly clobbered ass of a ship of an ass ship sticking in the air! & when we got to it it was another crashed ship.  An alien ship.  & wait till I tell you 'bout the remains... crystal shattered into the illusion of a thousand faces. This one ship was filléd up with diamonds.  We walked through diamonds up to our knees, making the same crunching sound you make when you crack cold cereal with your remaining, crystal teeth. ALONG THE WRONG CONTINENT Flowers have twigs like glaciers have blue splinters, so we were walking along lovely-crackling if chill-rent mosaics of parented slush-o-silences© if splints science if density print if skids of pure blue ice & it was fracturing enough to make us all feel all full of ourselves, as walking through the strangest mum of a great pine forest doth give one the wonderful feeling of the mums, the feeling that only this "one," here actually a platoon so lost a pla TOOM! so LOXT! it was trodding like so many soldiers along the Wrong Continent, about to die in the next landslide, the landslide of their cries, in fact, the landcries of all the cries of the fast-slaughtered "junk-children" we are about to mention in the cavedoor of anpother roten metaphor will be in at slanglide, about 3.36 minuten away, ergo ertho erlo erjo erko erpo plenty of time to finish all but my most ample sentences, so we were feeling the abyss of silence in which almost none but the mass-claughteres waist within‑‑I mean, you can just count out the sound of your breathing after you've gone over whatever precise number it is at which God, or Satan in God's dapper drag, counts as True Mass Killing, as opposed to the slot below that, whch is just a Holy Mess, during which believe me you can hear any silence, not tomention every drop of the mess from the tooth of a fresh-broked unspoken "bone," and‑‑getting back to us, I believe, or one of the many groups of yokels who pretend to be us for no reason that either they nor their highly specialized psychiatsists (flown in from their frosty studies along every planet of every frostrim, which is where your interspasmodic, just a joke there, innergaxic shrinks spend all their time, now gathered with plenty of elbow fights & jeers in languages so foreign they are foreign to languages, now gathered, I was saying, around us, & shrinking & regrowing us, each time we are regrown into more & more loathsome approximations of what we once were, yet unending re-dilutions constantly & routinely‑‑& in many a languiage beyond words‑‑so we keep coming back as pock-marked, eye-sptrocketed, tooth-crocked monsters used to scare,not to sleep, but unto a blithering, completely unrestful, & yet at least fucking quiet little trance, to be placed in the closet where the cupboards grow, or in the cupvbards where only tiny simuacra of Byron the Rapping Bulb to glow, there to grow righ with the finest webs, called Skeletons on the deep Asian black markets or blarkets where they the ex-kids They, the Ex-Kids, take their shushed & stuproous children to & their parents soliciting for their childrentaken those children, too (it's kind of a mess with all these childrenhere; I can only make out a thousandth of it, at which point it already looks lie a problem‑‑don'tlook at me‑‑the universe has, a solution this cogarette-smioking universe knowning I mean loking like nothing so much as Humphrey Bogart flinging a ridiculous, unburnt twig to the pavement there being no smoking here, & still looking like th most phantasmagorically cool guy in the universe, so you know we'll have a few generations of kids who will somehow succeed in growing up, despire our efforts at black-market sales, not to mention genocide practice, practiced very day, genocide practice, PRACTICED every DAY, to‑‑can infer much less out-and-out fucking guess, & think twig-flinging is the coolest thing in the world.  Which, in the hands of Bogey, it is.  Or will be son as whoever's at the time machine gets it started after all this...uh...time & gets time moving again so the sentence can die a natural death & turn into natural, ever-breathing time again again.  We were were walking along thick twigs & there was no noise is what I'm saying. I'm saying it quickly‑‑before the hawk of sentience monster come & bagus in his talons only to start another sentence, beating with each droplet of our (silently falling!  silently landing!) lood‑‑that there was a silence around us, which was underscored, for me at least, when * moved his lips & no sound came out, & I went on a Necessary Digression (not like most of my digressions, which are strictly illegal in the Cosmos of the Stopped Breath which I as a poet call disdainfully "the cosmos of the constipated Vörter, which none of the little selves inside me, in their tidy little grey suits & ties, calls anything anything calls calls anything anything at all) to remember how to lip read. "[It looks like sound's being absorbed in here,]" xoft his zoft and, I notice casually, beautifully shaped if somewht too wide or a tad too large, if possibly according to the laws of mangification that enlarge I mean gorge I mean govern this strange little dirtshack of words I call The Universe of Ghosts unless I've changed my mind since then. * then said soemthing, but his lips didn't move.  What a jerk. We were in fact approaching another ship‑‑which was so predictably crashed I refuse even to grace it with the epithet crashed‑‑lost but for a rust-sheened bumper-shape deep in the earth. Yea, another crashed ship.  It had really crashed fast, huh?  Unless it had the common Universal Burrowing Devices which burrowed the thing‑‑landed according to the most exquiite coordinates or otherwise‑‑deep into whatever it landed on, if it be at all burrowing, which the dirt dancing on the surface of a sun was, certainly, if not the sun itself.  It was not something to be known nor even imagine, so don't expect a garth of verbiage from me on the untenable subject, nossirree. This buried ship, then, also encompassed in an orb of silence, which we could only presume was caused by the fetid black insects that buzzed through the blackened air over these awful black flowers‑‑possibly the creepiest yet‑‑which kept nipping our ankles with phenomenal tendrils build like roots with claws or claws of root or somesuchthongandoranother. Sumorr was tired of being blown into abominable faces of his own Suavely Nuanced Emotions (he was the clever lot of the rat or Rat of the Lot in a Vat of Alottarats™), & cuffed up the following plan. "It's simple," he announced, as we huddled, football-style, amongst the mothy stadium-lights of the cell they kept us in between unconscionable abominabilities.  "*, you make *, *, *, & yourself small, then I'll stuff you in my pocket." He saw at glance we were not comprehending the first letter, much less the ultimate essence, of his suave & clever plan, but were rather frowned at the magnetic tube of force which was writing out, intricately, our next play on the empty field.  We did smile, however... "They'll frisk me, then put everything back into The Inaccessible," Sumorr, who actually preferred incomprehensibility as not marring the pluperfection of his Immaculate Plans.  He was making markings in the grass we were all looking at... "The four of you will then be in the Inaccessible!" he cried, cried, cired, around the trithried echolalia of the resplendent, silver-and-gold stadium. The Inaccessible lifts off to the tromboning of Quurian sirenses, the scambling of eighty-trillion star-powered trickster-devil-cruisers, the curxing of that dwarf what came forth a while forth, the evil, mean flicker of the candle of doom upon the buff faces of the unused irons, & I mean torture-irons, the madneff of maidf & more weighty madnexx of wixes, meaning wives, the leaping on horn-tail'd demons into nullifying cruisers whiter than the hue of that first airless moon, naked in her interlunar cave, the squealing of ointment & of pigs, artists besplattering their soft pallettes, in fricatives so madly incensed with the vision, distant Boschean cities aflare as if in ugly face beautifued off the pure polish of the succulent cruisers or the succulent fires, the sound of fires going superosnic into their own firey thoughts‑‑thoughts which are to the mind of fire as fire etc. THE POCKET HE KEEPS IN HIS EMOTIONS WHERE. Never ransom your size to your Sorcerer Older Brother‑‑no matter what moony crescents & dancing waves ilulant blue in the air he may display, no matter how sublime he shake his shaft & no matter how many entire worlds that smite empeach empoach emcroach, worlds each with its own set or mark or significance, or something...100,000 bare worlds in a barren & a starving set of wives by each of their sides) shrink you down into the pocket he keeps in his emotions where. Never let him speak to you in that burglarious, desperate tongue (you recall‑‑the tongue of the Gods that tortures the tongue to speak?  The tongue of the Gods that tortures the tongue to speak?  (I don't know why I like doing that, unless I connect with the second breath better than the rest, where rest equals first) Do you want me to say it in Sanskrit? like some lousy, browbeating undergod tormenting the callers in the antechamber (pause while I amuse myself with balloons‑‑written on each balloon the tumorous Words of God, hilariously expanding each into jokes; here, I'll blow you another...) Because you might end up with me, a soldier in clothes of a drabness so intense they not only refract just the odd Caprillario of Light but bore you boreyou boreyouboreyou into forgetting them, so the Opposing Side just fuckin yawns & goes away, or walks into the huge bags, called dumpwunples, we have waiting for them off the starry end of the Cliff on the Edge of Time, or it seems that way), & wounded, except you cannot no longer understand the signals your body be sending thee (you see?), so you're not sure reaslly what it is that's coming in from a very highly specified (yet still dizzying (yet still dizzying (yet still dizzying (yet still dizzying part of your organic form, which would seem to be the nature of your form, as the bartender calmeth me with another tall tumbler of fezz. Anyway, I was crawling over hillocks supple with moss, clumsily overtunring a mound here or there which would instantaneously 0stop the thought & someone or something that is trying to drive us crazy sent me crawling through passageways made out of the pure twilight‑‑you know, those old alleyways like they had back in Benzadrobrio, of that fanciful meterial which not so much let the sunset primp within the beauties of its own inverted face but also dance among the gold balls which solifify positions in the fictional space, like this period here.  You'll notice how it works, how the stone soldier boy keeps forgetting his boy, I mean way, though if you ask me, whoever I am (but I'm wounded, something like him, yes I are!), he's landed on a pretty plush place, in his brother's pocket.  One may be for a short term raped as they say of long-term memory & some basic motor reflexes such as closing the I, but, hm-hm-hm, he'll be all right. He was afraid to stop crawling.  That's strange.  He's crawling through a ridge of impossible flowers, crawling & crawling (& you vets know how much hard work it is, swallowing the guts that keep pushing the back of your teeth & the muscles we dreamt were only lizards' spanged & gloam, & yet as I say he is alfraid to stand up, or even crawl like a proper cat or dog (& you should see how proper the cat & dogs of Preeipeole get, with tuxedos & bumbadieres & flashy humps) as words come clanging & claiming to be clanging to be saving to be clanging you, & so the words clang you good, & the words save from another, depper, more troublesome surface of worlds, a stratum of the Ocean of Hygnomnic Words that troubles you because, while it means the same thing as every other stratum of cource of course, it hadn't occurred to you. He crawls along the bases of gold-angled jetchuriums, each with its little cheech or hums or full-throated little grasshopper (each with a life of its own (in a manner of speaking) lived in unspoken Japanese).  My writing is gettig crazier‑‑perhaps I've been in the isolation tank just a little too long according to mine owne span of consciousness.  But he is still afraid to stand up, you see, because the sentences are too long.  They zut! & they soar right at head level, aiming for the neck, eager for beheadment.  A long grunt could stand his ragged ass up & get totally fragged by some sub-sub-corrdinative snapping him in a snat yet with the fling of a fleur de lis, suggesting a sport of beautiful terror & even‑‑yes, despite amnesia‑‑a fair share of, not nly memory, but of brother-love (I suffer from it, too). So he flops on his back like some crudely resting cat, & he catches the sky.  I mean, he lays back & loosens the grip so tight it approachéd identification with his rifle‑‑a nifty M-16‑‑& catches the pouch of his brother's sky. I'll bet the bastard's casting spells right out there now, he smiles, & he is quite right. * finally calles us over to crouch down & hear the finalizationed versionization of the artfulization of his planitization.  This one‑‑which he calls Version CGX-1-8 affectedly‑‑passes through the thought-gears of his sylph-computer swifter than butter through the laves of a licking knive, & I say knive deliberately, & hecalls & he calls to us...unlike the likeness of a bit too likely mother to her children, that Mother Who Was Always Never There floating above the city so impossibly big no one grows there, staring out from its center of unlikelhood (which is the corner from which you'll notice the memory of ones mother always stares), while the kids sayb "(Why the hell's she stare at us like that?)" it's getting harder & harder to type, so we converge. "Sorry about that, everyone says," everyone says, for no other reason than this is what we say. REALITY-BINDING "*," * begins, talking more like Daliesque accelerations of a quarterback thranging in the thick of the press with the smudges on his cheeks befooling the randomity of the stadium lights within stadium lights within etc. seven times that's the kind of lighting we had here, even for non-events; that's how advanced we once upon a time were were than a janitor fooling round the latrines which I hasten to add, we had spiffed unto smithereens so you can either watch the scene, or wwatch so many loving variations of the scene reflected in & off the piping & the curves & the tubeware there tubeware there tubeware there of a ship designed so perfectly it could not be flown. That's right‑‑to interrupt my flow of thought for a change. It had been mathematically provéd by whizz-rabber Wrong Emduftion that The Inadmissiable an alternate name‑‑for in the same equation in which he proved what I'm about to tell you when parentheses end, Wrong proved that you couldn't stick this spiffy ship with a singular monikker, neither was unflyable.  It had, the report glort, "too mucking futch attitude." So they just abandoned it & sent us in, where we'd actually been cleaning, inside, alone & three-fourths miniaturized a common technique in my novels, to shrink cleaning people‑‑hardworking, good people all of them‑‑to three-quarters height‑‑albeit thus making them only three-fourths as hardworking & good as before, so as to make those tough spots easier to reach not that The Insuffisiable had any corners, being designed along the lines of an endlessly unfolding sort of Doric repetitive Doric French curve of sourts, something like that, something like this (watch my hand), whooooooosssshhh! and my brother had a plan to steal it, which he was rattling out real fast, like someone burping out their number on the message machine. & it was this:   OK, this is it: *, you, *, & * shrink me down & stuff me into your, *, pocket, while I'll shrink you‑‑*, *, & *, & stuff you into my shirt pocket‑‑you know, the one right here in front, the obvious one, the one they never think to look in, & this is because this time we'll be nervous, & rather small, what with you shrinking down sufficient to fit me into your poash & me running round back & shriking you down et cetera, & we'll look listening & preoccuptied & guilty & illegal, & so..." "And so?" "And so they'll check the poash!" cried * in domndoddly triumph. "So what then?" asteriskt, putting hand which was the best smile od a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl's little life, with plenty more to come from that bouquet on head which was what the last bee smelt when he bent down over the fragile flower, that sort of thin, thing being the first sentience of the first current of the scent of aforeshed flower. "So," * continued, seeming strangely worried,as if we were going to atack him.  It may have been our tattoos, our tattoos or our shaved heads, heads or our watches, which were pretty threatening watches, let me tell you, each ebony face slashed against the wingtip of your secret or the weapons in our hands pressed par TIC u lar ly against the soft flesh of his face. "S-so they'll gather you up from my pocket," he sprockit, in all sorts of Quurved & Qoollated Syllables, nothing important, never mind the attentuations & eliations of those sounds, forget them, forget them right away, forget them right away or they'll become an obsession these funny, yet strangely pretty & oddly lyrical little a cappella arpeggio's of scintillating brilliance & terror, the sounds used and this is just a personal theory, meant in no way or wise to impugn, imply, condemn nor notherwise compromise the reputation, name, or well-reknownthefuckingness of the Composer heretofore referred to as Name, not meant nor implied in any way whatsofuckingever to be reality-binding in Perf's "Darpaguean Rhapsody," you know‑‑the part where the singers of the chorus start to compress their faces & lips every which way, producing impossible polythongs, gradatios, & paregnmblombs* *variegated footnotes of the original major notes in a minor sort of key, or at east a Doric sort of one, the dimished seventh of the flush of the Jack of Solar Diamonds It might have been any of these things, destroying the structure of his sentences, as he blubbered disgustingly out the remainder of his impossible impossibly brilliantly impossible plan. & he foop:  "So they's chuck you boys backin after checking my poash & then," wriggling a bit in the discomfiture I'm sure of lead masses pressed against the flesh of his ledeanlurned little head, "they'll check my posh!" We pulled the guns & the pistols & the Uzis & the cannon away, but I'm afraid we still didn't get it. "They'll still find you in my poash!" * practically shrieked. "A-a-and then they'll throw me back inside. * snaps his fingers, exploding the big lightgold marigold above his sudden head.  "Yea! inside!" "With whom?" "'Ew‑‑listen to us!' With you, stupids!"  This plan is stupendously accurate & made out of Stupendous Static Plastic.  Anyhiw, accurate.  It clicks (waving his powerful hand-sized calculor which looks not a little bit cross to be used in this way, making harumphing sounds as if to regain retainéd dignity, bouncing up on the balls of his little calculor feet, dontchyaknow, & actually going so far in the dark of a great rogue moon hide the answers from the calculoritor!) it goes Without Calculation much smarter than he.  I mean, the calculations work out." Though they seemed in directive of some kind of basic violation... We made our getaway by accident.  Always the best approach, if you can manage it.  See, brother *'d excitedly pocketidly poecidtly the rocket...he'd pocketed the rocket, which was then diminished down... The wealth & the money arced up.  I really don't know why.  The wealth & the money just sort of arced up right to us, so we had it all.  I really don't know or care why, but here it all was, like a droplet from a little fingertip.  One did not have servants or desires, erased I guess in the backwardnest of time, which is where we nest. It all wound down to this dark crux of sarble, this dark green thing so rich it owned us in its essences.  A reuben crux of sarble leaning back in its own ease.  It is full of perfumes.  It is ful of stories.   One glint off it's neither nedge indicatedes a whole life wasted in effetful works. Digressing further down sometimes down to even to a cruxt of arble pellucid material numin'd in the nimbus of a nuxt of gnarbule!  & that one great ship distilled of it.  It would take us anywhere, if we could earn it. The details of my birth‑‑which I was a privy party to‑‑produced the corollary that I was or would be too perfect to be born, thus, perfectly stillborn, which I in the glimpse of mine owne corollary, was. They had to introduce a flaw‑‑some sort of flaw, any flaw.  Even a perfect flaw would do.  But of course by this time in the sotry, flaws were too fusion-foo, flimsy-few, & far-and-by-between... but one such far-between'd flaw did they perforce seize. down the marble rivulets of many a deadly book did they charge, & quite a few died, which is always desirable.  Then quite a few more, they died, & this was commiserable & good, & we did profit from the dead.  We profit frm percentages both of the death & and of the dead; that is, we cut a deal with death whereby a certain yet unnamed percentile of the challengles leftover by these customarily early deaths, creating a challenge, creating an energy which at once fighteth & braceth death, my teef gegging skuk betweeng the thithleth of mine theieth! & so they entered my flaw & I was born.  & the first words I spake to my Globular Green Dad were "I want to be poor." He said nothing, fused withthe effortless thought that this was one thing we couldn't addord. "Aw, but dad..."  & thence, even for me, the awkward childhood, full of sullen lacks like the latent leaves not falling off on not-your-face from a shadowtree, the tortured adolescence with my dimpled wealth destroying every single friend (even though these friends had been both bought & built‑‑bought moistened in their cases full of lavish glee, built with imaculate buffers soze to withstomb'd the nasty little warpages of my fortunes, & I would weep but for the worth of each mighty tear, each one falling, each one destroying an heir, a family, a hindbent universe. I felt adulthood come on in the form of illusive dry latitutde in the ever-cream'd hemispheres of my face.  I didn't have to lick the Fingerfull of Butter to know I was a man, where man stands for these highly nubile, subtle subliminal cardsworth.  I mean, I were not a man as you speak it but a shuffling of a thousand potent identities, the mearthing of a thousand thousand bent tears, the faceless value of a thousand bent spheres, a divergence unto the meaning-isles of a thousand acutely symbolic cards.  That's what we mean in these parts when we say man, & when we are so imprudent as to say "Parts," we are really saying (in a harsh, killing-but-hypnotic whisper, nothing leath) the sum total of comeupances of death we get from that deal we made back then when we were poor enough to be be making deals with death. No death here, just profits from his own countless & cumbumbersome deaths, worsthe than any fleasth (& there go my teef wedgying yup ynto mine Crawe a-gaine!), that our brilliant, long-since-obsolescent lawyers engineered for him, better than sharks in a garden, purer than hash in the raches of a cellular pipe, clearer than the thought I want to be poor which instantly killed my dad. It would be a missile, I mean a missiled statement.  I mean it would be a misfall into the fallen Glades of Forever, I mean it would be a kind of linguistic boner to say I came into some serious dough.  We have to carefully translate these things, & for reasons we are afraid to know, there being a great deal of fear no one foresaw in this consolidative incrementation of hyperindulgences, if you will, a fear hanging by you like the blood pumping visibly in your own god damned throat involved in this process of getting so irresistibly unwieldy in one's own perfervid lavishenss, so that every carven sarble falling from one's palm is very like a slash very close to the throat, so this business of earning everyone's earnings was a subtle one at best, & pretty damned bloody the rest of the ruddy time. Time ruddies forth.  It does.  No, really‑‑it really ruddies out, which means roughly rolling out in the form of large & roughly sphorbical ehres of rust.  That's how time moves here: it ruddies forth, at which point the mathematicians trying to place just one point into the future all die at once & it behooves me to somehow disburse all at once some theretofore unfrothable eructation of multinomial stolthx, which would, had one sane, living, at-the-same-time mathmaxicians to imvisium it, embother at once the bliss distilled & the filth extracted from. Hence The Unattainable.  Hence the ship that would break me & break me free. Being rich means turning an unviable mood of blue through which one purchase other & others' immoderate moods.  To become poor I was going to need an artist & the only great artist is a starving artist, so I had to seek out the one who most between most perfect strokes of dying might die most perfectly, while at the same time [condensing * something for me] really pretty nameless except for some sort of wafed ice-creature. So he made device upon device for me, each making me by staig-mogrifications© (he copyright that© (I see your copyright & raise you two©©)©) fold©) microdegrees closer to those breaths you have...you know, those prosaic moments of flesh...that's what I was shooting for; that's what dire-iced rockets from the dying poles indicated on my cerebconscious subindicators, that's what the patended feel of flesh would be...that's where it would lie. & so he made for me such mystical bits of clothes or mythical bits of cloth I coulf wrap right round myself right within the process of waking up‑‑devices & contrivances such as the since-notorious uglification pouche, which alone itself in the gasping of did all but pull on the pullings-on of silk the pullings on of something very dead. He gave me cachets of dead flesh from some source he would not name, but which was so howlingly obvious even Christ's kid brother, that miauling rat, would understand.  What a putz!  But nevermind. Each morning I would arise & wash off whatever holiness I had intact in the holiness intanct within my one leftover leftoff gloricating eye, then swab on this burn-cream he made out of, he said, the baby's memories of some real burns, & some leavings of a real burn too, from the real ground of a place where place where real experiences he had. Thus far would this artist detain his dying thux to go.  & I would paste upon my dolorless heaviness Excrescent Swatches of Dour which I would swoop in dense crescents under my breasts & giant eye.  He gave me this Giant Eye‑‑a ridiculous facsimile of a true Star-Pointed Eye, one filled with Liquids of Agony, or at least liquids of great mistrust, misjudging from what I thought I ought myoptically to be holding in to store, as in this world where nothing was literal did he make me literally nothing, pore by sorry-ol-poor.  It was almost enough to make him start to eat. "I want you to be poor in everything," gaddered *, mixing his madder.  He looks down at the madder & then he looks up. And he painted me a face with his starved essences.  He painted on me the smallest grin, one of those dusturbing, just-barely grins *... Strung out under the lustrous tunnelless flannels of the unctuous vox of none other than the Mr. Odun "Sim-Somng" Tonng, following ahead of your head if you know what my head means, solemnizing the corporate joy of his own thum-thumderoux voxcal quoids, this most expensive of all voices praises the ship (& praises the ship (& praises the ship, I might tadd, within the confines of a precisely measured little goblet of poor-doubt time) in a precisely mannered little sinking amulet in the sinking little minuets of time & of of doubletime. & he says, "Your new crackpane, pop-character Starcast© SpaceMaster© Model XL Plus is comes teeming to its beastly jimbles what with wings white as a hoarde of a hoarde of albino dragosaurns, robust otto-options blurting disconcertingly out of each & every ripple, unabashed luxuires within its every rafter teeming with temble, not to mention every little handycrafted bubble with a little anonymical Master of Bubble signet on it, & luxuriant rendudndancies flourishing in the timbre of its every fluent rafter.  This singular your ship, no?  I mean, is this a ship or not?" It was true.  You had these crew.  You had these crew who would pop out if you wont.  You would wont, see, & your crew would rupture the sound of their own erft-time solificiation & burst a gasket trying to serve you in every way, even though they could in no way see you, so tightly-strung to serve were they. Yea, the ship was crack-panel.  All you had to do was crack a panel & it would act things out, & * was cracking & paneling, sand th ship would crack act or do things out.  Crack five panels & you're slushed, though.  Nevertheless, we got right to work in earnest in the ruination of these faces that we cannot have, & we waltzed through the doubledecks & the Eye-decks & the Planar-Decks & the Rolling-o-o-Folio portions of the subdex & the dexter ones, too dumb to wonder, & cracking panel ater panel wuth a knuckle, with a swervely plafed back of the hand, & a panel would crack into, say, these crazy leaves spinning off a tree I've never seen! or this great collection of little bottles, made by the eople of the bottle worlds.  Or Jimmmy'd crack pane & a long view of horses sloughing down.  It's foolish for them to run down that hill, but there they go.  I want not to see the edge of this mubie, Jeeves, so could you put it on Unseen for me, & so we see. This was the sort of vessel that never let you see where it went.  It would show you only the faces of places with these rather pleasant faces we had never been. "How do you work this thing?" whined *, straddling a gemmed array of panes set up along the console there & smashing them all with his elbows whilst he spoke.  Good elbow work, *. The ship did & said, became & bodied out, many a thing at that, none of it answering his question, but every bit of it aimed its little beams into his dead, till it was like Pictures of Guilt Slide Down which once was the mubie I could never stop washing.  That was back in '84.  Wasn't that back som'eres en 84? So we're inside this attack ship which wouldn't be pure if it weren't theorietically on fire.  Anyway, whenever whatever it whatever it was was, I like to think that, from the imagined outside, it looked like someone was flying the Inadmissible, & flying it all to hell. SPEAKING IN CHAINS "I'm going to have to...pull your eyes out a bit, actually quite a bit." "What‑‑my eyes are...too far in?" "Way far too far in.  With those so-fine eye-points, each in the perfect Chain of a Tiny Galaxy from the ancient explosion of that once-priceless (back when pricless had what would nmow be regard dead nothi g as a price upon its) Chain of the Perfect Galaxies, all well-meant little gifts from creatures that had eyes.  & grown & developed & evolved too far got that rotten enough Eye, too, that Eye‑‑distending into a large portion of Brain, a large dollop of brain named Brain which was taking on more & more brain inanduntoandof itself and a technicolor portion that was taking on more & more the control of my thoughts & tears, such that I was having thoughts & tears of a tear-shaped, heavy sort, & you have never thought until you have thought in technicolor, droop-shapéd tears, featuring some of the silliest-loookin, the sillist-looking but saddest thoughts that ever droopeda tear such that my tear surrounds himself with a sad & rougghly tear-shaped beast of a head, a not, however, not beastly in thought but rather silly, rather supersublime in feeling, & this head surrounded not by other heads just like ours, tear-shaped & dour, but by other tears, tears existig & living amongst themselves and now our director thinks Now our director thinks now we're getting someplace, not to mwnrion the tearshaped music surrounding the ocean, the shore seeming to be where this scene seems to be taking its seemly place. [DEAD] MEASURE] LAUGHTER] Down in the Propulsion Deck existed nothing but black mental masses full of fused faces of depression, great dark arches like a dinosaur's back, I am just trying to describe things here, & archaic machines.  Proud of the filth on their great dumb heads, each strikes a pose, & a bunch of ugly poses they are.  The Inadmissible‑‑presumably the highest of machines‑‑was definitely fueled by the lowest of means. "What's that smell?" grimaced *, tapping on a chunk so as to check out the absolute precise density of the coal (through the use of petita-computers in the palm of his goddam hand!!!!) "I get no readings," he bleedings, with the sadness in the soul of a ceded machine.  He dropped the coal & tapped his palm a few times.   I'd seem him doing that‑‑tapping his metal palm many times‑‑so as up to cheer himself or to cheer anyway up his little friend. You could see these jagged bends, torn forces of a ripped snort of snemon of some rickt sorse, & the diesel rigs‑‑big ugly suckers chuffing on their own black whoop, black whoop, black whoop, great grinders shouting at themselves, howling out the great magnified power of the ugliness with the vague feel ing yes the vague feelings here of of shredded flesh...yes, that's it...we have a winner...we have a winner ladies & gentlemen, & his name is Torne Flesche!!!  Come say a word to the audience, Mr. Flesh. But Torn can't say anything, just start screeching at the agonized mass of a broken arm.  "How many places'd y'say that's broken, Torne?" queries Host, odiously rotund Odun Tonng.  & for a moment our hero, our perpetrator here, knows that if he just puts his arm down...if he just lets that bulging meat-mash down, if he can just let go of those countless sparks of self-inflicted pain, significant jolts of agony coming along on one anmother's backs, to eager to get to him...if he can just let go... ...yea, these were regrettable & disgraceful ships, indeed.  Snotty ships, ships that deliberately stank, small-minded ships that never got into the philosohpy that lay behind the job.  Machines that goofed off & that ne'er did nothin' & that never wull.  Devil machines that smarmed you.  Ace-machies that dealt whole decks right into yourteeth till you spit out machine-teeth for a solid week (children's version) or you shit out machine-teeths for a thousand week (adult virgin).  Virgin machines that Will Refuse to Fuck You.  More run-of-the-mill bummer machines‑‑you now, machines that would never run or would run only for a second or would run only to the rim of the job at hand.  Machines that had lost their jibs, or that had never had serious consideration of even knowing what jibs is (pause for a serious momment:  jibs is...), much less of having jibs, ,much much less of working with working jibs, whatever that might mean.  Meaning machines, formed by "Mindes caffein'd ande alcoholoicke," deconstructing themselves into mud some slides of in the distances. & worst of all, ships that broke the rules of physics just to get the old edge in there (do you know what God is thinking right now about the laws of physics & the break ing there of?  I do.  Stretched over my face I have the vision of God leaning forward so as to gaze upon his infamuxx Laws of Physics, played here by Andrew Spax, in the form of one of those small ball in which the snow falleth if you will, but for a minute here have to be quiet ("Shh!")...don't want to disturb God (is he a handsome devil or what [laughter [choking [dead] measure] laughter] ?!) with his hand uon his chin, contemplatig & thinking in awe & wonder, as is his wont, on his great creatiosns, & a greatly creative big bastar he is, I can say.  & don't worry:  God loves to be called a bastard.  He digs that shit, OK. God leans back in his throne, & it is am MAZE eing how intense his motions are, it is A MAZE ING how his every extension seems made for the camera, every interchanging angle in the balance of his parts seems to be a pose, sems to me a bloody pose, so He remains perfect in sequencio, perfect re-made I guess in thin slices of time (& I'm not sure but I think...I mean...let me check my time manual...because I think it slices true there, time slices true there, time as it persists in heaven as a rather fulsomely cute small creature. "Uh huh," says God, flipping the laws of physics on their head & back, making the snow come down. They seem to be in the ship. Of course this could be a trick.  Certainly there are an awful lot of 7mirrors around, if you knowwhateyemean. I think we all know someone using mirrors is trying to like trick you into another universe where they can lord it over you & have their way with you & your children & then you again. Nevertheless, drugs reinforce the conviction they're not just brains in a bottle but alive & well if a mite on the stupid side & aboard The Goddam Inadmissible, which they are happy to see does not seem to need any cleaning up whatsoever. See how happy they are about that, scratching their noses... In fact, their presence here is already severely infecting the ship wioth a severe & massively-spreaidng case of The Creeping Crud, which turns the screen all brown so the movie is no longer any fun to watch, ifyouknowwhateyemean, & gradually fills the word sof the story with this Rank Brown Liquid no one wants to know anything about. What the boys don't know is The Inadmissible was designed to filter out even the most formidable intelligence.  But since the squires, in the sense of young snapper fish, had no intelligence whatsoever, the ship just waves them in. As for the Creeping Crus, ship don;t seem to care. The sentient ship's power over their minds was absolute & complete, though mindstuff didn;t really cover too much of theior personalities, so it;s not like they were slaves or anything.  The Inadmissible could implant all sorts of thoughts & beliefs in them.  Whether they would notice was another matter, under God's control & no onbe else's/ So they really came to believe they were in the ship, & therefore found themselves aboard the ship, & therefore were aboard some sort of perfectly clean ship, though youknow it was more of a curve than a ship, & very blue, & very Doric, & very solemn. It didn't say Welcome aboard or anything.  Not as far as we can tell. Not as far as the imagination can go.  In the Occluded section opf the Akashic Records. The ship filled their minds constantly with cool stuff, should they have any use for it, & made them feel at home & kept them from getting actually killed (though it tortured the shit out of them, of course) It seemed so strangely solemn, here under their star-command, that it forcéd them to touch it, as a woman forces a man to touch her so that his bond of desire turns into something else, quite other than desire, something needless to say much greater than he‑‑a sort of a sad & touching fire like the fire I felt forced to touch when I first reached my hand‑‑hand understood to be a solemn sonstruction of stars‑‑so when they first with their solid construction of stars didde touche the ship with the inadmissible sovereignty & name, the ship with but one blue, unpronounceable name, where name is understood to be the sad pattern of flowers on the window of the room you cannot leave & when these touched, where touched is understood as a solemn procession of mutually exchangéd pain, where pain is packaged in these like white bundles firmed up with twine, where the twine is intercepted by the handless hand of God‑‑not forgetting that a hand here is nothing but a configuration of stars which, somehow touching you your deepest in insides, maketh you sad, as sad as this useless exchange of pains, sad as the first touch that goes beyond desire, sad as the incandescent luminating sourceless blue walls of sadness of the ship I first touched. "Just think‑‑it's ours," glip Gip, banging Balb zarm quite badly as he segregated Balby from the expression of doom & dolour Balaber was trying without actually using words, but rather skipping of of words as a force skips around countless stars, also known as pointless stars to convey to you, in the form of the current that is conveyed between these words, directly to you...but not with a broken arm. "You broke my arm!" Balb cried dryly, clutching the arm in the Universal Punched-Arm Way, except he said it in one of the seven ways one can say something here‑‑even something as violently funny as "You broke my arm!" or "I am having an arm attack"‑‑so as to have it lost.  But who knows?  In his sadnesss or whatever sadly passed a Procession of Blue for Sadness passing by, Gip may have wanted Balbo's brokenness to be lost... PLASTIC PUPPET LEFTOVERS or                                                                                                                                                                                                            "Any special interest, or do you want to see it all?" "Childhood memories," I froghghphwhzh, noticing that my throat actually took pains to clear itself with every syllable. The man was busily whistling.  No‑‑he was needlingly whistling that tune that never comes out, that tune that just keeps wheedling at you, as if it were a tune, that tune tune either so abruptly curt or compleadingly corsucant you could never hear to the end of it without losing end of it without consciousness. "A connoisseur!" he blömp, nodding several of his heads many times,                                                                                                                                                                          like that‑‑manymany headeadss, many many times, as if they were agreeing with one another and you could tell they were not proper heads; genedix, mayber, or just Plastic Puppet Leftovers from The Last Halloween back in 199958 and what these vacant mechanisms were agreeing on was the word pervert or possibly even perfect pervert, like I was the only one in these mackeral-crammed galaxies who...sort of...peeped into FCMs once in the greenest of while. & for this he had to reach into the deepest layer of his multibeetled cloaks, pulling its Assembl'd Images out with a shiteating grin that was very far across the Mountains of Smile. & I noticed that deep beneath the tacky layers of his purveyor's outfit‑‑pricelessly silver & with all the nettles & weeds in the right splotch‑‑was a nicely tailored, perfect green little suit‑‑something few hacking perferts or haeckvraeks ever had the mneans enough to sink low enough to see, much less be seen by police, who are generally known to See Through Green Clothes, I mean...see out from green clothes. & sure, I tried touching my fingertips to my own, veklvet lapels.  It was worth a shot, but it still turned into the scrabbling of beasts so rotten * they ate their own flesh, as fast as they could without dying, sometimes so fast they didn't have time to die, sometimes so fast there was no time, & there you have the Inacccessible again. He invokes a cone of darkness around us, as if to make sure everyone knows we are up to no good, & stretcheth out his coat, for as it turns out this fellow really does have quite an array of that most fevridden of flutes, the laughing child's memory (not to be mistaken for the god of the Shaetomnians, who is a laughing child's memory & is known, to this most liquid of creatures, flewing or fleughing amongst rocks, The Laughing Child's Memory (to whom or which or whatever no similiarity, derivation, affiliation (positive or negative), nor alliance (affiliative or non-aff) should or may be construed, dreamt of, dreamt off of, dreamt in a circular orbit around, hacked up, coughed, or wretched in any maimshape mainslay nor shameswape whatsoearfor) so much for your Laughing Child's Memory), for after rolling both his real & imagined, his viscous & plasticene, real & surreal eyes so as to indicate that I must have fucking indavertantfuckingly written that swatch of narration in one of the Five Ways you can write narration so that the narrees' can read it, or overhear it, or think it, or overthink it‑‑no one is not sure in a manner not dissimilar to the manner in which one is not uncertain, which is in the same manner as the limegreen klyy, living out its wellnigh infinitely miserable existence aboards the podhusk'd deserts of Arafavia, is aware of itself in one of the Five Ways a klyy thinks no one can overhear him, when here everybody overheernhum!!! but I'll calm down now, reweaving by mine tentacles of eye that coat he stretch out now, that long flap of coat my friend stretches right out now revealing vial after vial of what looks like blood‑‑just straightforward, uncut, degenerate human blood (except it seems a bit diluted (leading that certain little monster of inquisitiveness within me to murmur Why would it be diluted? answers available upon payment in plain brown envelopes of blood left aboard the measureless howling of the planes of mythical Arafavia, which existeth only in alternate paragraphs, & is therefore not exactly mentioned in this one, except I had to make that point‑‑that all-important & to us infinitely * embarrassing point about...you-know-where (Arafavia‑‑which alternately exists & falls short of existence in parentheses, which do not of course count as parts of paragraphs (discounting offcourse those paragraphs born bred & died within parentheses) from which this paragraph is hereby excluded by an exclusive phrase effective only in this paragraph (which, however, does not count as a paragraph (by the First Law of Discountenance (by which everyone's face (turns (white & falls (off (by which we have a pretty horrid image there (were it not such a quintessentially laughable child's memory) like the time my own child‑‑before I hired them to took him‑‑laughed at all our faces falling off) which actually happens quite a bit) in these ids)pers)éd) univer)s) This is a continuation of the paragraph before the one with all the blinking.  Have I mentioned a parenthesis is no more than a Blink in the Thoughtforms of God?  No, I haven't, nor shall I (blink).  Well anyhow, the blood looked a bit diluted, which caused all manner of mental spasms, till I remembered our most disregarded (& rightly disregarded) law of physics‑‑Memories must be diluted.  If it's undiluted, & you're remembering it‑‑it's not a memory you're remembering.  These things happen when we forget our own basic laws.  I like to make these things happen inside one of my quaint little jars...but never mind. God is a perspicuous fly buzzing round your nose. The man pulls out a vial & holds it up to the light which has expediently formed right in front of my nose.  I mean eyes.  Next thing no one knows, I am holding it up, & the light oscillates light oscillates as if to make this even more pulsatingly obscene... * turned up the comfort & died.  It happened during a circular timeshift, so it happened many times, two in partocular. Here's how those two happened. First he sighs "Ours!" again, whilst flapping bagfuls of luminous air surround him with clever ripples, so called because the ripples all made clever variations on the way he moved & talked an in general existed there in their magic, gaseous world of parody, & he sits in the chair & just dies. You see, over in these parts, comfort is an electromagnetic wavelength jammed with secret codes, games, & GIK General Ingrown Knowledge.  & when comfort hits you, so does loss‑‑loss & loneliness & a desperation to escape this comfort which is enfolding you like some cold disease or like those ice-cloud molesters they have over on frigid & comfortless Phinagial Seven, where only the squat, creepy little Phoggs would wanna live (& they live practically forever, beig as how comfort kills) I forgot to say "Comfort kills," but it depends on the power & the focus of the comfort machine. The first comfort chair was built by Blez Incadensia sometime back in the earnest years of the Flual Decade (199948-199958).  All we know is they found his skeleton in the chair, which had run untouched in his timesphere for most of this decade we've landed with our landing-pods, aka feet, here. U uu uuuu wuwuwuwu wuk wuk! Comfort costs, so after a few more hundred more years, there existed no comfort for the poor other than that which sprayed itself naturally through the atmosphere, mostly from the jolly blue star Winkole which lit our world as a personal favor for some good dead I mean did I mean deed some one of us done back before we were alive, that is, biologically evolved, which happens very quickly when "a Sunne doth grace thy sky" as methamphetamin'd the poet Ondonne from the vaporous bursts of his own poetic sky. Then the rich filtered out even that, & the world was comfrtless.  Meanwhile, in these increasingly huge yet ingrown spaces the rich lauded themselves and, more important, got lauded by Purchased Portions™ of Themselves‑‑either portions of their real hearts or configurations of energy they'd purchased from the poor, who had nothing & would sell anything, while the rich both have & buy everything.  Such was the stasis of our world.  Same to you, fella. The fusion fields created levels of comfort that would kill my ass, or yours, what with the loneliness coming along & breaking your heart.  & when my brother sat down sighing in the flimsy atmosphere supplying a sort of stoned, buoyant help to this most dair chear I mean dear chair, he turned up the comfort & he died, staring at me, paralyzed, of loneliness.  This is how it happpened in what I call Way One. Way Two, which I think if you say it to youself & then agree with yourself, logically ensues.  The Euphoric Ghost zax himself down in the vap'rous buoncy we were dreaming about back during Way One, which I now call the Way of Dreams. The seat, anyway‑‑possibly the captain's seat‑‑which like everything else aboard The Inadmissible was more or less a sphere surrounded by a cloud, a perfect, thinly-seen lil sphere, which Norton here recognized as a chair‑‑as who wouldn't?‑‑was very comfoy, & Norton made a move as to turn up the control, which is when I‑‑having built the damn ship & worked out this whole fakery now‑‑leapt & grabbed his hand, so as to pull it off the dial which, getting some delicious joke inside his plump little belly, smialed and he slapped the hand of a seasoned street fighter on top of mine, so as to peel it off wherupon I slaps down the hand of an unnervingly beautiful diva, so as to release this little knot of flesh we were knot creating and the ever-resourceful Norton slapdown mine-on the hand of an embittered widow, a woman who endures, watching the dustbowl outside her home eat up the dreams of everyone, onto which slaps I the eboy hand of a jungle fighter & a bright-eyed lover, a genius lost in the sleepy jungle, his genus giving out those irritating bolts which geniuses give off, all of it slipped into the sleepy yet lethal jungle, & Norton wallops upon my hand‑‑which I thought & still keep thinking was a nifty turn‑‑the diseased, scrawny hand of Christ's little brother, a sort of a gross-out opposition to his brother that we do not here even have. Have even here.  Even have hear, & I let go.  That's when Norturnedup the control & stared at me, as we both died of the beautiful emptiness. The timeslide which forces me to give at least two significant accounts of the unaccountable, the whirling little dervish of curvacious time, the timeslag which hit me back there gamboled away, & I was sprawled all over my dead brother, & then began a Most Interesting Discussion. "Should we rebuild him?" "That's a hassle.  & Gip's still alive, by God, though he's spraddled on that chair." "That's right.  How is it that you're alive, Gip?" I acted casual, at first trying not to look alive‑‑a trick I'd learned from the artist I would never see again, but they didn't perceive it‑‑my activities fell off over the small edge of air we were keeping behind us, so I changed my act & started wiping invisible dust & germs & tiny little crystalline charms of the overcoats of my many-sleeves. "I just know how to sit in a damned chair," I smuttered or mannered or stummered or tattered.  Some of those are words.  Then I stood straight up.  "* took the rays.  * took in most of those rays." "'* took most of the rays,'" * muttered. "'Most of the rays,'" sighed * in a dizzy echo. Yea well there were plenty of rays... I'm putting in a pause here, sort of a time doorstop, & I'm kicking it in real good & making it last.  I want this pause to last.  I want to have the audience have the healing benefit of a moment of sanity represented as a pause, although it's really just a doorstop sort of serrated bit of matter stuck loosely for a time in their heads.  The successs or failure of this pause depends on you... Rays converge on a cowardly version of you, rays converged crunching a cowering you.  I am sorry about this, but the rays, the rays are everywhere.  At the push of a button you can have a day's worth of rays.  At the sweep of a hand if you haven't sold your hands you could fill a great chandeleir'd ballroom with empty rays, vacant rays, starving & dancing rays, rays within rays, etc. "We have to rebuild him, right?" says *, & though no one is disagreeing, he adds, "I mean, he got us aboard & everything." So we rebuilt *.  We can do that, but it's a nuisance, rather like washing windows, which the five of us had done for centuries. The Starvation Artist was a headliner in All Known Cerebrums.  Here is what he did.  He sped up time & floated in a gold cube, where people could watch him starve as fast as a paper crumpling up. He was a starvation artist, & you had to pay a pretty numb penny to see him emaciate himself beyond the dazzlings of blief, constantly doing his little dance to prove that he's alive, growing doubts (can a skeleton maybe dance?) confusion & surrender to the glory of it, all with this overstuffed pearly plate on which were prepared & served fresh each & every day, food with condiments galore, nourishing, rich golden food, wondrously cooked & with a bouquet to die for. & yet he never gobbled it down.  He would sit staring you in the eyes for long periods, while you were watched in speedtime him wither to a mere wrinkle of skin, & then‑‑just when you thought you'd get your ticket refunded on the stipulation of "failure to sufficiently starve," where "sufficiently" connotes some sort of bubbly sea of stars, wherein each star a galaxy, each galaxy a super galaxy, & so on san on, for quite a while‑‑he'd up & do his macabre dance, & you'd toss your tivcket into the air & go. Here I was, dirt-poor & scruffy, & here I had four brothers too‑‑each one of them with a personality so complicated I almost dared not eventell you so, not that I don't trust ya.  So the trick of it was, I was broken into four poor pieces‑‑so one could prudently smarm that our starvation dude'd consummated brilliantly.  & keep in mind that we have a lot of brilliance in our galaxy, we have a lot of sentences strung together with commas, we have so much brilliance that sometimes‑‑like when you'd be drinking something sweet & you got into staring at the glass‑‑our entire universe becomes a transpicuous crystal.  Pretty coool, ya?  Or as the kids who come from nowhere say, Pretty dool, achey? The five me's, each named & happening, happening, Sumorr, Vekk, Gip, Balb, Bictor, whom I could with an effort access them within the skims of their weaker moments‑‑like when they were dying, which they seemed doomed to keep on doing, or falling a sleep, which is a swell time for a hypnopompic peek.  But most of time I was just Gip, most of time, smallest of the four & in a nanosense the youngest.  Generally, I could not access them at all, & simply had to trust that this experience was a great work of art, that it would last a long time & I'd be here forever, that I reaaaly blew it this time, that my creator had done more than disguising or even remaking me.  Thanks to me & my overturned fortune, * [artist] had even found another form!  This time, we were going to watch me starve (checking our watches now & then, then getting too excited to be cool, thence doomed to coo & drool, thenque moortifyed by all the double-oo's), which I am dew to keep on dooming alla time within this toomb. Gip, Sumorr, Vekk, Balb, Bictor "I'll shut him up," spuk Vekk, punching nothing but ones & zeros into the luminous number pad that appeared in the hysterical air.  He was taling to the machie at its basic level, giving it the ones & the zeros it needed stay connected, to stay alive.  It was hard on Vekk.  We later noted quite a bit of brain damage‑‑& all for this silencing scene. Sitting cross-legged, the last to transcend, the only soul on a planetful of birds. In an alternate universe‑‑one equipped with a complete change of faces & clothes‑‑* worked the delicate analogues of the machine, trying to keep it from killing us, trying to stop it from operating us, trying to turn ourselves in, one long number after another, each a nuanced shade of The Inadmissible's meaning. The software was so smooth.  The software thought & talked like a great Quuome artist & a genius engineer.  The software moved like a sliding argument down to embarrassing turns, obscene lures, unspeakable snares in corners where no one don't not want to go. It slid along like that.  No one decided this. It just evolved itself this way. "I wish it would evolve us," grumbled *, looking like that old shoe you found in the closet. Ah, the tricks & the fury of language, thinks *, but his words connect only to one another, which not what we want, but instead form an idiotic paradigm * in the air of his head, I mean the error over his head, & he cannot move.  Have I mentioned * couldn't move?  Well, he is & he isn't‑‑that's * all over again‑‑& he is powered by an invisible electric chair which gives him movements vaguely reminiscent of the thought he might have had. DONE-DID-IT Backstage after the show, Smithy gorges on a Sunday brunch thing he has neatly set out here.  The colors, the forms of the food are so divinely organized that one truly wonders whether Fesh had not himself done-did-it.  Fesh was the nexus of all wealth in this universe.  So the artisan crammed in his brunch, thinking of The Note from the Simulated Kid (1944).  See, he'd known since the star this some projected child, since children don't exist anymore.  I've done my best... It was a good fake kid, he thought.  So what more forms of trickery might I own if I met with him? & he met with him, at the assigned place & time, wearing a startling cloak of black.  & there was this kid, smiling attractively, but strangely still for a real kid.  Plus Smithy could see the strings. "I want to talk to the pupeteer behind the kid," Fesh blugget, whereupon the bright child deflated to the remnants of a torn balloon, & Fesh was meeting with Smithy. SUBLITERARY All at once the story speed up greatly, like the author had top pee.  How dya like that?  You can sense the state of this guy's bladder from his writing.  Some writer! "SubLiterary," I'd say.  "Fuckin subliterary, I say!" so next thing we knew Fesh is charmed outright, Fesh spends hidden months performing all manner of humiliating sexual favor for Smithy & anyone else who wanted a piece of this creature with the bag over his head who could bend into any shape, accommodate anything, suck the ojas out of anyone. Then that whole paragraph is forgotten, or suddenly perceived as a dream & with his inflatable kid tucked under his arm, Fesh takes Smithy "home," just like that which ~ or home or tilde proved to be a spiderlike device, stuffed full of children.  & with children's limbs dangling out & with children falling out.  At least it looked that way.  I was most distraught, let me tell you.  This is a very tragic moment here, in case you thought these stories lacked tragedy or were light or frivolous or even bullshit in some way. & by the way, this house had its own rules.  When you stepped inside, you agreed to be bound for the duration of your stay, etc., bound by laws of physics that were strikingly unreal.  This Fesh guy seemed to have an aversion to naked reality, much like the Rest of his Ilk, livid in glazed aquariums pressed all-up against the glass, giggling, trying to lure some specific fish. "Can't stay long," the artist mentioned, helping himself to the abundance of fruit flowing surplusly from the table, where table ... "Got a 3:00 show to do." "Please sit down."  But * was not sure he could.  He had heard about the Couches of the Rich on a hard-hitting because so side-splittingly funny at the same time, showing us what horses we were, & the grit of the gist was that these mechanisms had the pleasure turned up way too high, too high for legitimate, current technology, high for my own company, *, Inc., but available on the marked black balcony of your soul. * sat down, & for the first time in his ridiculous life he was full of comfort & despair, each one vying for release, but relief beig given by no one in this passive universe. "Would you like a novelty?" said *, pointing toward the basket cinched between *'s legs.  It was a bag full of little tiny things with great detail,elusively slid little curves & quurls, little angulations from the sun & fumistagions from the flowery fat moon, Ferfa.  & actually, these were really great little things.  They had one, in the form of a widening beam, you could project a whole tiny sort of mubie in your head.  Another one replaced your heart with a machine, then put it back again‑‑pretty harrowing for a little crescent.  There were several cubes, most notably the back cubes which were the result of turning the cubes inside-out with your mind, cubes that did nothing, or else did something profound which waas so deepseated it existed as a twitch, like I exist as a twitch, or else the cube was turning you inside out in its imagination.  Now there's a novelty, that turns you into this geeky little novelty.  No wonder * had brought these out. Necessary Evil was playing in the background, with their usual buouncy, actually more like playing their asses off.  But all the while, they had this huge image of an asshole (which the lead guitarist verifies as "what it's all about") projected over them, so there was a sky of asshole or an asshole of a sky, & I don't know why they do that, it's just too weird. "You're going to work for me full-time.  No more starvation shows." "That thought is frightening, when you notice the artist will get so severely fat his left side sends his right side Valentines & the right side reciprocates, all of this being done through lawyers & other front-men, naturally. "We can make your fat invisible.  We can make it all disappear." "But I love the thought of starving." "Very well.  Keep that thought & let's get busy.  Sign, or else I'll bring out the kid again." The kid coming back, Thought no. 579596.273875.   Nicknamed Strangely Frightening.  * kept the thought together in his mind for a long long time, way beyond the end of this or any other story you have whiopped up, screwed & abadoned a hundred times. Thought engineers came by, wreaking havoc with one's singular thoughts but encouraging the growth in this Garden of Weirdness of deviants & invalids.  They were growing a crop of greens right in your head. "Pay no attention to that platoon of men," says *, punching a button on the pad in his had in the den int the dim in the house in the white house in the great white house full of bizarre & unnatural growths, tumors, zits, carbuncles, & boils.  "They are just a dense cartoon.  Like everything," & he laughing pulled out one of the novelty‑‑a tiny spaceship that was perfect & could go anywhere, not that there are legal, specifically places you can go to. "I want to be poor," * announced, & here we can paste in the reactions of everybody else, since everybody has certain words programmed in his body, & they come out in this form, as if thoughts were oceans poundig one another for their rage or volcanos flipping a million tons of lava all over your screaming seats or the howl of the tornado as it picks you up. "And I'm about to build this ship." "I don't know anything about ships," said *.  "I have never been involved with ships." "It's just that I want a ship with tricks." "O...that I can do." "I want it loaded with tricks," Fesh went on, in his chronic conceptual agitation, his features & even his body in its dictations of shape bobbing & wobbling, as if he were the dim image of himself in a balloon.  Needless to say, medical viruses converged by tyhe billions to take care of him.  "Smithy, my friend‑‑I want The Inaccessible to be all tricks, the way your father's thousand birthday trickds were each, in a childish way, a broken sort of a trick of soething that would have been a real gift.  I think he got them from the wonders factories.  He admitted to owning several dozen wonder factories, & these were the broken ones, or the ones specifically built to break apart, or the ones that were intact & fine, but they did things to your mind which made the poor broken mind think they were breaking apart."  Fesh shoook his head, shaking off a bazillion highly-trained, professional bacteria ("Yi!" they cried, like Orientals in a pulpmube full of amateur fictions).   "That's my dad all over.  He died, as you know, in 19993, but is re-enspirated through a great series of multiple-dimensional bypasses, so having died, he has qualified fom some great technology."  He whistled, which amazed Smithy to know he could, much less to hear its intricate, self-conscious, furrowed & note-taking notes.  "You know‑‑our re-enspiration stuff."  He whislted again, but this time it seemed as dull as that snowbank out your window which refuses, in the absence of seasons, to thaw.  "That's the coolest stuff st all‑‑except for the stuff you & I are going to put in to my ship." Fesh had been floating disconcertingly at Smithy, & now he even more shockingly putingly hisingly armingly around Smithy's hypersensitive shoulder. No one ever touched anyone in this world.  The rich‑‑they were seeming stranger & stranger by the iauk, which is a measureless measure of time we have which keeps count, but which cheats on the counting, having been originally denied to be a carddealer-cheater on that bird-world, whatchyamacallit‑‑Jyurp, that's it‑‑to be a card-sharp on Jyurp, where they could never refuse to gamble.  Anyway, these devices didn't work out, so they turned them into gamboling units of time, the iauk, which shuffles & deals out seconds from the bottom of the deck, fake-cuts the Cards of Singularity which make up what is left of poor, wrecked, wounded, & crash-landed time (time crash-landed here eauks ago...I thought you knew...), & in general futzes up that linear movement you used to know you used to know you knew. "You mean this spaceship‑‑this expensive monstrosity‑‑is supposed to be nothing but a bag of broken toys?" Fesh thought about that, broke contact, went to light up a cigar, lit the cigar, puffed on it & drew back from it & watched it explode into a profusion of ridiculous flags, making the rolling noise of collosally angry clowns kicking one another in the wert grass... "No no no no no no no no," he said, wiping his hands reassuringly.  "The conceptualization of our tricks will go into the very woof of the ship's volcano, like what this novelty does‑‑project an angry planet everywhere‑‑quite a little trick."  & he was modulated the nodes of a pinkisah novelty from his basket, so a fluid red planet, an angry planet, wriggled round them for a while. "But I also want you to transform me, to make me naked & stupid & poor." A silence, but not a passive one, nor a rhetorical one, nor heavens forbid an actor's silence, nor the silence that comes between the echos of the Ylem exploding in the red-flushed blood-buddine flowers of your fucking face, nor even the silence of Mary as she, every much a god as her kid, forgives everyone‑‑in just one white silence, Mary forgives everyone.  No, it was a less passive silence, a drawing in of emotions silence, an implosion of those fine mental figurines we generally carry about (when we're awake at least) or at least the silence of Smithy falling apart, though in complete ignorance of this fact, though in complete confidence ha ha he was Master of the Si-o-lence. Then he starts to laugh, helping himself to the bowl of fresh nuts the pretty woman brought to him while he was under or something.  He starts to laugh up enough of a storm that severeal local families have hid themselves forever, pledged to a life of pleasuring the Devil.  & I can't blame you a bit, now laughing so hard the stream of nut-frags from his mouth sets you in the jaws of Jeopardy "Make you poor," he tried to say, though it came out, "Mhaakeha yohau phahaoohahara." "This is not a joke," says Fesh sternly.  "And I am not a man to kid with, I'm warning you. *'s on the floor by now, eating bananas, avocados, & other fresh givings of the Fruitarian Earth, laughing off portions of his ass, the thong's going to blow, & we'll have actual ashes & actual vpolvanos, created from nothing, killing people, all very hilarious to the big fat artist. So for his 3:00 show‑‑which was the last show he ever did, though this knowledge not available at this time‑‑& he comes out, puffed & punchy, fat as a rabbit, & sits there & accelerates the passsage of his dying time without touching your time at all, per contract riding through the sky & thins down for a while.  Everone wanted their money back, & most of them got it back, for watching the Great Smithy slender down to something I would call hysterical were I not so normal.  I mean the opposite.  I mean the apposite.  I mean they watch the Great Smithy wither down to a normal-sized guy, who picks up his coat & walks right off the stage, going to work for Fesh, in Fesh's tiny personal universe, looking for Fesh's diaries day after day, cruising round the house in these flappy sort of rug-cruiser things,only they were animals, only we were at the zoo & everything got out, but it was more like a dream, a dream perhaps of rats, only they constituted some food that had been silently & strangely served, with slave after slac\ve in a comc fashion, but it tasted bitter & it wasn't him. & he kept on writing pieces, scribbling out hilarious new bits & whole acts & stages of foreverneth, but he never staged anymore, so these documents‑‑hundreds of drugged pages drugcrazy pages Smithy's Collected Pages, & here is one of them‑‑an act which never ocurred, or else an act performed on the stage of nothjingness as you sit right here.  Here is his best piece, by which I mean The Strangest: [Contract: only staged fully amongst the wee, short for hours of the night of Ours.  The dude'll never make money on this.  I mean had he, he never would have.  But anyway, out comes he Smithy the Great Technician, Smithy the Soul of Nightfall Smithy of the Fear Clan, filemaker Smithy, Smithy gradually infecting all the office space & then lays everybody off!!! ...in the dashing guise of a god‑‑a pretty neat costume, emphasizing his dick, which as I say was fully & completely staged, by which I mean laid, later & later at night till the hours go invisible, & then he starts losing money with his patended rap.] "I am Insomnia, Lord of Losers, probably you too...For fear of me, you take great drugs, but I am with you as you slip & slide.  I can always find your consciousness.  I can sniff it out anytime you're breathing such carefully contrived air.  It's a cakewalk, a wincing dance of a morbid disease.  That's what you're staying awake for.  Stay awake, or it will build up a bit, maybe come down all of a sudden & crush your face!!!  Kind of cute, don't you think?" Make Fesh poor? I mean‑‑Fesh?  You'd have to remove your money belt & defractionate the activities of your remuneration sympathies (which "Fesh didde Love" as the subdivided poet, Doet, said) & probably scrape off the Gel of Prosperous & the jello of abundance & the dust of infinity & that faint smell of water, suggesting something sad, which one now feels to the fullest, like being boiled alive! & peel off that tape of sheathes which looks like a bow, looks like a bow & then comes out with these fakey-fancy fumes, like a sumptuous Cuban cigar or some other rot that is rotting you alive, & toss forth the incandescence of endless currency & the waves of solitude & the soft, fat tears of a liquid solitude & the barren nothingness that exists within my heart at the sound of his name, whatever it is." "You must have hated him.  You can't remember his name, which is Faltslan or Falt, for short or Fa for extra short (like when the energy that feeds the novel go away, & we all have to gather sticks & make fire & live outdoors beneath the stars of nothingness, too poor to walk the planet)." "What?" "You were complaining about Falt." "That's right.  There is something about that guy, whatever his name is, that gets to me.  "He's got something that I need, OK?  I'll model him for Smit, to see if it's smat." Would it be smart for the richest buggering being amongst these worlds to pose as a janitor, & a creepy, evasive little janitor apparently at that, & be him, possibly sans reprieve?  You do the math on that, Buddy, the math on that as many times as you please, Bub, & it will flunk your ass!!! Each one of them frozen in his mesh, but quite conscious of what is bemeshing them, & able to speak loudly & instantly the nature of their complaint.  I have written it this way, so as to make it easy (& believe me, my life is easy now!), & so we have no other choice but to go embound.* They clambor aboard stuffed in various pockets that affect their memory & effect their memory & in general, * thinks, the horses all panicked at once & you had these horses, rambling this way & that, & coming right at you, & making with their famous snorts & whinnies, which I love, & then the sudden heart failure in the valves of their horsey hearts.  Metaphors come true within The Inaccessible, so we had a lot of organic matter to dispose of on accounta that horse metaphor.  Whoa, baby! Let's take it easy tonight!" Words will be born after you & I die.  They will keep reshaping themselves & joining into various rhythmic units, from heavy dedicated rap to the vapid jestings of an old court clerk.  Just think: brand-new words will be invented with the inherent unfolding of reality, with a constant & never-quite-filled desire for words, words to plaster to 'em or words as conveyances like momentous flying saucers & flying lights & flying lights so intense they cause you to lose time in your life, as if you were dead for a coupla hours, so words as stupid spaceships into which the meaning pours, or words like gellatine molds shaping their little booties to our future, words born like babies, with the sense of a lot of desperate breathing & crying to start your miserable life, or words hatched in an egg, with the meanins pecking their way out, yearning to peck in to the disaster of other words, or words as black holes sucking everything in‑‑a new & very dangerous germ of a word, a word virus that will enter the language hence, & thenceforth permeate the morning dew. & there will only be this One Big Word...one word encompassing all the meanings & the history of each formerly-sovereign word, or words as compasses that tell you where to go, or words as bouncy red balls you just have to pick up or words as lost balloons, poor, sa & somber lost balloons, or words as energy units, units of isolation, isolating the thought that must have given forth the word, I mean verb, I mean word, or words as mindless berries you can eat philosphically, or words as warts on the tundra of time‑‑an idea I for one do not like‑‑or words as cute little parasites, like puppies pleading to suck you dry, or dry words in a desert of meanin, words dying of thirst, sandfilled gumped-up words, dead words we dig up out of the graveyard up on the hill.  That's a word graveyard you see there, where even the word graveyard is buried, intact & full of chatter, but dead, just...no longer connecting with the other ones.  Tis a fair form of death, methinks. Or words as pieces of God's mind flowing & flooding through our mouths & eyes‑‑I find this a little too...well, visceral, so I go with my own particular theory, ready to move swiftly to the forefronts of technology, being as it is, so very close to the truth, words as actual living souls, being named again & again by these crazy peope, each violating the word-soul just a little bit, but it hurts, it hurts & disconnex you, & there you have all the known theories of words.  Remember: I'm a professional.  Don't you be seeking these beigs out in the dead of night or as you walk along. Don't look for meaning‑‑never. With a cute little half-curl of his littlest finger the smallest amongst a still-growing family of‑‑what number would you believe?  Anyway, this involves the littlest of these...like the dinkiest bristle on a burr Fesh sent out his scholars in teeming waves, scholars who in turn threw their scholars who sent forth phosphorous wavelets of wavy scholars who in turn for countless degrees of lesser & lesser scholars, scholars built closer & closer, if not to the rhythmic truth‑‑existing like smiling little girl-creatures on the splanded sangs of time‑‑at least to the mubes of truth, "a measureless mile above which the Quuomes didde sitte" (Ierlanalrei) & these had underlings & servants, graduate assistants & all manner of suck-me-ups, who in turn hit the beaches of knowledge‑‑which is what we term our libraries or centrexxes or gnomesuckles or xaxes or truth-villages or cores here‑‑crashing against the palm-shaded banks of the unsuspecting villagers, villagers, transpaneling (to the next panel of the comic strip‑‑now, please) their cars into projectiles & their houses into singular boards their dissected just so in a featureless dead trice‑‑& transpurning these boards into further projectiles, destroying a trice the lives of those who fished on the edges of knowledge, & these jackbooted agents of a government too powerful even to be high-handed, even to be, directly speaking, low & merciless & crueller than a kröel, which is a crüel yellow thing by which I mean small gaseous creature lurking in the Blue Vines of the Sun, we have here researched the whole matter of Becoming Poor, which was the topics given unto their infnite betters, far above. This information crushed & recrushed till it fell into Fesh's intricate palm in the form of a yellow candy, twisted in plastic. He popped that sucker right into his mouth, & he found out. The real problem started, not when the difference between the two classes, then groups, the races, slid like Hyperion into the rustled air, becoming part of our nerves, even going so far as to enter our neurological spheres, & appear within the strands of the kinky substance, droth, that will have in this novel to pass for the splitting genes, appearing in ancient, dusted-doff plays, appearing in the dreams of our own inexplicable children in the day, but when the difference between rich & poor became metaphysical, when our poor little philosohpers had to keep tugging on our sleeves (till we got rid of sleeves forever just to stop those philosophers, tugging being the favored philosophical technique here in Drub), trying to tell us, would that we heard, it was meaningless to even speak of the poor, the difference having long passed into Indifference, there being, philosophically screeching, nothing for us to be other to, then it got hard, & seemed to a solid 0.7% of the Quuomes a breach quite necessary to cross. Fesh nodded as he sucked his little candy there, in a living room that kept vying with its own convolutions to aim its pleasures & favors at him.  He had the poor-bug, but he had it worse than ever before, which is to me sad.  I have to write so many things that are sad, & just keep going, on to other sad things, making me sadder & sadder till I'm this big, animated pile of Milch slopping at the keyboards, which have hardened in this cartoon of dolor to feckless flapes of hengéd stone. Then he read about the past attempts, hoping to learn at least what to avoid, & when I say read I mean mubes, which inditeth a sort of a warm, tubuled growth of something transparent through the infinite layers of spring I have here, here, spring being the word here & here being the favorite word infinite taking the form of a glboular, Very Concerned Doctor to the Quume, Herr Doktor Vial, t!ch-t?ching & shaking his heads within heads within heads, & then inventing diseases there, ravishing & unfound perfections, perfections & projections of machines, machines of machination where thought equals machine equals machination of machine, where there is in the imained body of the Quuome, who love to imagine zeases in themselves... "Fesh, you're dying," quoth the doctor. "Yea, Doc‑‑make me laugh," sighed a very long slide of a sigh of a freshly-inspiréd Fesh. "Here it is," the doctor said, palming a bluely luminous vial, then making it appear behind his floating doctor's floating doctor's floating doctor's ear, then pitching it up & down upon & through his palm, making it yoyo into itself, & then rip round the back of your (your!) head exhausted & brilliant & inverted & panicked from its flight around the universe, then talking & saying "That's not my death, Doctor Vial." "Didn't say it was," said the coy doctor, stalling & coughing & stretching his ass out for more time, because the rich they had to pay dearly for their perfections of projections of time, for the finer forms of matter they inclined to live within, for the raptured, perfect air they breathed & for the splendidly-honed poetry of their minds, which constituted the thought of near-perfect‑‑depending on how many millions of fortunes you were disposed to blend, I mean send, I meant mend, but it is too late to mean ANYTHING by now‑‑we...have gone...too far with the blendings & the mentionings & the fine-tined honings of another time, plus residuals & expenses for the infinitely hilarious (fatal to a poorer man) jokes they spend their lives doting & composing (meaning having composed by the great Idiots of Poetry like myself or such as I) poetry from the Idiottes on Highe.  Anyway, the rich pay dearly for every instant they live, until they blow their fortunes entirely on the right to die, which is herein & formally Deniéd to Alle. They broke through beige pane after beige pane, revealing beige machines or colorless actions by the ship, & of course they popped out millions of crew members, then popped them back. Vekk broke another beige pane & found within it a spherical mirrory pane. "I believe this is the pilot's seat," said Vekk, who believed things instantly & without cause or reason.  & he broke the mirrored sphere & sat down in what looked like a pilot's seat indeed. "Now we're going somewhere," said Vekk, with his Usual Inordonate Spheroid Shinings of Pride. But it twarn't so easy!  The seat opened up a hug image of your brain, & you had to pick out the patterns in this synthetic brain to determine where the fuck as they say you were going to be going. "Vekk," said Balb, who was capable of Instantaneous Skepticism & had the gift of Effortless Skepticism, with just cause & suitable reason he was just not skeptical about, & he tried to like tap Vekk on the shoulder gently knocking off the burnt cinder of a shoulder, but receiving a Torturous Electrical Shock as a shock result as a trying to interpose his lilly hand.  He confessed to every crime, which, in our universe, makes him guilty of every crime (somewhere in the distance, thousands of prisoners are set "free") for some fucking time. Anyway, "Vekk," he went on‑‑because, he could start into replogging reright re-up, even with his arm completely fried.  "This another trick, this time making you take your own brain apart," a nasty trick, that, & which had happened quite a dozen times, with a baker's cindered thumb thrown in on the side, so there were pieces of their brains‑‑not to mention their livers, lungs, & testicles‑‑draped like severed testicles sorry all around the Schippe. Gip steps forward into the light, the singular white light shining down on the ledge full of the emptiness of audience of the rickety old creaking wood stage, & declares, "I doubt this morsel of crap was designed to go anywhere.  It's a damned chick trip, just like you'd know the rich'devise." & he stomps his little foot!  It bangs the boards, clearing away the echoes of every other sound, which was or was made to seem or which was & was made to seem significant because, up to now, The Inadmissible'd been echoing in immeasurable yet dopplering ditheration every single sound ever made aboard it ever since conception. Which was a hell of an implication.  Now the bash of the brittle boards was the only sound, going through some incalculably complex mega-arches & spiralations, but going off into the dark which one noticed had formed around them‑‑no more plates to crack or characters to pop, no more vaguely dangerous or Escherianly-disruptive surfaces, no more mirrors or traps or pilot's seats causing you to pick clear your enture there.  Gip was even there, standing free now, atomized butter of his brain within his hands.  He was, of course, wondering about too many things for even an intact brain to wonder, & in any case they stood there, while the ship moved through all periodicization & amplitude of thoughtwave... Whereupon the ship's voice‑‑not used since the beginning of time, except for a test spin or two by the starving Smithy n his wise‑‑said, "Where would you go, sir?" "He said 'Where would you go [emphasize mines]," whispered Giph.  They tried to shout at Gip that they had found the controls, but he was in earless ecstasy, picking gayly apart the bowels of his own big brain. ("He's useless," muttered Balb, with 66% anger & the rest sorrow, & the puzzled ship repeated its request. "Unfit Sector," barked vekk, & the ship‑‑no longer bothering to reply in words, informed them digitally there were several digital wafers legal waivers they nu-needed to sign.  I mean, everyone must sign who did not have a pick'd-apart bra-in. THE CLEARANCES They all took some days (but The Inadmissible made them pass like erry years!) with The Clearances‑‑an unending & monumental signing & signing of monumental three-dee documents the ship, out of orifices dimensional known as Dimensional the Orifices neither here nor there, the presentation of immense except when they were too frail & dinky to look at, much less approach, muckslesh touch, m.l. sign! so they destroyed a significant profusion of these seemingly-endless yet each-essential "plates of confusion" or rather ID-platters & the smaller, 45-RPM "beam-mubographs" they hadna knode nexisted, much less to be found after violet afterhours, standing beneath a rock the shade of which was very hot I might & am told I just did add, Unknowable Playing Cards containing their future!s flipped-out-of-tuck, as they say around these tricky mirrory parts of parts of parts from snookered & unfeelable surgical seals & precision moors & those "velcro seales of the Greate Sublime" as Kinkakiddle writes in the tiniest foil mini-mini-mini-mini (aka "fourth-level pockets"), protected by code words & signals they didn't know they had, along with bodily fluids they didn't k.t.h. & these peculiar little gnik! tics of the face they most certainly knew nor knough that they had noghr haghed but which they did. & then there were the physicals, involving orifices they'd never gnode nor felt about (possibly new orifices‑‑Orifices of the Unknowne!!!‑‑The Inadmissible was tearing here & there; it was the sort of thing a ship of tricks might do, & so was impossible to compute, even on the grey little things revealed to have always been (old inadmissible time-trick) bleeding of partices of time in the palms of their open hands, & with many hands multiplied by some effects I am not as a realistic author aloowed to talk about, but which included 1) that *ns had a constantly changing, unknowable number of hands I was afraid because of my vows as a literary god or was it gremlin to reveal, 2) "God changeth hands frequently" (old saying, neither heard nor recognizable it being, I am able to reveal, the thing God says to you at death, so now you'll know), 3) The Inadmissible liked to be quacking & hoaxing as many hands as at possible a time was, & 4) these are fabricahands©, manufactured by a wholly-unknown subsubsidiary of our old friend FeshManufakturen©, 4) a million other reasons, all packed into this reason, just FYI. So anyway, they were checked out right down to the last jot & tiggle of their karma up in the kashic records, & then they were cleared. They did not know this‑‑they were not to know this‑‑not in their slither track of time but in this sort of skewed, blue one, much fatter and, if I may say, more timely.  So they stood there, half-naked & with pockets & brains turned out (did I mention they had to turn out their brains?) & their brains in their innumerable hands & those beautiful clocks ticking away in their palms & their little mouths opened, dripping with Dumb. "Where to?" queried The Inaccessible through those specific tubes of thought the insanely beautiful Smithy had Smithy had poured the knowledge of the true Inaccessible‑‑the flying one, the faster-than-thought, faster than idiocy one, the one that could elide the attemptional cross-sections of the bravery of any cop, the Inadmissible that was in essence too fast for this universe, arriving places long before requested,, etc. It was thus that our friends found themselves shipwracked on Foloria, the planet of flowers, & a member of the Unfit Sector, on account of it drew ships there & crashéd them like bees. "You will Notice (or Failure Notice, as the case may be) that I or some evilness inside of me whose actions I relish when they come out at night to torture & betray have mutated your planes & poppers into into a ridiculous congestion of light bulbs, making your physical movement impossible, as near your palms can calculate, & you will note if you persevere in your tendency to movement that the pop of each filamental-delicate lightbulb release an immutable monster into your ship, a beautiful monster...into your ship." This rather fondling tone affected our travelers even more than the irksome Light-Bulb Situation.  The Inadmissible sounded rather fond of its monsters, as if it had created & nurtured them itself.  The monsters seemed rather close to The Immutable's soul. Balb swept this thinglikeafoot a swathe across the bulby floor, & monsters emerged‑‑immutable little images of dragons & sphinxes, of mutated flies & Gorgons‑‑all of them tiny moving in beautiful patterns that beautiful patterns that releaved blue colors across the imminent spectrum of the floor. "Your see?" said the ship in its * tones, its * thought-accent, its fluent & perfect vernacular 8ese. "These are superb," gasped *, falling to his knees with his tethered spectacles already thickening over his eyes.  He reached out his hands in The Sanctioned Manner & tilted & cocked his head quite fittingly. "Little bastards," snarled *, & crushed some underfoot. "Anyway, take us to the Unfit Sector," said Vekk sternly & with a lot of unfit echoes making it impossible to hear, though half the monsters hel their ears‑‑that's right, half the monsters crushed their ears. "I no longer will respond to verbal requests," said the snotty ship like a churlish chap, tracing & shaping his thoughts like a series of ice sculptures made to mock or imitate words, which put together said "Vekk is dumb!" They all thought veers of hate into the guts of The Inadmissible, with *'s thoughts, of course, leading the way, & together they filled the ship with thentofore unheard-of horrors of imagery, featuring the sub-bestial acts the Warags were wont to execute, & the vivid nightmares of Jogg brain-slaying mubosity. The Inadmissible said I mean thought nothing, & even the growing hoards of cute little cartoon monsters paused in their gnawing of the feets. "Take us to the Unfit Sector," * thought (actually *,*, & * thought). "Righto," said I mean thought the Inadmissible.  "Longest route possible or longer-than-possible?" On a hunch they all thought longer-than-possible, & they were instantly there, instantly crashing like a bunch of turds into the flower planet. Gip, Sumorr, Vekk, Balb, Bictor "You crashed!" cried Bictor in a crucifixion of amazement or an angrification of confricative hallucination, one or the other. "Every ship crashes here," The Inadmissible, using words again, said using words again said.  "But you'll notice it was a perfectly executed crash." "'Perfectly executed'?  The concept makes no sense‑‑it's incoherent!" "Well, what do you expect from me?" he blanched.  "I just crashed!" Bictor turned to the others.  "I can't seem to learn you should never argue with this ship." "I never shoulda made yez smarter," ship diƒgrumpled. "Besides," croak the hoarse & dying Inadmissible.  "You had executed an illegal maneuver in requesting the Unfit Sector.  All my modalities were, by law & legally administered write, fucked up." "Shut up." & The Inadmissible did!  Those were the last words they ever heard, the last thoughtforms they were ever aware of. Gip thought to open the hatch, & with that thoguth all the little monsters rushed out like dogs who had to pee, to be consumed by the little monster flowers of flowers. At least, that was The Official Assumption. Hiking through the flower-forests & infinite shipwrecks of Foloria seemed to be a big mistake.  The hatches of the crashed ships were there at every step‑‑invisible, covered by vines which invariably hooked your foot, so you fell headfirst but not as long into the strangeness of an alien ship, & you fell pretty much forever, too, which was a delusion enforced by the fall being long as your head & by the powerful delusion-enforcers of the soi-distant "protector vests." "I'll protect you," they'd cry out in these heroic voices, & you would notice that whatever lights may have glone in the alien interior were extended into the sort of speedlines you speedlines you saw out the sideholes of a Vorp Torpedo, which was the name of a ship that became quite popular during Transpoliptical Times but then (like the Transpoliptical times themselves) disappeared in the form of vorps speeding croxx the dials of time.  I'm satisfied with any sentence other than this one that ends with time with time. & you'd generally land in some sort of spanpolyptic goo or else a pile of broken, useless tools, or maybe a box of unknown instruments pop up, or just one shy device of an odd but lovely dictations of shape crying in the corner. They collected oodles of these things‑‑quirky, minor-key machines that obviously did things but obviously did things that they could not perceive.  Except the green ovoid found in a mossy ship that looped through the hooples of the trees lie a great, bended crane & whose interior consisted of a suave gel that gave them all their youth again‑‑or so they thought.  You can imagine our heroes running around from this point on acting like kids, fighting over the ovoid, using it on themselves & each other, playing themselves back or else playing the tapes of their lives on back or transforming their mubes into the tickly depths of negative age, negative reality.   Even crashed here on "the planet of the broken stars" or the planet where you crash aboard your silver ship & die or the world of the proud flowers that lets no one dry. They worked down long caves‑‑refined figures of shadow throwing out their flashlight beams, beams that stayed tight as they beamed themselves farther away, beams from which nothing could hide (& from which a snickering Nothing was hiding indeed!) & which moved before their heads did, flashlights of the future, friends, anticipating your finest flex, flashlights shining like irritating mirrors into the shadows of destiny. @MACHINE ROOM QUA FLIES ...fell parallel capzize into same, wrm-doored ship, like fingers dipped into the Cavities of Flute. From The Encyclopedia of Drub (not to be mistaken for The Encyclopedia of Drub which some of his fans put out in years not yet even to come). This machine cut them into individual molecules, checked them out, then reconstituted them, but got the molecules mixed with the molecules of A Murderouse Flye!!! and came back qua flies, but we cannot be certain who or which is tainted, the molecules having been given them enhancements of association & diminishments of character such that the little gnob on the gob on the ngonog the molecule screen indicating, say, Fly! would just shudder & wince, despite your knuckrapplings on the actual superglass above the actual gaugue, & would give out nothing more‑‑once deencrypted by Sumorr & his teem of powerful deencryptiong robots, which were given to violence, & hence, sent off to another job once the novel was done (a moment I'll remember to the end of my life; then, thankfull, cured) than a coded shrug. "He's fucked us up with flies!" cried Gip, who received a sudden butt to the back of his head by the passig palm of Bictor.  Gip sputtered & looked.  Bictor sipped his drinks & knocked of the ash at the end of a cigar & leaned back into a sort of ruby light‑‑a lampshade...from New Orleans, I think (at least I think I've been seeing things from New Orleans floating round this set).  & said,  "Only one fly, Gip." Which enraged Gip, whose psychotic episode of "Positions by Pollution by the Fly" can be observed to its fullest in his fans' fan-bible, Gimme Shtook.  There is nothing so mad as a man from New Orleans, & no, I do not hear voices going everywhich way. I am fine.  I am as tight as a jigsaw with my gig. @they go on to check the place out This is the Storybook of Flowers, right?  I mean, we're on the same page on that, yes? Anyway, the brothers though as we have seen they were more like insects     more like larvae than insects more like these Glistening Little Eggs than larvaeae more like some very strange noises coming from someplace we have never been than GLE's I dunno.  Motelike I mean more like a tiny crystal with the memory of the brothers having this big argument‑‑a very Ugly Arguyment. Anyway, the brothers, as I was saying, got into a big argument with The Inaccessible‑‑one in which no participant acquitted himself well, once in which everbody screamed & interrupted themselves & pounded on tables till their palms formed a bloody crush, I'm sorry, & people got up from sounds the meeting table marched about. It happened thisaway.  The Inadmissible would every now & remind them this was (flourish) Floroia, into which had thousands of ships vanished Fooa nowihhdtosnso i aihd Fonwhdonoiah Fwdnih Fdi Fi F and was finally towed to the Unfit Sector as a danger & an "infected moon," moon to use a bit of the vernacular (vernacular did I say "say infected moon," mmoon or is something going wrong with my language.  Language is it my language?  Language is language falling apart? Apart so say my legal sources, some of them so primary you had live through every second, some so abstract they took but an instant (though you were nanostruck for years!), & when our Eager Pirates of Yore with their great wooden swords asked him to open the goddam door, he wouldn't.  He didn't.  He refused.  It was a rather differen Inamissible we had there then.  I mean, you'd think he'd want hem to wander the moosy-griven galls of the Flower Planet & be destroyed by a mythical beast invented by three scientists so stoned they charged round the charted-up charges of the planet, trying to find what happened to the aliens.  Hu! But it seemed as if Mr. Inadmissible, in his starchy white suit & his white captain's hat & his gleaming white obsession with whales, had not foreseen this coming. Do nothing, said the deecrypted text of Smithy's programmer's note to the then-sleeping, then-baby vessel.   In the event of any incomprehension, do nothing but like pretend to know, you know?  It's called logic‑‑it'll help ya, which proves the ship had not expected even to be asked to go out there. So he kept stalling, & the men would trounce round the bulbs of imagery & sulk, & take drugs (not to be mistaken for the drugs taken during "The Taking of the Rugs," below), & then attack their doctor's I mean captor's dink door (dink being that impenetrable substance (though it was actually more like images of rape flowing cross a flshaing screen) Smithy had had made to have the ship in all its lidless, stolidness made), & thus shatter into jillions the concomitant crystallization of their bodies made, & then they'd get back together in a manner much imagined but never revealed or take my theory, since I'm making this stuff up:  you only felt like you're being shattered, or your brother's being shattered; like you only dreamt where you're coming from, see? & demand that he open up his doors. "Didn't you guys hear me?" blurts a flustraided Inadmissible.  "There are all these ships, crashed amongst the flowers‑‑nothing empty unholy Asian I mean alien ships crushed amongst the perfervid flora there‑‑& you want to go ot?" They would nod.  "Yes, we do." & The Inadmissible would try some other means of distracting them.  He tried very hard not to let this story happen, but it was the most joyful scene we have, unless it's The Taking of the Drugs below.  He made them toys.  He made many wondrous toy & tossed them one by one at them... THE FORUM OF TAPES To Vekk especially he gave the Dictionary of Absolute Words, actually an axial toy made out of antique leather, packed with stretched wires stretched into all the various stretches you can shape a display fine, crystalline wires which looked (when you peeked at their nakedness) like nothing so much as the Fine Old Thoughts of God not His thoughts, of course, which would be too superfine, but the fine old thoughts we had of Him when we were much happier, much more in a primitive mode & had the ability if you operated it right‑‑that is, looked up the right words & NOT the WRONG ones!!!‑‑bend space I say into the very shape of those Loose Gluttony Guts That interfered with your sleep ever since your nightlit childoohd or nightlood childhit & also have I mentioned these strange Marauding Mouths almost worthy of Kowack-u-Wack, and, too, giddy tearfilled gargoyles naught near worthy as of Ginzazablurg, & chronic, grinning gems the like of Alicia zum Vunterlandt, all of it employing syntax surpassing the equal of nothingness, better than anyone & a little watch so small it would cut you but what telleth time much as it really is‑‑none of that steady tocking shit‑‑& with which you could leap over all the unbearable parts of your life, which, let's face it, is most of your goddam life, & do tricks & stunts within the mythical Fountain at the Centeer of Time, whatever that means (& Vekk, not in legal possession of his own wired sensory apparatuses, had to go & look up‑‑all of which further served to further warp that time), & dance in the gushes for a while, until the Bad Parts come to get you... Of course there some chintzy toys‑‑shitty toys or toys shittily representing shit, & bagful after bagful of toys made out of this parallel universe version of shit the irony being that some of these were truly wondrous toys, fantastical play-devices of the Very First Order (& these orders don't come easily!), & in fact, the best toys have always been made of (except for the ones made out of snot, beautiful creamy snot‑‑but those toys exist quite outside the price-range of this simple story) shit. Please raise a hand if this offends you.  Please levitate if this offends you.  Please go back in time, if you would.  Please deanimate if thith offendeth Thee. & he just gave * shapes‑‑articulate, articulated shapes, shapes passsing through shapes, shapes excessively curved & mocking the laws of space as they played out their lunar physices, tremendous, mountainy shapes that rivaled the Looms of Jupiter, & gas-shapes spotted only by their thin mirage of fluid, a certain refractive moistness spread in idle beads across their heads, or heads scintillant across their scintillant beads, or heads supersentient far beyond the promise of their beads, yellow beads on a string fit to the neck of a very old woman (that's what we think anyway; he have to; it's hardwired in the circuitry, which I keep on telling everyone...but they won't BELIEVE) shapes without heads, headshapes without heads, shapes evern more without heads, or shapes appearing so, & look at Gip's special, ben-trovato gift: a skein or a shift of galaxies, a sort of prism of magic magnitudes, a star-image of an incident happening on a tiny star which somehow‑‑through the statistics of impossibility, perhaps‑‑duplicates the movements of energy along the universe's entire sphere, so that he was given an image, a single & a signular image, I say, singular, which I mean ter saypip in the form of drapes waving up into your face, drapes puffing up into your face, grazing your face with their fine-but-tough silk, in which you saw these images, kind of neat, except they were not very nice images, & were not in fact images but were in fact in fact guts, glistening freshly torn by the suicide's slippery hands & hey‑‑Bictor, of all peopple, got one whale of a white white toy, in the forum of the forum of tapes‑‑excuse me, mubes‑‑of slow deaths, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, possibly millions, improbably millions, impossibly billions, which Bictor seemed to relish like one great bottle of winer followed by a greater, ever-larger, & infinitely more bitter fine wine, till he was sluugin' down that wone o' death with a face pure & peachy, as if he were pregnant & pregnancy agrees with him, as if he had gained weight & put on a happy pound or two, as if mubing his eternal way through all these deaths would change his own, charge it up somehow & make it trim, speedy & sexual, but he was wrong. He was totally drunk & liquored up‑‑I mean, the shelves of the bar were filled, in the morning sunlight seeping through the ruby blinds, with nothing but empty bottles tipped on their heads, other bottles lying mostly empty on their sides, a broken bottle or two or three or four‑‑pick any number you like‑‑& tiny shot glasses gaining, gaining far, gaining far more light than a shotglass ever intended to beam, so you had these laser shotglasses blinding you, so you can see the empty image of Bictor lost on the continent of his cups, loss in the dominance of his double-cups, lush in serenity of his bubblepups and then you'd go blind from the unfortunate accident involving shotglasses which both you & me‑‑that's right, you, too‑‑were involved, arraigned, & subsequently questioned to death, in mubes that went somehow straight to the heart of our hardy fat Bictor here, & which he played.  This was quite a toy, as I say. This was a planet of flowers only if you were a flower, but below, all was the sort of dappled darkness you feel as you walk along the fine bed of pine needles beneath the naked trees, & our friends would bump into one another with deliberate elbows & hips‑‑where elbow stands for a magnificent, glowing ultra-contraption completing circle after circle of spinning bearings within bearings & the odd, occasional rogue bearing without any bearings & where hips are the collision of two infinite forces in the perfect vacuum of an Obviously Intricate Universe or OIU or maybe hips were the swaying of bird-cries in the incandescent glades of the dusks of the shadow of the Dawn of Night, or maybe not‑‑& they kept losing track of what they were doing (effect of pollen, in which pollen exists as a mighty army of a trillion trillion preeminently sentient insects, where insect is at least half-understood & possibly wholly understud as one of the secret thoughts of God, supposedly transcribed into the Alphabet of Nothingness by large groups of undistinguished‑‑except for their wings, that is‑‑scribes of God, wherein each letter is a Secret Insect of God) & also falling into potholes which proved, upon the seemingly incalculable stretch of the meaning of fall‑‑fall stretched into * so rife with animation they would make an Einstein blush or rather shudder into nothingness, & when I say ~ I mean past, & when I say ~ I mean they went into the endless, aching recesses of a hollow hived, of a shockingly black material, in which they prayed every god they met not to see. & then, in this one hull, *, they discovered what looked like a tunnel to another hull‑‑that is, a tunnel through the hull materiel right through the moist vacancy of the interlunar soil, & through some other hull, completely red or scaled or musty, & of some material so different from the previous it would have nothing (other than the tunnel itself, the tunnel which made it helpless, the tunnel which, when it bores into your or my dreams, makes us mutually helpless) to do with the Other Hull, which it called names like "hussy" & "whore."  These would appear to be semi-sentient hulls, hulls with the dreamy quality as of a dream consisting of nothing but women writing poems, whole great groups of handsome, intelligent women, all writing essentially the same poem, the poem we all write today, the Poem Full of Stones, hulls dreaming of other hulls as being female stones. KIRK (wearing silly mask, but that's him all right):  Yes, I see‑‑that would be the logic here.  I'm sorry.  Was it absolutely necessary to wake me up & drag me into this story? Wasn;t it going along all right with me dead or asleep or whatevedr I was? O shut the fuck up.  Now back to our story, in which they saw they could stip I mean skip the greary I mean dreary zibneff I mean business of climbing out of each ship & then fowling I mean falling into another wug I mean wug I mean one. So they did, proceding through a perfectly straight tunnel, carved by what unknown bore or unimaginable black ray (they figured it to be a black ray (but only because they were lost (deep into the dream of themselves (which is a medical I mean mental I mean actual thing that can happen to your entire race) after which of course) they would need) painfully) no one could guess, nor bother to guess (after of course they succeeded in superceding the crawls within themselves‑‑escaping if plaugible the black hole of themselves, wouldn'tchya know), so they were now just walking along, through the great nexus tunnel of connectedness of selves, which they, even though connected from birth, could not conceive, which I must quickly insert right here was part genetic, part from the fact these particular *s [race] had deliberately made it impossible to conceive of birth, so they were barren of birth, even as they teemed. WINCING FRIEND They thought in passing they had passed or they passed through this one place full of cobras, just crowded with black cobras, amnesiative or possibly amnesioid cobras, so they forgot how they got out, but they noticed they were twice-shy, so that, plus innumerable puncture wounds, was that. & after that they noticed they heard the laughing of the ship, constantly laughing in the background of this dream, dream that just keeps niggling on the edge of nightmare, the Dream Along Nightmare's Edge that they traveled, through their tunnels, now paved, multifarious, & absolutely filled with light.  The ship laughed.  The holes turned to light.  What did this portend?  The nightflower of The End? Gip, Sumorr, Vekk, Balb, Bictor "Put that down, Vekk," screeches Balb to Vekk, who was holding a bloody portent in his hand. "Don't you know a damned portent when you're holding one?" snapped Vekk, who had in his ruddy genes all the anger of the family‑‑the anger that was once mine, but which I gave up to God, who evidently put it all into Vekk here, who looks pretty damned mad. Sumorr I guess sniffed incuriously at the portent, which was a thing he had. "In this one, we all end up killing one another," he bleb, tossing the portent up & down in the up & down-thrusting palm of his palmy hand. "Don't drop it!" screeg Vekkt, which just made Balb smile (he had the smile but not the laughs; the asterisk had all the laughs, as you may have noticeded) for reasons unknown & quite possibly nonexistent. Sumorr put it down carefully, then picked up another. "Look," he chirped, time stopping for a moment. "This one's just full of tepid water," he said, with some sort of wry disgust, forgot himself & threw the portent, whish of course exploded, aside. Aside it exploded, & suddenly there was nothing but water everywhere.  Of course one cannot say they chose the way of water‑‑not the way the Asterisk of Amnesia chucked that portent aside!‑‑but water it was, & water they became, becoming mere variations in the water of the trough of the flew of the flough. But it wasn't just water, or rather was more than just water, as they stared dripping at the dripping cobras again & fanged dripping from the stares dripping off like stars into the Dry Beyond, for those had not necessarily nor e'en probably been forgetter cobras but rather the Cobras of Deja Vu!!! & they were reading the whole novel again, even beyond here, beyond this point here‑‑even right on through the end to the stuff I never came round to making up.  I mean, these guys were lost! Sumorr was still entertaining his friends with portents.  Finally, he lifted a big one high. "In this one," he bleb, studying each individual portent, limp though it was, as though it was one of those gems falling fabled from the eyes of God, or the loose teeth falling jiggled from the grey jaws of God, or else the flakes stubbled of the great, casting-off officer's skin of God, unless your God is a skinless God, in which case I apologize & pity you, all at once as the gems fall endless from the fabled skies‑‑which specific sky I don't remember, but to end this ascription which has, I fear. "In this one we become the richest mem in the world." Afterhours of rabid laughter. Then "Fesh?" they cried in succulent unison.  "We merge into Fesh, man?"  Somehow the idea adjured unto them. "Yes, I fear," answered Sumorr, stricken with momentary smaertness, which is a disease we have here, along with transitory smarm, brief genius, fleeting insanity, etc. "We become the very eye & the flesh of Fesh Grammicon, sitting ancient in his aching chair‑‑you know, the chair of dreams, the chair of pleasure, the chair you hear about in practically every myth & mube‑‑the chair from up one never gets." The others nodded.  Too comfy, they almost thought but by the way they always failed of thought or faltered far short of thought, or else forgought to thought, or else got waylayed in the midst of the blessings of their thoughtless thought.  You know the scary score, my winking friend or is it wincing friend? I cannot for the life of me remembered why we thought we wouldn't die from that.  I just don't have the fucking thought, OK? but foughrgought. "Lounging eternally there, afloat in the thin & distant, yet totally inebriative air we all have heard about, or heard of tell something about. What was I talking about?  Oh yes, the wincing friend, fondling that pipe as pure as the cryslaine air sans all thought of water, much more the tiny gems that keep, in this passage at least, falling from somewhere in God, or in & of God, unless you have the thought of a skinless God, in wish cakes Shame on you!!!  Well anyway, fondling that pipe full of purest Profusion Herb, getting this guy-who's-never-even-seen-the fasce of Pain, so high we can only stand here, weeping water amidst elaborations of Other Water, spin out a gem or two of tear therefor. '...and wishing himself poor, & thinking himself poor, & dividng himself into the woolly dust of us." THE LIBRARY SHIP SUBFACES SHIP LIBRARY THE The library ship was covered with lines, each leading to another in a most majestic way.  Roots or tendrils had entered the doors or portals, & poked or grimaced through like subfaces subfaces (sub)faces (sub)fasces ( u )f c s. That last paragraph was wirrten by an alien.  Have I mentioned how aliens project their thoughts into me?  Nod once for yes, twice for know... Now.bak to our story, which reads another one floated with glowing skulls an anomaly unrecognizable in this tciomnets ipnaucuem or ctoinmtei snpuaucme which is this way the author has of scrambling his words, trying to scramble just a few more words through, dontchyagnö. In one you punched in your name & received a guide to your past lives, but these were not true accounts, they were lying guides.  One was filled with stolen, spherical horizons, stripped & poachéd atmospheres, like catseyes seemingly from every world it seems.  One contained one whole, condenst wrld (& an ugly wrld it was, too!). They entered a cavern‑‑made apparently out of Condenso-Space©, which must be mighty expensive, but not to bad if you didn't pay‑‑full of unfathomably large stalagmites & stalactites, with a few leering, Boschian grimaces as touch put here & there, a decorating thing, a specific, if horrific, vision, a work of alien art, an alienated work of alien art, a rare book full of loud-sounding words & self-referentialities which I cannot hire anyone else to do. A gas station, plugged with liquid oxygen (but what the hell was oxygen?  To them, a very crude gas).  In many a ship there was apparency of crew (see Floralia: A Partial List of Apparency of Crews for more), like angry red cats or faces flaming with eczema chasing you round. Wheu! "Maybe we're apparency of crew, said Apparency of Crew, blurting out out helplessly but trying to look thoughtful as his dying spirits failed. All the trash from the triple city of Goth, whatever that was, prob'ly some big Metropolis amidst planets no one even bothered to name, known collectively as the Floating Planets, where the people all were angry at specifically you, & mad because they didn't have a name.  Anyway, it was nothing but trash inside, which explained the inconceivable cheapness of this ship, with no luxuries, no life-support, no cozy corridors, no time, no speech, & no director, calling for action.  It was a big trash-bag or a spaced-out dumpster:  Floralia was being used as a spot to dump the trash. A ship full bright & gaudy names, there for the asking, & one absolutely stoned with sex, with the essence of sex, the bare-naked hormones gleaned from a thousand fucking worlds, & one full of stop-watches‑‑all watching, all stopped, & more than one loaded with incredible weapons, all harmless now as toys, as a part of The Filter. Whoever This Is wondered to himself who had made Floralia, & what the deal was with the Filter & these tree-sized flowers but also man-sized flowers, cat-sized flowers, perfect, normal-sized flowers, & flowers fine as the wisps of hair on the forearm of a 13-year-old girl, just that small The place had been made by a race who hated space travel.  Invaded some 111 times, Guleon floated angry along the strangespace wacerays of a Particularly Heavy Travel Zone, dense with exhaust & machine-made galactic dust, heavily polluted with the offal of dead warriors, & the Guleons built Floralia, invaded 33 times during the process of its creation alone, & at this point we cannot say more because their novel had come to an end. But it was built (by robots so lonely in the sky they didn't even know themselves, they say).  I can give you a lot of mythology, but all we know is we suspect they may have built it to disinfect a sky o'erloaded with the various categories of Magic Boat (i.e., Skycrafts, Space-Singer, Light-Shuttles, Subtle Wordcrafts, Projectors, Injectors‑‑lotta those‑‑Bubble Boosters, & Lousy Warpers; see Fodge, Boats, pp. 55-122). Sorry about those fake references.  I did not mean to hurt you, though I have.  I did not mean for you to literally bleed from the intenstines at that ripe & ribbony betrayal, where betrayal exists as a potent, big ribbon garbling the wholeness of the sky, slitting up space, hurting us, making you specifically bleed.  I am sorry about that, but it did seem to me that the world that I created needed some documentation‑‑you know, to make it more real. Instead, you have flunked the extrance exam to the Fluxion of Eternity & come up dry, inside the cave of another planet within another expensive basket of Condenso-Space, where we all weep from sorry. "What are we weeping for?" said Asteriskio, the first to come round. They thought for half an hour. "We must have slipped into a ship saturated to the brim with cast-off sorrow.  We became inordinately sorrowful," said Ast, finally, because they still actually a deep blue of sorrow, where sorrow is indicated as the mythic Governess of Tears, the strict goddess of grief, the waylaid matron of unbearable sadness, & so on, & Astix was the only one with words.  He had nothing but words. "..." * thought, & you will notice as in I hereby notify you, weapon in hand, that there was no other point in time in which this could possibly exist, & the thought we're having here could not but occur when it did, after that last thought, even though * exists at the narrative level & this old thought persist in the negative, metathought realm of worry.  They all have to take their place in the liquid thread of Time. Infinite packets of bulldozed trash. Prisons of fear, where people's fears were kept, that they might be in fear forever. Here, vivid jungles of the mind dripping with alien imagery, sometimes manifesting as a zit or a z!p in memory, sometimes as simple liquid, refreshing itself on the vine, sometimes a big ol' droplet pursey with dew, its owen, inwrought dew I might say There, a room with a razor (it was a circular room; it was an inspired razor) which slit the specific Moxie of Condenséd Mind into little tributaries, preparing each parallel universe for quark bombardment microscopy (against which all other microscopy cringed; nay! against which there is no microscopy!) JUDGING FROM THE VERBS Shelves of retroviruses of the which they did partook, these luminous viruses which made them Smarter than The Day Before‑‑i.e., did not make you smarter at all, as judging from the verbs‑‑which you harvested employing fine pincers which in turn picked up tinier pincers, which in turn trained the image down till you were absolutely plucking ripe viruses from the livid tree, under a star which makes you much more able to see, beneath a moon that softened your Sunday-evening fears, under two hundred thousand electrovolts of shocking electricity, because you forgot about static & you forgot about thought, & so you shuffled forth carelessly, thinking a thought, & so now you have to deal with the amps of your own electricity. NOW WAS THERE WAS NOW "Flying" The Inadmissible, though illegal to describe (& there's no doubt who was controlling whom, now was there was now?), was rather like finding yourself into a room of light you did not know you had in your dark & powerless mansion of relegated, expoetic stones (stones that had retired from the Great Stone Hierarchy; stones no longer part of this age of stone poetry of stone of stone of stone), & remembering you had come there, at that time knowing it was there (or at least at that time knowing it was somewhere, which you sure as hell did not know now), to do or get or somehow relieve in some way the mutual agonies (but of whom you did not, at that moment, know), but forgetting now why you came in there, except that you don't care anymore, what with the sublime but tickling periperhanliatic chaos you found yourself not-remembering in so you go round the room pretending to be looking for clues (& getting from these "clues" not so much your purpose, if any, of coming here deliberately, if so (& the clues existing, in the tiny simulation the mind tries to make of all the incoming mindless goo, as bloodclots of some sort of strangely-colored, eerily-rexturéd "blood"),), but in reality getting farther & farther in the excandescent clutter from the door (a poor little black thing, a mere line fine as a the face on a Krazy-Kat-line into Multiple Elaborate Florations of tiny limbos of the eyes...a door gone now, door gone, just a sketchy line eventually stetching itself out) & immersed into the captivating clutter, like a smiley face, lost (even shot!) within the slits of time, & I'll take anything ending with immersions into time. A MICROMUBE OF THOUGHTS The Idiot Rescue Ships finally come & out come the guys in bandages & swath our friends in friendly echoaic bandage-bandage-bandages.  No reason.  Just some dangling preference left over from an absent (hence idiotic) medical program, all medical or related programs having been duly (& need I say legally?) revoked by the Health Act of 99999.  Just one enchanting metaphor after another & our friends had nothing to say. No one talks once they've crashed on Floralia, they thought turgidly‑‑I mean, others thought, & the five were declared Officially & Immorally Dead‑‑a bad consideration here, dead-bad, as they crated & sent them off with their bandaged hands waving bye-byes to the skies. "Bu-but we've got the gems!" they shouted in shouts lost in the afterthought of swathes.  "We found them!  They were on Floralia-ia-ia ia-ia-ia-ia!" Ia-ia-ia-ia... "Your new set, sir," said something one hundred times gentler than the most effiminitely servile boy whispering with his cold red lips into the lispless caverns fo Youneare, "and a handsome one, if I may say." Fesh deicdes to let him say, charme by the box, charmed more & stiller still by the wrappings & the bandages & the nuptial volumes of blood & the self-referential blood that's blood with footnotes, urscoptic blood, blood bleeding on blood leaving trails so full of history they darken arke into nt past as...and then at last, at the very center of All This Blood...the gems‑‑a Micromube™ of Thoughts™, all thought by himself in his five dimensions of pure pure dearth. "Too bad you have no money, sir," said the serf.  You have those gems & with no eye to look at them." Whereupon the servant‑‑whose name by the way was Vyvivaez (a foreign-enough name, enh? but don't ask me where that sputter of spittle uver cum fum fum)‑‑pluckth out hith eyeth. "Hey!" THE GLORY GOE OF SHIME The mythical Auggua Gems, made they out of the rock of the inescapable crash-world of Floralia currently on view in the Yng-FIP! Xexor or the Im-PIF! trektor, or more basely mongst the "thoughtless meniscus meniscus of a Muddle Crass" mumbling in the jumble of their theoretical "cups" comprising the nightmare known as The Unfitte Sector, within which glough this amu-or-whatever-let so very full of mystery, so primitive & pure, consisting of the dew of the gems which (if they existed existed in anything outside smotherations of a self-referential dream) of course dripped in a triggle or dipped in a tiggle of light though some yawned twas not so much light as a sort of Merry Triviality but even in the cups of their yawning cups they'd have to (were they still conscious say were they that this sort of innocence‑‑or anything huffing up the pretense of such simplicity...well, it would be quite priceless at that, pricklingly measureless & effortlessly soft & pale in its creamy easiness at that & that & that...but for their voices not to mention minds lost in those cups that cups that cups that hollowow outut thoughtought & truly regally fully-full of canyons yawningly full of canyons dreaming of canyons within the realm of canyon canyons of poverty... Oops!  I was talking about Floralia, the flower planet or collision orb into which every passing ship do crash, & with nary a survivor spotted yet, not that the ambulamps could get too close with their glory Goe of Shime or the hard-rock planetoid, small as it was, & then through some Malarkaly Trickeray did it formulate or create by the power of its crushing or crush from nothing into existences or polished with its everflowing tingly spurts of dew & then somehow someone or some selfless junction of endlessly interconnected effects (which seems unlikely as anything, does it not?  Well, it always has to me) was formed into this gasping set of wordgems compliments of the diadem of eyes which are the diamond eyes that form all things straight & crooked, possible or not, like these gems unfurled from swathes of strangely bandage-like plush, here known as the Auggua Amulet or the Augua Gems or, simply, the Aug. Yoops!  There I go, talking about the gems, talking about the Augua when I meant today's lecture to have something reserve about the planets, with specific reference to what can be legally known about the Unfit Sector e.g., its history‑‑including & perhaps extrapolating a bit on the dawn of the concept of its inherent necessity, which devolved upon the perception of "unfit" worlds astronomy‑‑though the coordinates are classified, some of the images winging off the unseen unknown uncoordinates can be capitalized as beautiful wings of light, which in turn may reflect (in an inverted manner, of course) the very coordinates we were looking for (before the whole class sinks into dream, & I am standing on a broken piller alive with moss...) I wake to find myself lecturing with a mossy crrok't old twig about the Unfit Sector to a class of bodies clearly unfit to live for a thousand centuries, at which point my stick, my lecture, & I disintegrate into skulls or fragments fluent with moss, which is how they shut down any quirk of moss that begins to get to close to the Unfit Sector, the Sector of Mirrors, The Blindspot Sector or the Sector of the Blind, or the Lost Sector as I think I've said or even The Sector of the Deja Vu... JUST TO INJECT SOME MORE STUFF HERE 'BOUT THE POOR His mansion floats high in a capitalized & capitolled sky, known for its beauty as as the enhancéd sky though you can imagine just how little the poor look upwards, just to inject some more stuff here 'bout The Poor, who as you now know are afraid to look upstairs (which drives the rich batty, 'cause they want so much more an almost anything else to be seen).  More Fantasy Recreationel Vehicles than homes, these various castles run like a smirk of dolphins arriving to view like cloud condensations, like the eerie, global mirrors that float around, like amazements of the mackeral-crowded skies of the rich sometimes colliding with the funny punch of bumper cars & everyone remains in any case Moste Oblivious‑‑except for the poor down below, who get these lovely showers of sparks, & blackened, not-so-lovely ashes where their food had been. On occasion, an emissary of some emissary of the rich would come down & recompense them for their food by bringing them one gigantic basket of fruit, full of fruits you would not beleve, grown in the labratories lost in the above-mentioned Castles of the Fothermuckin Sky. Then sometimes the occasional "passing palace" as they were wont to say, would suck the lights right out of Same (Same City; they have only one, lst some sort of vagrant riches do get stored in there, so it is always Same City we are talking about) with a wavering tube of shadow coming down in a column on their backs. Some of their spinal fluid was tapped, assuming they had spines or some analogue to spines that will work in this universe‑‑something like a fountain of light or a tide coming in with the light of sanity, something like that. Aforesaid fluid tapped because there was money there, & any sort of baubles or brightnesses one might find toblinking there.  The prosperous had scientific advisors‑‑gnats thrown in to ecstasy when those nets came up, sorting out the substances & kinds, arranging in appriate I mean appropriate order (& there were Strict Legal Rules on This Shit, which could cost you to countermand by your lawyer, The Counterman) & further reconverting into principles of cash, at which pont ah point the images of the Expropriated Stuff‑‑stuffed with scientific data, in the form of pudgy but really lovely pearls constricted into dreamy amulets (or was it amethists popped open by inertial nutcrackes as you sat in your daddy's la staring & doubting this life as you have lived so far is really true?) You see the point.  You could don yes you could don these pairs of glasses covered with variegated lenses, lights, filters, & a huge but crystalline brain (no bigger than a *'s sneeze) the digital gems strutting their graphs in unchartable complexity & tabulations charged like God with little riddles & perplexicities, countless fluent numerals (sniffing & sneezing with these tiny codes!) adding up to various Absolute Numeric Impossibilities. the gems ticketed by one of approximately 900 species of roving cops, each answering, not to the court or even any of the other cops, whom they regard with Bent Intensities of Condescent lying like dew on the inside of a flower, or on the glass of their gorgeous helico-Peters, radiating their intentions as they call up your records (records you don't even have, contaninig mostly, not what you ever said nor did, but with the things you might do, which as we see here in this scene seen right here, you can be ticketed for) ...always takes a long time for a cop to finish, writing up your ticket in his fluent hand, employing the invisible gold ink of the cops, the Ink of the God damned Cops, writing up a storm, writing up a consarned Wafer Plane in which tickets are written one under another, & it seems this cop we've gotten saddled with here, it seems this blesséd cop has to rewrite all the tickets ever written, all down the layers of that Palimpsestic Pad, so it takes a wee while, & by then we have a good chance of being ticketed or jailed by a density of cops drawn to the scene and‑‑each with its own set of laws in its recombinant head‑‑falling deep into a jelly of ticketing, arraignments, sentences, hard time, soft time, judicial warnings, trials which were really the reenactment of the trial that shot so instantaneously through the many-cop heads. But the beautiful pearls, if I may now return to the shining pearls, as I feel myself drawn into the gravity of the gleaming pearls, each of which smiles at me most persnally, except that my mind is crashing into the comely pearls before I can even have time to think of rubbing my chin in sheer amazement at the gravity... Anyway, all this shit seen in hilarious, bent deformity‑‑bizarre faces of data seen as on the hoode of one of those waxen cars they service for themselves & have thrown away by the little trash-masters who‑‑except for their monster trucks‑‑look much like the consultant scientists beamed over to the images of accountants, who do not "wiss" to be spoken in the volume about, & I will respect their wissies, knowing as I do any One could audit me to Death, audit me to one sizzling smithereen and/or multiple parcels on the grounds of all uncountable flesh) VARIOUS BRAINS Smithy yawned a yawn so dark & shallow that the shadow of that yawn fell across the hull of the unnamed, uncolored, & utterly un-built ship, & half across the Powerful Little Pad© he had & was yawning as he changed the exterior.  He had the ship all covered with rainbow-ridges as of some supernal dinosaur, then sighed & punched some more random buttons, & had a hull in blue silk, then silken velvet, then velvet starriness (as if invisible, but that would be too illegal here) then a sort of starry confusion in the form of Fesh's genetically-handsomed, love-enhancéd face, but covered with pockmarks, see.  Smithy loved to fuck with Fesh's image of which Fesh did watch in glee. Yes, Fesh was in Glee‑‑& that capital glee helps you understand just what kind of Power Pack© of morphemes that word in this * context held‑‑yea, cute little morphemes hugging & fucking each other & themselves & falling by the gravity of language deeply into one of themselves. & in this great bower of glee beset with flowers gay did Fesh come visit the ship, its name he sensed as he stroked his eloquent cat (where cat is understood as a condensation of the Dew of wily Felinity, wherein dew be understood as an acid sugar-cube of benefits that sends you straight even with each even-curving stroke, into Infinity, where infinity lies like a transiently docile cat) as a crystal pool lying silent & untouched in eternity, in the part of eternity we call the future, though we have no evidence in hand & in gleeful hand that anysuch entity subsists, much less comes along every instant just to smack you on the head. Smithy looked smacked across the head when he saw Fesh there.  He sneezed, as he generally did in the presence of such sarble, & he gulped, which was, Fesh's computer's computers whispered to the whisperers who whispurred unto him, generally a sign he was failing to do his job (& Fesh had teams of lawyers working out just which kind of punishment he could sans carceration deal to Smithy out. Sorry 'bout that syntax there, but this is a sign of the approach.  In a sort of quizzical rush, Smithy punched the ship into a giant toad, teeming with zots, then a Magic Sabre keen-shape & blinding silver-gold, & then did he cast about for other forms & embellishments, coming up with some sort of surreal Hindu diamond replete with the images of god that no one in this story ever heard of, but they were downloaded with frightful potency by the pad. "Doing the hull, I see," said Fesh, his words filtered & filtered further down to the disgusting level‑‑known but not oft spoken of as the Level of Snot, which is as high as the artisans got‑‑wherein Smithy could nod stupidly, meanwhile turning the ship into a teeming lump of mud, a dune of sheer hot sand (loving the sun & loving to fry you under the sum of the sun, where sun is an illegal, mathematical entity beaming at you like the next dictation of shape, which was) nothing but the skull of a dead animal with maggots crawling out of its candle-eyes (& this made Fesh raise his eyebrows, see, which is a hell of an expensive proposition, or I should say composition, or rather contemplation, or maybe just incept of imagination, see), a grinning dolphin of silver, & a haggard crag. "Ah! Putting on the finishing touches," said Fesh, but this also just made the artist move the ships through moods, over a thousand lumpy modes of caution & teeming little rills of expostulation‑‑faces, textures, dragons, great spherical rainbows blowing you away when they prush your face, handfuls of glitter against the dark of the danceroom floor, flesh as seen in close-up (at which Fesh both raised his eyebrows & shook his head, a fortune in plenitude vainly‑‑which I hope is clear is the Proper Way‑‑spent). Fesh was advised by one of his superscript metacommentators that his employee was not fit to speak, & that he would in no wise talk (while his statistical advisor, in another lobe of his brain, entered the equation & resultant result: 0.0035% chance that Smithy could speak), so he patted Smithy on the shoulder & said (with Father-Mode infiltrations filtered from the effortless vision of a voice): "Good work, son," at which poor Smithy just absolutely creamed his jeans & died. With his puny heart in halt, Smithy mocked no further variations, but shifted his skeleton (a man of science with direct access to Fesh's closest telepathic asociate's eyes noted the slouch of the skeleton.  Relieved, Fesh's thought had the subthought thought.  Some sort of relief at something.  Ah well, & he returned, not to his cat, but some particular pleasures involving minuscule forests of mini-banzai trees & glades trickling as with the manna of heaven & fair maidens in saris worshipping gods he couldn't even start to have conceived by his various brains for him, but they allured him anyway, his heart breaking again & again, & multiply-deployed teams within teams within a grapen cluster of surgeons worked constantly at him, for Fesh loved above all else to have his heart broken by a babe who thought him less than an insect thinks whatever an insect looks down on in the same manner we look down on insects, as it were.  Or most of us, anyway.  & speaking of anyway, Smithy collapsed on the floor by the ship, for in truth there was absolutely nothing inside.  He was simply fucking with the hull, for he knew not what to do.  I mean, the Renowned Artist had a nasty plan for making his employer poor, a plan positively erotic in its heartbreaking brilliancy, but he wist not how to make a spaceship, not by any manner of his means. Meaning he had to suborn some top physicists (who were not so easy to suborn, being as they were rule-bound, riddled with strictest formulae, & also only a magnitude or two less wealthy than Fesh than Fesh than Fesh) to break their own rules & power that ship. & they laughed in their Perfect Disguises from Disguises Are Us & named the ship The Inadmissible, savoring their secret closeness to litigation & the sheer rapture of breaking, not simply one law, but all the laws of physics over their bone-broken knees, instantly repaired by their own little sphere of medical teams, doctors very small, very very small in this sector, sometimes mirthfully refered to by those few other secters aware of this sector, or aware of the persistence of sectors at all, for that antimatter as The Sector of the Doctor-Dolls, but this was not proper.  There are huge doctors here, if you know where to look. Thus came about the infamous Inadmissible, whose hulll Smithy now gratefully made an absolute, eye-absorbing black so that‑‑if you were fool enough to look at it‑‑you could know nothing else but black, which was pretty cool. A LIGHTSPEED SHUFFLE OF REALIZATIONS "Well, you've probably noticed those thin little rays beaming out like weightless curtains from the flowers now & then.  All right, maybe you haven't.  I'll give you that.  I'm giving that one over to you.  Maybe you can't perceive the fuckin bandwidth, though I assure you it is a very common bandwidth.  But you're looking quite stupid, if I may say. "But let me hastily assure you at this point that I am in no wise nor manner of means a flower.  I am disguising myself as a flower in order to forestall any belligerance on the part of these other big fellows.  O, I have learned their ways & converse & smile & in general truck with them easy as a Swiphean breeze. "I am in fact none other than Woog.  You've undoubtedly heard of me‑‑ah, but now you're looking dumber than ever, all five of you whom I hold like some awful bouquet in my spine-powerful, war-florally arm.  Stem.  Stem, I mean‑‑stem, not arm.  Maybe you perceive no bandwidths at all.  That had occurred to me: everything occurs to me, but there's quite a lightspeed shuffle of realizations always breaking on the spindles of my consciousness. "Buh bubu bu bu But I had hoped for better from you, as you seem to be still alive, or at least as alive as when you landed ha ha 'landed' here, & that delayed the realization of that realization. "Now what was I talking about?  Not that I forget, but that I have in actuality over two billion conversations going on with you with all at once with with, you see.  I am Woog Dounmeeg, nine-times winner & now permanent holder of the cup of the Sygnacian Mentality Combat, first-level non-life section.  I am Woog‑‑the smartest machine in the world, & when I say universe I mean when I say world I mean universe, OK?  I'm shaking you a little bit as you clutch the unseen tendrils just as hairy as stiff about your throats, just to get my points across. "The point being, you see, that those rays coming off the flowers like pure & perfect curtains of eeyore slice individual selves into minor, pygmy versions of themselves, then slice the smaller selfes into diminished-seventh, really wee fagments or frigments of themselves, & so on, in a flutter of nonexistent breezes, till those selves are nonexistent, too." That's why there were no survivors from the other ship. "Don't think I don't hear that.  But you're right, & your continued survival makes‑‑of innumerable possible expliquations clear‑‑clear that you are not selves.  Now I'm letting you go, now that we're all certain of that." POEMS OF DESPAIR When Balb had a face at all it was a handsome‑‑though rather bothered, black-cragged‑‑face, he fancied, & this is the juncture where I come screaming in. You see, I heard from some of our more malkative flowers rumors‑‑flimsy, ill-timed & endlessly embroidered rumors from the moppy flowers, rumors from the likes of the "moppy" flowers, rumors from the flowers about this face of his, Balb's (funny name) or his apparency of face, as with waterdrops spread across the crystal features & I traveled far & wide, though I'm not exactly sure what the wide was for, but then I know nothing of what is for, or fore, or what came before‑‑through nasty stems of flowers, bald flowers blocking off all manner of the triple suns, & with those great, bunched roots (really the brains, the brains of the intelligent flowers, so you might say I was climbing & crawling & yes occasionally hacking my way through these big, bunched brains) & of course the endless poems, the helpless crumpt old poems, the langorous Poems of Despair which is all the flowers wrote, though I personally think it pretty good that they even wrote, but instead of humorous limericks with their bouncy lines lines licking the fine line over decency or strange fantasy adventures packed with images‑‑such as giant flowers that did nothing but make trouble, make trouble & write these poems of despair, & then somehow crumpling them‑‑bulbing out the contents of their most hidden minds, they just wrote these thirteen-line poems of despair, & then somehow they the poems got all crumpled, like when you hate what you wrote & crumple the thing without looking, just crumped the life out of that poem just out of decency. & when I came upon these creatures, the loose coils fancying themselves some muckled sort of brothers, I saw no faces but instead the Failure of Face, the failure to create a self & fend off the waves of decency constantly & of course ultiomately clawing off the strange faces you create as yourself.  No wonder they survived in these forests!  The jumbo flowers might just flip out their waves as they might waves their might they their waves flip out, as I tried to say‑‑there was nothing to hit, nothing to split, not even the fancied faces of control they kept thinking & handing the thought round one to another & one, nothing to whit. A screaming face reckoned Bictor, Balb's inverted twin.  & when Balb had no face he was said to be screamingly handsome, or screamt to be unswayingly andsome, but stupid old Bictor had to have a face to save his soul, & so his cells if that's what they were were always aligned in symmetry to the perpendicular, in marked distraction to the faces of Sumorr, which were in their infinite plentitude nothing more than the faces of despair, which are the faces words put on, which is the way they wail when they put on the white faces of their white, astonied audience, which is when he puts on your face in reverse, & half-thinks this monstrosity a handsome face, & half-thinks & rightly he half-thinks himself mad. What a bunch of putzes, murmers Gip, who if he bothers in the morning of his botherations to put on on, always has the face of a singular shark closing in on his controls. BETRAYED BY THE BETRAYAL WAVES or EV SIV  M NEU ERS Yea, the flowers sent off waves in order to fend themselves off from the selves that were coming‑‑some from nowhere, some from everywhere at all.  There were always selves coming, some by sunwing, most by ships, & the flowers of Floralia just up & sent out these waves, which generally split the Master Machine Computaters on board the ships & sent them crashing down.  The flowers then would dissolve everything. I grew up here.  "Born just right," as the dead ads not to be mistaken for Dead Dads missaid (I was born on Floralia, as we shall see...) in a mubetube (Incubation Model 3, High-Humidity Type 2), in Laboratory 26a of the Labyrinth Labs o' Birth, Unit 3, in a rather remote, distinctly aloof sort of orbit around the planet Dire 4, then got together with some friends & crashed onto Floralia, where they were immediately as we say betrayed by the betrayal rays, & where I popped out of the tube, resolved to evolve to revolve to revowal, & I proudly if not a bit vainly evolved myself‑‑none of this survival-of-the-fittest, let's-just-wait-for-the-genepool-to-change shit; not a bit of that, because I didn't have the time. So I guess I am some type of hybrid half-flower.  I have my limbs, my godly shape, & my skin as tough & as white as a burnished rhino horn, but I can see those rays of betrayal coming, & I just dodge them, just like that. I might be sitting at the trunk of some audacious redwood of a goddam flower, my knees up, & down comes this betrayalray, & I just nick my head to one side, evadi g it, & so it goes on. This why I sometimes appear to be dancing to some inadible, outlandishly slow music of some kind.  Like I'll jerstop & hunker down, then resume walking, then sway broadly to the side, almost folding I say almost folding myself into fucking halves, then resume walking, then lift one foot & its Correspondont Arm or Arms (it dends on the seasons of my doubts) then walk, then crouch, then walk, bob my head, walk, leap high, walk‑‑& so on.  I tell you I am just evading the rays.  I am dancing to the invisible network of Profuse Betrayal Rays, Betrayal Rays from the Flowers, but they can't get me, not now that I am dance. O there's a split or two‑‑a furrow if you will here & if you will there‑‑in my self. I've been hit a few times.  You can see patchwork scars on the shoulders & one elbow, also three damaged feet, in the body of my mind.  But it's a flower self, I have a half of a flower-self intead of your usual brand, so I'm a much harder chap for those beautiful sonofabitches to split by far, & so I am here with you‑‑I join you inin the sure & gradual deconstruction of econstrtn f cst f your self or multiple selves living like leeches off the energy field of one singular goodamned brain.  I am here with you, dancig & twitching all the time, & here whether you desire me or not, & I think not. That's all I ever think, by the way‑‑not, not‑‑& it helps me through the endless whirligig of suns & monstrous moons (not to mention the functionless blooms of cloud) that passeth for a day, a day here on Floralia, where I try to teach you to dodge & you cannot do it.  I've watched a thousand visitors die by now‑‑twitched & danced & tried to jerk them out of the way, butto no ultimate pail, or as they say, avail. MASQUE EMPORIA "What a ship!" I said after I said after I tried to touch its surface, so black as to be a sort of anti-light, & finding the surface eddied away to my touch, then only to bubble up, as if reaching for my hand. "Was this made on Solaris?" I said. "Or under Solaris?  Naw‑‑it's a fucking trick-ship," said a sad-looking Bictor, pulling on the very best sad rubber face I'd ever seen‑‑I mean it was the blue of Superman's cape, the slide of a vessel of oil, & huge, so it covered Bic's small body as he crouched there helpless with the pollinated pollinated despair despair of the flowers.  I doubled that.  I double everything.  Everything.  But that face had the huge but aberrated nose (without which there would be no sadness) you just wanted to pull on, were it not so oversized & the eyes drooping reflective like twim Siamese I mean like reflective Siamese twims I meant Siamese twims reflective like, & the pure & simple marks of his tears‑‑not overdone, as is so frequently the case in the thousands of mask shows & mask shops & Masque Emporia & houses filled with opulent semblances of the rubber masks of the gods‑‑to verboten even to suppose, much less gossip about, & the several coffee-table books I like to fum-fru with their pitures masks, on & off, stretched an inverted, with miscroscopic close ups together with fine-strung global maps of the mask r masks as a whole or wholes. "...cooked up by Fesh." You can bet I marveled.  I marveled & stepped in micomotion froworad andwith my poor mouth Wholly Opened at the Time, & I marveled (so they say) till the ground underfoot turned to gold & an Irish rainbow flumed the sky & and ubiquitous series of floods did sneeze the air wherein lispy lesbians did waft in gossamer.  I rather liked the effects of all my retrical marveling.  I could explain that, but Bictor endeavor to speak again, this time through the foamy dampering of his sadassed mask. "It's all ricks & exploding bubbles," he muffered, & he clapped his palms together, clapped them into powder, actually, actually destroying his palms now known as The Palms of the Thunderous Clap, which also melts the mask, so it becomes first the saddest mask in the world, then a goblin, then the hideous demon you know you will see in the mirror someday, someday when all is gone. BORED WITH HIS MOUTH WRAPED RIGHT RO UND A SILVER SPOON Fesh Deshor is the richest hero you could never meat.  If Fesh had been born, he would have been bored with his mouth wrapped right round a silver spoon.  This is how it works:  due to the unusual interaction in this universe among several laws of physics related to mass & speed & time, wealth develops intensity & becomes deeply metaphorical.  This makes the richest people the most profound, & Fesh was richer than anybody else around, & he was Deeply Redundantly proud, I mean Profound. This all comes about from an equation much too abstruse & expensive to ever print, nor even a hint.  Anyway, in this universe one is automatically wealthy or automatically poor, & becoming rich leads to dense & heavier riches (hinkling of that formula here‑‑we can leave inklings), while for the poor yhe eye of hope has closed, as it has closed on you, despite your dreams & your expectations, despite all the pain inside. So this Fesh fellow was rich & dense beyond belief‑‑a real meta-mensh with swirls of implication crawling all over him, & full of meanings & riveting, sometimes riveted, thought only they aren't thoughts here, they're more like afterthoughts, or the thoughts you have after you die, you die & see your body, ugly & thrown away, only dense & with colors & still more rich, inner significasnce cance & he could juggle like 39 thoughts at the same time, while still smiling at you through the usual unthinkable filters, & still charm the pants off you, & exploit & make money from you, so you'd say good morning to him because you had to, because he owned your soul, & you had to keep working, & come out of it naked & poor.  The naked part hurts me the most, though I never knew Fesh except in exceptional visions God (my God) has given to me. The central computer, microscopic in size & a daze of a dazzling cube when microscopicized or a dashing square in phase-contrast mode, had decided they neded more poor, & the *s were his solution‑‑some sort of chemical mostrosity, existing in ugly, undulating waves, could be made to produce these incredibly cheap sub-beings who came out in *s [bunch of kittens) & fancied themselves, for example, five brothers, when what they really were was creations of the Newer Poor, the poorest in the endless, regeneration generations of what you might call deeper Poors. LANGUAGE 144 When Smithy came in, Fesh was apparently gorging a fair number of his Countless Enhanced Lusts upon a number of stunning babes right out of paintings, all of them synthetic as it were‑‑I mean, they were not really synthetic, but were entities stunned by their own meaning, & thus made synthetic as a simile. But Fesh's lust was very sensitive & sweet, quite sophisticated & erudite, of course, so you couldn't be sure.  The eerie space of his den seemed a painting of fluid nudes "stretched & blossom'd all over the place," as Finlay writes in what he called the Sacred Memoirs, which I think of as Memoirs of a Rich Man, given poetic genius from his generation into existence, given way too much poetic power, enough power to take overa the wotrld, were he not so involved in his genius-world, which existed around him in a poetic blur of words no one could wooreds no one could even see, much less rapidly vapidly read.  I think you see the situatio, & yiou know (without knowing) where it leads. It leads to this scene, which leads in with Fesh quickly dissolving all the babes, & Smithy feels broken-hearted now, & within this sudden dream of sanguine pain doth he see a teardrop in his host's ghostly-bright eyes, caught in a sulllen dream of a dream. "Welcome, Professor Smithy.  I'm very glad you came," Fesh said, in the latest, most costly enhanced, post-doctoral hyper-inter-lingual parlance, speaking, to speak planly, in Language 144, which hit poor Smithy as so much menaingful wind, just so much meaningless wind & a haze of Thoughts Not Caught, & a deep, overwhelming sense of personal loss which knocked the wind out of him, having never head Lingo 144 before, but he understood well enough. "Thank you for uh inviting me," Smithy replied uncertainly, in his own idiolect of broken English 1‑‑the language that was never much enhanced & which must have sounded like a bunch of rude farts to Fesh, as he nodded & smiled, but he understood it well enough, "But let's face it‑‑I had no choice." "No one has a choice, Mr. Smithy.  Please take a seat in my AirChair© 3," which Smithy procceded in the sweep of the seeming scene to do. No one in the story knew this, but the infamous AirChair 3 Smithy was putting himself in was a pleasure prototype, a chair which delivered with such flair all the pleasures that the flesh could bear, a chair that broke your will & called your lawyer, a chair no one could get up from, without risking severe psychological damage, but in later years the AirChair spokesplub said bluntly that they'd made it anyway‑‑because, & I quote, "Who cares, right?"  This insanity business might explain Smithy's ultimate deployment of infinite trickery to his job. Smithy. Hm.  That name up there was there when I got here‑‑just sort of planted here, like some medicianl plant, so I left it there.  Pay no attentin to the name that appeared there.  God knows but never tells I didn't put it there *'s butt whistles a tune.  "Sorry," he says with such a perspicuous ingenuousness that everyon is stunned, not by his fart, but by his sweet simplicity‑‑ certain shade of Sweet Simplicity a bit harder on the yellow beams of light, great yellow beams of light streaming from a mirror, carrying us away. VISITATIONS FROM TIME'S EDGE I hop up in the still-drizzled dew, deww-on-your-face morning & go & say my great Payer of Despair, to the one, sad face of God I can get a prayer safely off to, what with the giant flowers trying to hide themselves from God.  No, this the way this fucking bower or Bower of Fucking is always or always is.  That is, I keep it in extreme comfort & delicate overlays.  Not unlike one of your animated gardens, no?  You like‑‑you find it nice?  So typical of Floralia that it would be in actuality this den of idiot silence I can't evoke...that is, a spirit that does not come to you in your berserkish Den of Death.  This place won't be happy till everyone dies.  You heard how it came to be?  You heard about the Guleons?  Me, too. If I survive the timebranch that I'm in, I mean...if I'm in one of the ones in which I live, I eat some fruit (they hate that!), then go into the safest possible (I can control these things) timebranch in which I just sit perfectly still‑‑which I do, because you don't have to dodge for a while‑‑or else into the timebranch in which I shmooze around in the countless ships that have crashed here.  Millennia, & the technology's still good!  Even this fancy new item, which I haven't been able to open, with what look like Visitations from Time's Edge, the way they el-lude your si-ight! It may that this ship was ahead of me.  It was possible‑‑I'm getting a gentle implication here, with my fingers on the black enbuff of the buffered hull‑‑nothing straightforward, & might all be a joke, but I'm getting ticklish little inklings that this ship crashed here on purpose.  Yes, I thought, finally deciding & stepping back with a notably urgent sort of respect, Yea, this baby's a murder ship. FIRETWIGS The trouble was, talking to Fesh, nodding & talking to Fesh under the Roofless Cerulean of his den, was that the den‑‑unless it was your head, one could not tell which‑‑kept disappearing in the fuggy volutes of the hookah rising like a pilot on his ice in the center of the room or head in whatever flip it was in whatever flip it was in whatever flip whatever it was in, you understand, all the while your lips are puffed before you, also lost in the smoke & the hail...it looks like hail...carrying on this conversation. In that opulent atmosphere, the organs that feed cerebration get distended from themselves, get just plain lost amongst the fibres & the molecules, the synapses snapping like indandescent firetwigs causing a wince to appear off in some lost garden of an Eye‑‑at least, they do to a man too poor to live much longer, there or anywhere so fine... So as you listen to the transcript of this conversation, I want you to remember that I was not THERE.  If you just remember that, everything will be OK between us, OK?  Otherwise there'll be trouble aplenty & aplenty of guts for you to run on through. "What I'm telling you is this," said Fesh of the Fiery Hair.  He paused a moment to stroke gently out the rabid flames, stroken & smoothéd & in general soothing every little (supplied with a complete estate & sentient governance of its own, by the way, just to give you some halfassed idea of how rich this guy was; but it created some fairly severe Hair Manageability Problems.  "I want to be poor.") hair. I could only lean back farther & get more lost in the Chair That Wasn't There© & say, "You know there are hundreds of poverty simulation devices out there..." At which he leapt like a cat on fire onto another fiery cat & shook me not by the lapels but by the lateral tendons of my neck, which he ripped right out & proceeded to shake with a bit of his might (but not very much, or else I wouldn't be there...I mean here, or wherever I am) & screeched because it's the only way you can say this: "I want to beeeeee poor, idiot!" I plucked back my tendons & slipped back into their freshly-rendered coat of deep red skin. "No need to get violent," I said, then hastily added, "But I understand. SELF-IMMOLATION TO ONE OF OUR WORLD'S CENTRAL COSMIC GODS "There it is," Smithy said Smithy said.  "All you gotta do I step into 'er." "And I'll be poor?" sniveled Fesh, who had gotten extremely old, or his actual or actualized oldness had been brought out in the brought in the acrid atmosphere‑‑completely poisonous, deadly to any self-respecting living thing.  I was probably not doing so well myself.  I know I'd sure hate to see myself... "Yes," I said, patting his little back with its tartared morsel of tattermedalion cloth over the risch hump apong hiv .bak.  "You'll be dirt-poor, my friend‑‑dirt-poor.  But you have to get in." See, I knew he'd try anything, & here was my ringside seat to his self-immolation to one of our world's central cosmic gods.  Pretty cool, huh? THE VACUUM WAIL I figured I'd built a drastically final maze (when I was going to say a "pretty good" maze) or infinitely parenthetical maze‑‑you know, the kind I love wo weave within the pages till they weave right out of your mind, & seem long-forgotten, maze for the labyrinthine old coot.  Just think: I would have centuries as prlongéd as I might like, snouting through his riches, while we may imagine the remainder of Fesh walking constitutionally through this demonically blue sort of lunar landscape‑‑a hideous, warped landscape that sickens even I, the creator‑‑nay, I, even more than any of you! that wailed with a vacuum sort of wail with a vacuum sort of wail with a vacuum wail‑‑covered with one crater after another filled with caves & the craters within the craters filling up again, as if longing for the lost feeling of being so perfedtly, utterly majestically lost, my goal being that Fesh would fall in love with my heartless garden, fall in love & never want to come out, always the ragged man bleeding at the arches he was walking with his arms raised to them through.  Sorry about the syntax there, but you had to be there, which I was‑‑possibly a possible weak link in my plan. And so Fesh in his nifty suit jumps out of The Inadmissible like some nine-year-old lost in the panic of his own freaky fantasis & onto Flor. "Fantastic!" he cried, probably out of that coiled reflex he couldn't help but have that made him feel everyone was listening to him, thanks to the drugs that the huge guards that were routing us out, administered with a hypo big as a rack, so that we had to listyen to everything he said. "Poor & naked," he said a bit hyperbolically (I mean, he had a space ship, OK?), "and lost in a world of flowers." Within seconds he had ceased to exist, torn to bits by the rays of the giant flowers, which I'll get to in a bit, transposied, as the wags do like to say, into an amulet of transcendently perfect gems. "Booty!" cried *, stoping stupidly in his stupefaction to to to pick the amulet up, leting it snake from his fingers hundreds of times, each slip different, more & more mud on him as the reel went round & round, till he was a bemish boy holding up his beads to mum & saying, "Check it out!" "I can't do it," Smithy finally said, nodding his headslowly at each syllable, unaware he was very close to dying. Fesh proffered a cigar, where proffered means smashing it into your face & said. "Have a cigar you jot-eyed sonofabitch," wherepong he lit my face & I passed through the ancient, friendly gates opening their various, mysterious, wrought-iron (I have always thought it verymysterious‑‑I mean, wrought, for Chrissake!) dimensions of forsakenness, where d. of f. means hole, & hole here is understood to mean hole, OK? "You think any of this is easy?" fumed Fesh.  "Do you know how many people have to die‑‑yes, die‑‑to keep this wealth becoming closer & closer do the infinte?  Do you?  Do you?"  His face was pressed against mine so hard I mind so hard it winds so hard that the moulding of our features (his because it was made of the purest & most technologically advanced Molduspar©, its software beig updated (or "upgoosed" as we are fond to put it; mine because I was so porous; porpousness & poorness walk hand in hand like two giggling gay loves through their own iron gates into mystery) turned use into a third sort of face, consisting of baffling curves into their own near-oposites, etc., & when we popped back with a back-popping snap, we were monsters, but monsters who were mirror images of each other. "Here, you imbecile, look." & in this way he showed me the forges, where the men worked‑‑not for pay, but to get out of debt, only their work was somehow wrong, wrong in some undefined but consummately contractual way, so they were earning negative money, whch would put them farther & farther underground, & into a sort of miraculous wealth of debt, rather like the guys‑‑Sumorr, Vekk, Gip, Balb, & Bictor, standiong there dripping with mudflowers in the riches of their own, unforgivable, ultra-indebtedness.  He showed me the sweatshops‑‑whole continents of them!‑‑with the faceless fourteen-year-old girls at great machines blistering with heat so that the sweat roled down these sluices‑‑special sluices for the wet people, so they wouldn't drown & slow down production, don'tya see‑‑naked little unripe fruists, bent all but double at the controls, while large men in oddly-tailored suits & with colossal fat cigars fucked them from behind, which I suppose they hated but did not understand, so they kept on working, & sweating all the more. The minute a girl started enjoying, in a way, these constantly enforcéd fucks, she was thrown out on her ear (pursued by the man with the bent cigar), all the other girls wishing their bodies understood just what had happened to her, with the moaning coming up under the great silvery sluice-river of despair, I mean sweat they sweated in in a manner most sweaty, & done sweatily, I might add. SOMETIMES MADE AT TABLE SOMETIMES MADE IN BED God knows his face was in focus when he spoke.  Maybe it was the cigar‑‑undoubtedly some sort of layered plexus of ponderous, gravitational meta-meanings, cured & rolled to his Master's delection, then zapped with some kind of ray they either have or I think that they have, & its Memoraticke Ghoste blown into view & further notched cured & riddled meanings wide & comprehensive as stares, then double-zapped the dang thang & reworked its ghostly ghost, until they had confirmed this most spiritual (& spherical) of cigars, much bigger than any of the heads I've so often blowing up as heads do blow up a lot in this come to think of it sector.  Hell, mine's blown up at least seventy times.  No particular reason, no definitive pattern. Sometimes you sneeze & your head goes with it.  Sometimes your mind is filled with lust at the passing repetiious ciphers of deliquescent beauty, dopplering in tracers down the escalating stairs, & your head (along with the heads of many more middle-aged men like me as well as for!) just goes va-vloom. That's some sound, huh? Sometimes made at table, sometimes made in bed.  Always during orgasms, making sex around here a particularly dicey affair.  & sometimes it just blows, for no reason at all, in a forest or a public place, in a ship slinging its big ass round a star, alone on some sort of yellow-green plain, the plain of nothingness where nothing (other than thought) can grow, & your thoughts really do grow like blue blazes on those planes, your thoughts turning into the most blustrously coiléd "trees," & your other thoughts vining along its articulate roots or up its wrested trunk, on into the branches thorned like torture to infinity, & your head blows up & you have to grope your way beyond that plain, wrestling there with your own thought-forms, who have as I beleve I have aptly described take the form of tough plants & such, tough plants & othersuch, & one gets all too often throttled by one's own thoughts, & no body remembers just how anybody's head came back, but they generally, & I say generally, don't I? come back. Here coes one now.  Here comes my head right now‑‑coming back.  Did anyone see this?  How did it happen?  Why hae I recurred? Anyway, this stogey-poughing Fesh just made the ugliest faces I would ever care to see:  he turned his face inside out, he made it astonishingly asymmetrical for an equally astonishing length of time, he widened it like it was bubble gum, he squinched up his mouth to a dot & blew singular molecules of air in a single row out the rowing hole. He could make boring faces, too‑‑though one might could be at least somewhat stupefied by the skill required to create these boring featureless (yet contoured in some way resembling, as everything in this house did, genius).  But I chose to sleep, but even as my mind was being carried back to the bones of my poor starving body, my body suddenly scarred & mutilated by ceaseless, unknown tortures (because they were much too insuff'rable to even put in the goddamn book) I hadn't known, despite my constant bleeding & my constant pain & my constant, repulsive deformity, all of which served to make Fesh's medley of faces look pretty good. But he was still well within the Tedious Zone, which lies just outside the Electromagnificent Belt that lies just outside the ring of killer asteroids‑‑but I can't discuss our solar system.  It's just too muddled & obscured with spacy bewilderment & dimension-twistin incomprehensibility.  It won an award for these qualities, see, but it's also why we hardly get out of here.  That & the great Sphere of Nothingness (which you can't see, but you sure as the brimstones ripping out your eyes feel it) surrounding us, such that there are no stars (other than our own innumerable, muddled suns) nor any of the galactic stuff your kind feeds on like so many crazy babies... So I looked back at my flesh again & found it was covered with tiny worms!  & I mean covered: suddenly I saw that my clothes had been removed (or eaten off?) & that I now had families & species, subspecies & mutant varieties (carrying with them Great Significance, but right now meaning then I am meaning was too sick to care) piled upon one another, everywhere‑‑arms legs feet head & eyes‑‑& I gave out a shriek that didn't interrupt Fesh, but caused one of his little Linguistic Assistants to roll to me & say (in the most neurologically soothing tones of course) "Of course.  You think you are dying of worms.  You think your are sick with worms.  For the moment, all you can think about are these meshes & curtains & mountinous curdlings of worms, & thus you are the worms, so long as they obsesss the fabric of your soul." "But not to worry," said another chatty underling.  "These worms are cleansing your flesh, an they aren't worms anyway, but you might call‑‑lacking as you do absolutely ll technical data‑‑worm machines or worm mechanisms or cleansing worms..." "...or worms of the soul, eating your cleansing soul," put in the other one, who was made apparently made to speak to speak odious things soothingly.  He hypnotized you twice, then told you everything, then pulled you out of your first trance & said some things to mess up the deper part of you‑‑the one that heard it all... "Check out those crazy faces," said a third little metamechanical demon, this one somewhat like a bird, chirping on what's left of my cleansed-to-a-squeak iness-shoulder.  "I think you better take the gig, pal.  That's what the poor chump's tryinta say." "I'm perfectly happy with my starving," Smithy replied, irked that he was talking to some semi-imaginary protomechanical birdthing.  "I find it very fulfilling." At which the whole room turned to laughter. I mean, it wasn't "filled" with the milllion & one kinds of chitter & mechancical jittering that might pass for laughter.  I mean, the whole room turned into the shape of a great big laugh, hanging luminescent forever in one of Fesh'a giant amber strips of stoptime. "I could just steal your services," said the maker of faces, his jaw working strangely trying you know to overcome the forces of so many a face it did try. "You're a thief?  I mean, you just stole all this stuff." Not listening what what one could call acuteness, Fesh went on.  "I own theft, actually, as well as many other qualties.  It would be easy‑‑just slap a will-null generator or two on you, knock your spirit right onto its ass‑‑forever, if I choose‑‑& you'd hop to, your body dead, & your will would hop grinning like a fifth-generation slave into whatever disgusting form I care to put you.  It would be so easy it would be absurd.  So I'm not going to do it [applause].  You can go back to your starvation business.  I'm sure it's very lucrative." & now the house filled with laughter‑‑most of it shaped exactrly like the house-which-was-laughter itself, or herself, & some of it rendered monstrous by sculptures more twisted than the wryest mind. Amidt this diminishing fury, Fesh leaned toward Smithy & said, "Don't you even want to know the fee‑‑the fee I was goingto offer you?" "Oh," I said.  It was hard to think clearly.  There were always an infitite number of mubes showing down differetn chain-of-thoughtchain terminal-minals.  "What is it?" "You mean, what would it be?  It's too late to take the job now." "Oh.  Well, I mean‑‑just like...what would it have been?" Fesh waved grnasiosy, with as many suave cirlicues as those faces he had made.  "My fortuine," he said with lipless calmness, then grinned a gri that became all teeth, until he was himself all teeth‑‑all grinnig teeth, grinning at stupid old Smithy, who had missed his chance‑‑to have everything. "I really wanted poverty, my friend.  I really want it.  & I'll find someone who will do, & then I‑‑" He stopped as Smithy fell to the floor & clutched his knees.  Knee after knee disappeared disappeared, to be replaced upon the instant as they say "upon the instant" by & even better, more biomechanically perfect, knee, & he kept rioght on clutching those knees as he bawled, "Let me do it! PLease! Please!!  I can do it.  I'm the only one who can.  You know that.  Please, please‑‑let me have the job!" "OK," says Fesh, popping a perspicuous pearl of a grapelike lightlit berry into his mouth, where it no doubt melted instantly into the nature of every one of a million cravings there inside.  & the decor turne into frills, nothing but frills, & Fesh sat in a flowery dress on an overstuffed sofa with antimacassars draped everywhere, & doilies & podwers & scents & other effeminite effluoresences.  "Consider the deal done.  Now get out of here." he had gathered around himself a group of gnome-like cronies‑‑manufactured on the instant in the instance of his most surface thoughtless thought, like everything here, like the whole, laughter-shaped house. WE HAVE TOO MANY MOONS It was somewhere round about the fiftieth halfway-point in in their eennddlleessss & endlesslytricky & edesyopesd Infraspace™ whirl that they started to die. This was the painfully little loop of time within the greater loop of the journey within the greater loop of having to live in this universe, etc., that they up atarted to die‑‑& not prettily, my friends, not prettily at all... Hearing 2.42 brought it out that this was not one of Smithy's tricks.  Smithy was exonerated from charges of evil   which is a tough & muddy charge, riding on its great black stallion with its sword glistering in the light of a hundred moons.  We have too many moons. Have I mentioned we have way too many moons?  I slipped my thought. I slit my thought & crawled into it like a big deflated bag, & then the thought covered me, but I still could not recover it.  & don't think jst because I'm saying this in a box means this isn't true or something.      and blistered instead with rough castigations of incompetence, which went on & on.  The judgement machine of hearing 16.0 was much later to bring out that the Quadrunal of hearing 2.42, before cases were tried by judgement machines got carried away, I think, got very much carried away, I should say, & was just making stuff up. By the way, nothing in the boxes is true.  Don't even read them, Gentle Reader.  Go back & unread them redaeR eltneG. Driven mad by poisonous plankton, the heating systems went on the fritz & it got way-cold, with stalactitic icicles everywhere. These guys were really sick, man.  I cannpot inflate its distinctness too much, methinks.  One can not exaggerate it too loud, nor find too many synonyms indicating its dire seriousness, as vivd as dread, that most lunar of emoitons, dread, the goddess ordering death upon death from her cozy throne, bringing forth a sick cornucopia of sickly ailments wearing deep blue shrouds, with little in the way of face to cover, but their faces covered anyway, such as they was.  Hearing 7.37 determined through supermube enhancement flotational decade rivet pondering poodle pink in the Martian mist transmutation that through a software glitch which came to be known as The Glitch of the Century (though it was far far more than that, by the hundred moons!) The Inadmissible was filtrating out every organic bacterium, virus, or fungi, including a whale of a lot of horrid stuff we have that you don't want to know about ('cause it'd make ya sick!) & coddling & farming these items, then bloughing them with a great big Blough! into the ship's eerily lightgreen luminescent air at three a.m. every damned morning, while the guys were tossing either in or out of their sleep, but while they were tossing anyway.  After a few loops round Eznavia, the ineffable inevitable sun, that most pure & noblest of suns, that great blue essence of all suns, that conceptual, metaphoric mube of a perfect sun, and, more anagogically, the summary of suns, the summary of what all suns aim for, this exponential increase of absolute hundreds of the strong Makers of Disease, astride the marble founts along the ridge wihin the glint of the Ray of a Thousand Suns, made all four sick at once. So they were dying on a spaceship, dying midway to somewhere (probably bad) also in space, but now too helpless to do much, other than commit the act of dying in itself. The ship had smash-hospitals, which were like tempered-glass (actually a long-chained, organic sonofabitch known as hospitalio-carbon-6-13) cubes containing the generalized symbol of a hospital, unless you moved your head‑‑which you will note you cannot cease to do‑‑in which branch of multiplicative reality it was the generalized symbol for medicine (a pretty ugly thing, too‑‑a really rotten icon these guys chose), or the face of Uneera, the Goddess of Healing, but whatever you saw within those flickering bezels, you had to smash the glass to bring the hospital to being using, let's say, possibly, maybe...the big red axe looming its great crystalline blade right over the hospital, swinging slowly to & fro, though Hearing 6.19 established this was a "rotten hallucination," if I may quote Judge Robotonic Ecnomencement 1-13). "We've gotta smash this glass," croaked *, pausing amidst his sentences to heave. "That's obvious," groaned * from within his cocoon of grief.  "But who's gonna do it? "Hell, I'll do it," chirped Bictor, whose diseases apparently didn't make him feel so bad‑‑it just caused him to die whilst becoming uglier. So this chosen vision of a Bictor managed to stand up, & after no more than nineteen tries, he smashed The Inadmissible into Hospital Mode I, wherein many doctors in the form of opinionated disks appeared, doctors & nurses & aides & helpers of every kind‑‑all of them shaped like these illogical little disks, though of different colors, colors which conused, colors designed to disorient you,  like that night you were wheeled through the emergency ward & into the flaming-red lips of the big emergency war, & into the emergency disk, for healing of the most humiliating kind.  I think that kind of says it all. "There is good news & bad news," said the disk, making this sort of mild flop of a emotion‑‑almost invisible‑‑which was a disk's way of nodding its head, & was one way to pick out the doctors from the lot, or the disk-doctors from the disklot lot. The five "brothers" lay, parallel & silent, in their beds.  They were going to live, & they were in a way, technically cured, but they still felt as sick as could be, which they figured was the bad news anyway. "The god news is that you are cured & free.  Hospital Mode tending to end somewhere within this century, perhaps, let us say, fifteen seconds hence, for you have no more need of us & indeed we can read it in your eyes heartily sick of disks, & the bad news is that the ship has crashed." Whereupon the doctor, the countless disks, the white decor, & the other paraphernalia of hospitality‑‑wheeled carts, stethoscopes, goosers, bags made of rubber, deep syringes they were also thoroughly Fed Up Whiff‑‑popped like a soap bubble away. "Crashed?" said *, who was always eager to say The Stupid Thing, which this most certainly was for the situation they now found themselves in. HIGHER CLOUDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS At first, they slept the Sleep of the Dead, which is of course no sleep at all, then they died the Death of the Sleep, which is not really death but waking up, coming into Higher Clouds of Consciousness & then by golly they crawled around that ship like naked worms, & then for a few more weeks they moped around, unusually unable to think or do any coherent thing.  I know this is very shocking.  You  may want to stop reading for a moment, but for God's sake don't stop reading at this point. Just don't. I think we all feel I think we feel much better.  So they were incoherent for a while, then they just lay in the circle of their palette of green couches, activating all the pleasure machines & arguing with the ship & then amongst themselves (as each one developed not one but three shaped theories, which is a side-effect of trickster ships like these.  One recalls the great fleets of trickster-ships‑‑whole flotillas of proto-Inadmisssibles kicking out the jams all over this loose phase of space. Various Voices & Presences declared themselves to be the voice of the ship, but The Inadmissible was absolutely full of perfect, despicable liars & compulsive liars & machines living amongst the randomly assigned qualities of the dream-castles they inhabit in their minds, & liars from other dimensions in which their assertions were true, & unconscionably-well-trained & so intimately wellpreared con-men & teams of them, all declaring themselves the fundamental expressin of The Inadmissible, all of their stories constantly colliding with each other & the truth, & yet somehow you got sucked in anyway, your fingernails scraping on the railing, & that desperate, sucked-up look on your clownish face, believing one liar after another, & sometimes several at once.  We have records suggesting that Sumorr, taken all by himself, believed up to sixteen conflicting verities at once, & suffering apparently no ill effects, though everyone in this now-densely-populated universe knows that it telescoped his life right down to a Nothinub. Bu bu bu bububu but we would have to wait to see his whole life.  Which we sat down & did, in fleeting Brisk-o-Time!© which is a fleeting thing, the air suddenly filled these fleeting things around & about & over us like just so many locusts now cut loose, but never mind that, & never mind the lies.  At this juncture, all the device's arguments coalesced, which confused the poor * brothers almost to death.  * had an ongoing argument with this suddenly consolidated ship (which declared itself, in zoftmube after zsoftmube, "totally crapped out"), trying to convince everyone that it was logically impossible for the Inadmissible to vrash. "I'll open the doors, I'll show you!" the machines & the voices & introjected thoughtforms of the ship would say. "That's just a trick!" * would sputter, locked in a perfectly contained logical systems‑‑an affliction of both the stubborn & the very smart‑‑& * here was nothing if not both.  & the ship here was saying he was nothing, & so he fought on, well into the Secret Vales of Madness, well beyond the long-rising tides of his rapid mind. THE CLOUD-MEN IN YOUR FEVER-DREAMS It was a trickster ship, not made to fly one anywhere so much as to thump & frumage & frump & thumbage every last bit of the rent fabric (& yet still beautiful‑‑possibly more beautiful in this ambered, tatterdemalion known as your wit.  From the moment they went in, the bros held tight their breath (so their cheeks puffed like the cloud-men in your fever-dreams‑‑remember?) & as-it-were strangled shut their many vulnerable unmaneagable colloid eyes & crossed up their fingers & recrossed‑‑forming webs, mats, cat's cradles, & the intricate maneuver of effectivelies) so that they would never get out, as the boys tumbled in, hoping through these quaint maneuvers of their bodies for their bodies for for a straight, white, caucasion sort of ship with its wiles repressed beyond the activities of relations & exchange & trade.  For the first time in history, someone was looking for a white dude‑‑& here I was not even remotely nor closely nor intimately nor internally nor Fundamentally Operative yet. But anyway...they passed through like the seven green gates & through like the seven green lights arranged nocturally like sedentary fat fireflies in the dense & greeny mist, which mist grew mist thicker mist until it became the very Emerald Arches one was emerald arcges passing through...and they were vouchsafed a tip of the ol' cop-hat by the glovéd hand tipping at them & them tipping back, I mean waving back, & then due to excessive virescence in the tunnel were tunnled were as tranmission of body functions CEASED... ...But when they released their instinctual, suppressive pressures & looked about & up & around-around (which a special preposition we have here for a minor dimension we have in here)‑‑the first to see the deck since Smithy's last check & activation of the effective lie, they saw they were wrong.  The Inadmissible was if anything even more of a trickster ship inside than without.  & there was no way out.  That was the first trick‑‑you forgot how to get out, & the ship may also have made even your memory of getting out work as a memory, much less as a lie, much less than the lie of getting out.  So they vented all that pent up air & released their eyeballs from their clamps (so that vision came as a sort of soft & slowing focus, different each one of their many chintzy lies, I mean eyes) & goggled as their fingers‑‑most of them anyway‑‑detwined. The Inadmissible had a lot of inviting tools, buffed that perfect sheen that makes guys adulate in their pants, & that women admire because of its sweetness & its friendliness & for the way it is willing to reflect their beauty back when they stare, when they move up close & stare, & for an odd sort of sweet quality, which promised the timid shapes of mind many things, whilst leaving out details. But these same tools‑‑approved of by every eye, including & especially the eyes of our guys‑‑blew up when you touched them...just blew up when you lifted them & hoisted them from their counter or the neat rack some of them were wracked up in. & as your hand stang from the little blast into the subatomic particles (with a positive, as negative, & a third kind of charge, known to the particles abovew them (that often captured them & put them in a box, just for the killing involuted in with it) as the third charge or the Third Charge of the particles) known as smithereens, you realized these were not really tools but meaning less formations holding within their powerful but obviously fragile fields the thought of being a very dandy tool & a helluvan engineer NOT A PROPER SPAECHIP It didn't really look like a proper spaechip I mean spaceship at all.  The ceilings were too high, for instance, & one sometimes stumbled into vast cathedric wombs.  By the way, The Inadmissible liked to trip you, & so miraculously adept it wasn't even worth the bother of watching your stumbling step.  Some of the places‑‑& I could go on saying forever, in different ways, how very many places this place had, unless it was changing its places so as to make them seem new spaces‑‑looked like a spaceship should: no decor, no saucy posters on the walls, no coffee-mugs nor coffee-mug stains, no half-eaten doughnuts sitting ragged in the waxen folds of their wrappings, no dog-eared books, no trickets nor toys nor jewelry, everything not only clean but somehow polished unto a sterility that defies both life & death.  Plenty of places looked like that, but nothing worked in them.  At least it didn't seem so.  Take the toruses of control, for example, or the keyboards or the twizzles or the kgnaux‑‑frozen.  Dummy keys & buttons, dummy lights forming intricate flowers which were also bogus, but‑‑& this what I believe to be my point‑‑you couldn't help but try to pick them, or smell them, or, as in the case of the lads, eat them.  These inert control rooms were also frozen, & it tells us a lot, I think, about these fellows that they all got their tongues frozen twice to the panels, & it was lucky they had non-Inadmissible blowtorches at their command, or their would have died with their very long tongues sticking out, & you don't want that. It was impossible to avoid losing your way.  Either Smithy'd built the greatest labyrinth ever or The Inadmissible could move & reshape its halls & rooms & corridors, though none of the hundreds of redundant investigations turned up anything like the ghost of an old cloue, I mean clue (coughing, its breath quite visible piping out beneath its shawl) that it ever did.  Upon regaining their faculties, the boys split up immediately, because, aboard The Inadmissible, you were sure you knew which way to go, & almost everyone acted on these impulses immediately, coated as they were, with the sweet drip of the Honey of Senility. Some corridors seemed to be made of porous stone, & stone with a lot of character‑‑sedimental layers, vast geologic histories hinted at, fossilized creatures & remains, strange biochemical stains or what looked like letters spelling out as desperately as my writing desperately discharged accounts of Something Magical...that sort of thing‑‑& one was not all that alone in one's lostness.  Nay‑‑small monsters scuddered round the endless bends of the corridors... Of course they each developed fantasies designed to keep them wand'rin' roun' th' Rim o' th' Pastel Images, the hallucinations which served in here here in for air for in.  Gip just knew there was a treasure in here, amongst the strange blades & the mirrors that did not mirror anything‑‑another case of nouns not living up to their verbalizations, which made all language moot, which reduced Gips breathless breathing (another case of & adjective failing its succesant nominative) to a whoop. He later said‑‑during one of his now-famous One Thousand Debriefings‑‑that he knew it would be small & that he knew it would be wrapped in some & fragrant packaging, so he did a lot of "sniffing of the neutrons," as the literary fantasist from Canada cried in this hall & down that hall & over round these endless bended halls with the sniff of riches deep inside of them. And poor poor replicative Bictor was counting his echoes, not really his echos but Balb's suave insinuating echolalilalia... Meantime Balb had fact after dazzling fact luring him, & he knew they would form some gigantic structure of intersticed knowledge (he sort of saw a big cake, like a wedding cake with a hundred running layers), if he could just catch them all & gather them up... Sumorr found himself chasing after tiny replicas of himself & his brothers, plus a couple of other unrecognizable dudes... Then there was Vekk, plagued by these ironic vectors, colorful & spectral, as if he were caught in some gigantic, tilting screensaver made out of beautiful vectors.  Ah, they were beautiful indeed, & they had Vekk bruising himself right down to the barenaked bones pursuing the bones pursuing the things... Gip didn't see anything in these endless channels, so he spent his infinite time wandring through the hallways, which seemed very dark & grey, with his hands in his pockets, whistling some tuneless dirge that took over a damaged, sparking portion of his neurons quite some time ago, which is, by the way, why people whistle tunelessly.  But there was, he thought & thought again, & then thought once again, something in those pockets.  I mean, he could almost feel it as he moved his hands around what seemed like endlessly capacious pockets in pockets indeed, & he nurgled & zozzled his Roman hands & Russian fingers... Lotta sounds in there.  As if their own botherations weren't enough, strange, half-misunderstood rumors flew around like bats matching the walls of the halls in their hollow solemnity‑‑important rumors & urgent communiqués, too, & the voice of soeone much like your rumored mother, too, & swatching passages of tearswept poetry too madly beautiful to please even the Muses, who were also felt to be flying round there somewhere, too, & when you got down to it & (as you meaning they obsessively must meaning musted) thought about it, these things were coursing as they say through your bloodstream, & you yourself were stuck moseying around inside your bloodstream following the ignius fatui of things‑‑that was the trick.   Just head for the heart, said the head, & you'll be in free. Then there were the raccoons.  There were or was the projection of billions of the ugly suckers.  Our multidimensional racoons are not anything like yours, of course, but you can go ahead & think of them.  There are some interesting parallels I have just now thought of, though I've never mubed the topes on any of your life at all, much less your damned racoons... Only a lesser God‑‑certainly less than your very hyped-up God, who I understand brooks or brooketh no mistakes (my, but aren't we special?!)‑‑in one of his silly momenta...say, after a drinky-poo or two or too, & giggling mightily, each giggle becoming a monstrous sort of frozen-stringy asteroid or something similarly iggle, would have gone to the trouble of creating this ring-tailed monstrosity.   Yes, they have ringed tails, like someone along a long string of someones whispering one by one & each to the other, thence finally to me, whispered to me, but then as I said they spin off into other, more ultra, more purple dimensions... O hell, I'll describe them.  Your narrator‑‑me‑‑back there has been completely rebuilt & all his minuscule threads reemplast, so I will snap brute Consistency oer my knee like a greak chunk of fire wood. See him burn.  See all consistency burn... Er...racoons, anyone? These officially registered Nonproductive Behaviors (see the Official Register, vol. 85, section 20, paragraphs 1-3, NBs 762-173-6.2 & 762-173-6.3) lasted on the order of hundreds of your Speckled Years (it is impossible to reckon (it is impossible to reckon!), you damned, unreckoning wreck of an echoing echo-reckreck!), which are years longer than your Unspeckled Years, but not nowhere near so long bye-bye as your brown years (your brown years, your vapid, vaporless Desert Years (have we reached home yet?  Not yet.  Go back into that black little mottle of death you call sleep...)...brown years, man‑‑sheesh!), but The Inadmissible did not admit much of time nor Time's stupid-old, measured pasture, I mean passage. Talk about singularity!  The event horizon of The Inadmissible was not only not registered (in the Central Registry, (please note, a holy-owned syllabus I mean syzygy I mean subsidiary of of The Brown Years, Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vapor Industries, a wholly-owned subsidiary of God, Inc., which kind of tell you where the money in this whole deadly dealy-deal comes from, that is, which side the ol' toast was buttered on, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, pleased & noted) as non-material (due to its heavy inertial field which is just so damned hard to get to talking about, much less explaining in coherent, paraglaphic forums)‑‑it's registered etc. as technically nonexistent (due to its weightless ideational fields, kind of like the prose, weightless yet coherent, you are not reading here but in some parallel universe in which, for reasons unspake, you are reading this novel in a parallel universe where, apparently, you are not reading a blessed thing, which I think clears things up pretty well I think). Wellbut the Nonproductive Behaviors did, however, provide Fesh with a most amusing mubeotope of their farcical maneuvers, which he watched again & again, laughing harder every time, till his doctors took the funny tape away, & he forced himself to watch much more solemn, sombre things... INFERNAL FERNS The effeminite, prissy Rain God of the planet fussed & flittered, now choosing to Gush One Spot, now to Merely Sprinkle Another‑‑giving it that Incredibly Wet Smell when even the Hundreds of Glorious Suns are yawning, just for a second, then round about this Beautiful Rain God comes, unable to Leave It Alone, severely addicted to the actions of His Own Godliness, now swelling the streams, now merely moistening the leaves, then (as if taking a deep breath, though I am not sure that gods even gods even gods even breathe) or flooding whole subcontinents in their denselied monswooms. It was always temperate, as if one had no time to waste on such luminous excrescences or blazes of sudden pigments, made naked by that first quiet breath of frost, much less the starvy stuckle of the issi-ikkles deferred from the branches in their frozen tissues from the axis of your basic wintertime. Speaking of Axes & Absences of Rotational Flows, Foloria was 100% perfectly & in fact quite righteously straight on its axis, as calculated relative to the vectoral calculated/engineeréd locus of the Starrays of all those suns as writ up in the Big Book of The Starrays & printed up in beautiful Starray Circulature, that loving font, that irresistible if illegible font I have wasted when not wasting from & wasting without for all those wasted StryCrcltreless years... So you had mainly flowers.  Actually, it was hard to tell, being as how you couldn't orbit the place without finding yourself crashed amidst great floughy poughs of your missing memory.  But the closer scopes & the drones & the lucky sweeps nearby gave no indication of anything other than flowers, except for images of model airplanes which seemed to be constantly be flying into the dusk.  One either acknowledged these outlandish images‑‑in which case one was immediately declared insane & sprayed with some stuff that would, the Weaponsmasters said, secure the insanity inside, & generally make it safe for them to rave & us to sleep inside, or one dismissed them, & went on with one's work, preferably on a subject a bit less sanity-challenging. O, I'd love to describe to you those disappearing ferns to you, those turquoise fading ferns without end to you, & the ridiculously infinite or breathing down the limpid collar of the infinite, who is much perturbed, I'll tell you & you don't want your ferns to be much perturbed, you can take it directly to the white, marmoreal Infinite Bank round the corner of Diamond Street & Golden Row, where the really big money gains sentience & starts to wring this very plot from mine owne pursey hands unto its own, rich & green & turbulent...but I was talking about ferns, no no, I was talking about not talking about ferns, which (talking about ferns, not not talking about ferns) is strictly illegal, according to the Ridiculous Fern Laws of 19887 or thereabouts I mean, do I look like a walking,or at least squawking, law library? Huh? O yea...I guess I look like nothing to you, other than that irritating image of the briiliant image of the brilliant wimp imaged in the brilliant image f the image of the burning brilliant wimp so I'm just sort of rhapsodizing about those infernal ferns, especially the translucent ones, & even a few‑‑at the risk of sending out formal invitations to the Richest Guys in Town to the notion that I‑‑I!‑‑got more than a bit obsessed with sessed with ferns, great Heaven forBIB! (there, I've said it.  I've gone along & finally‑‑but after a long long time‑‑blurted out as they say the ultimate cuss: Heaven forBIB!)‑‑that appeared as nothing more than fern-shaped, waving distortions of the air, or of something within the very air, or of the portion of air that lies within your brain, lying to you with its innocent, crystal breath. DOING AN APPRECIATION THING HERE Well!  That was refreshing.  It was as refreshing as those Wacky Summer Flowers, with their microscopic bugs & Crude but Infiltrative Methods for endlessly you know reproducing themselves‑‑& all without bugs! No, the only bugs on Foloria were the billions of bugs the computer generated the loving, mad computer generated just for the hell of it, so actuallly there were billions of nearly massless, bubbly bugs not doing any official pollenating or anything, but crawling up & down the bodies... ...which were not much to look at in the first place, & occasionally into the Odd Brain, making the brain in question...The Brain in Question: read it NOW!...even odder.  So if you'd do me the favor of covering all your imaginings assuming any have succeeded of these queer admittedly queer itensely queer oddly queer queererly queer, dead & therefore Not Queer Anymore (dead, you see) characters with the warped images of hollow bugs, in the shapes of all monsters that can be generated by a device obviously with nothing else to do, I'd appreciate it. I am appreciating it.  I am intensely, madly appreciating, despite the bugs that not only cover all my soft, pinkish, once-visible flesh, but cover it in layers.  I am doing an appreciation thing here, which feels quite grand, & which definitely keeps me alive, if not sane.  You can re-iagine me along these lines, but I will not appreciate it.  I anticipate that, in the future starting & sliding ever-forthward now, I will have no time for appreciations, wat with all these bugs to feed, & of course the ones that crawl through my brain that seem like weird creatures passing their shadows across the movie screen to me, making me ever-so-slightly-more mad... THE AKASHIC RECKONING Let me elaborate.  Let me digress.  Please allow me to digress like the insinuating tendrils of a vine or the roots of a great, stout tree, whilst elaborating like the fresh & minty leaves of these plants we nowhere near "decided" would grow into our lives. That's the problem you see.  I'd like you to pretend that the metaphorical flowers in the preceding paragraph (Paragraph 152271142 in the Akashic Reckoning) are real & actual ones.  Actually, that's the way I want you to think of all my metaphors, though I know it's confused‑‑confusing, & hard.  Anyway, these nice, sun-fed blossoming mint flowers & eaves but for their brightness you could barely see, stand as a metaphor for my storytelling from ambiguous start to perplexing Finnish.  I start to recount these true & somber events, recording them well in the long tradition of meaningless chronicles of events no one will ever reproduce in his mind, destined, as they are, to either the nervous worm (poor guy!) or the captivating fire (which is how I intend to grow, I mean go. Nope‑‑no nervous little worms cleansing in their own slow way the corse for this guy), & somehing moves beneath the ground cover of nervous words I have built, where words are nervous worms & the alleged story is the stiff, & I follow it, & realize it relate to a tiny kingdom or province of the soul of some kind (of the soul, I would guess) which is in its own right something you really need to know about, if you're to gather the gist of the story like hugging an armful of golden marijuana. Sorry about that positive note on marijuana‑‑a killer drug if there drug what was I talking about ever was one‑‑but you do want the important aspect of the whole story, right? Well, this is a Notably Nonlinear Universe which keeps subverting my prose, right through by doze, & all of the parallel, skewed, & sub-universes caused wat I'm telling you happened to happen.  That's the problem‑‑that, & all these enormous flowers. Actually, Foloria had been completely invaded by flowers.  Either through a queer trick of mutation or through some rather creepy genetic engineering, there were nothing but flowers everywhere‑‑or, since we're being unnaturally precise here, it was almost totally inhabited by these things that sure looked like flowers, & there was a very brief moment in our history (which has been criminal, which lives hiding in the apartments of friends for short periods of time, by name changes,by in fact invrting its own contents so that was the history of some strange opposite world, & by keeping a low profile. (But you know they're gonna get it someday, what with History breathing willynilly down its neck) when we thought we'd discovered the coolest planet imaginable (this was before planets wre made illegal, & we started all having to live on these artificial, hilly things that looked a little like gloves or torn gloves or pieces of glove with green fuzz all over them or gloves actually being used or about to be used in some gigantic surgigcal procedure, which might make for some might make for some mighty strange weather out there, just until the glove was torn off & your whole world was inside out.  Oh well...there's a down side to everything, isn't there? ever-yth-ing,- is-n't -the-re? -eve-ryth-ing-, is-n't- the-re?- eve-ryt-hing-, i-sn't- th-ere?- ev-eryt-hin-g, i-sn'-t th-ere-? ev-ery-thin-g, -isn'-t t-here-? e-very-thi-ng, -isn-'t t-her-e? e-ver-ythi-ng,- isn-'t -ther-e? -ever-yth-ing,- is-n't -the-re? -eve-ryth-ing-, is-n't- the-re?- eve-ryt-hing-, i-sn't- th-ere?-) ...until we found out these "flowers" were tough & mean, & that their idea of existence didn't involve loving couples holding hands & walking through the rainbow-colored light of their great floral forests, or photography, or any sort of contact (read pollution) at all‑‑& in this day & age (or perhaps the day without the age; no...it should be no day in this age; my heart fails; language fails; we die together in one of those groves I thought in my dream I thought in my dream I thought I was talking about), I can't really find fault with their attitude.  So we found out quickly enough that if you approached Floria, you crashed.  You crashed & died & disappeared, & that was it, as if the planet operated accoring to its own unique or uniquely discovered law of physics.  Nothing other than lying could get you around it‑‑& how the lies did grow! All manner of people came out with mubes, statements, sworn testicular testimony, & pictures of them supposdly landing on Foloria,  Most of these rapscallion sold documntary-like accounts of their advetures, what they had found, & what Foloria was exactly like. The utter discontinuity amongst their visions of the planet somehow counted for naught‑‑the blather kept coming, even after the planet was gravved out to theUnfit Sectr, where we put our evil, dangerous, or degeerate planets. THE FLOATING KEY OF R "Yea, I can keep you alive, but only if you're dancing." & he observed how the unfortunate brothers were indeed dancing their asses off. This is like a nightmare.  This is like a fairy tale. "Even then," * went on.  "You'll lose a leg or arm or slice of torso or something. "  He tooted incredible psychedelic riffs in the Floating Key of R for a split second.  "No one lasts long." "Personally, I think we shouldn't have taken that ship." "But wait a minute!" gasps a panting Gip past the pants of a gasping Gip.  It turned out pants & similar exudations produced panes of glass for a minute.  They were beautiful, as if stained glass but all bare pastel, all as adorable as those mellow dreams you had‑‑you know it: dreams you had‑‑in which the most perfect, halp-garbéd abes brushed loving up again you, until the morning sun becaeme to much, until the sun touched... "Cool," hugged our gamboling Gip, then returned now to his own thought, but to another, completely alien thoughtform which alien thoughtform happened to be the closest in existence.  "We weren't hurt in the ship!" "That's mad!" said *, making a little fucking sort of move with his butt, but to this day no one knew if he was dodging a beam, or just making a strong, thrusting fucking motion with his ass.  Most people are too bored to stay awake, much less speculate, though a few are still‑‑this minute‑‑investigating the matter, & no doubt finding thosing in their evidence & reports but deeper, more hypnotic layers of ambiguity.  Looked like he was fucking something to me... "We've gotta figure out how to get back in," said Vekk, though he had on a faco on enigmatic enought I say to smothr a son mad about his wordless parents. So they did, hiding under the bulking hull in order to stop dancing‑‑& I mean no implication here that they did not love dancing‑‑& making forays, in ones & twos, to try to crack the trick or code or whatever it was that held this ship shut.  & I sense a whiff in a puffy little wind that they feared it might be shut forever.  Perhaps it was a sign on the door that said 27Shut forever, but then there were signes coming goin all ove the place & disappearing quite suddenly.  But not this sign. So they went through a few rough days there, sneaking out, dancing & jerking, to get some sunflower seeds & nectar, talking & begging The Inadmissible, trying to solve its little puzzle, which of all people Bictor solved when he said, his head bobbin with a sort of merry emptiness, "So, when does forever begin?" at which the door irised open, sucking all of them but Balb in.  But he got in.  He crawled over the side as one of those Irritating Small Aliens clambers oer the lip of your goddam cup, mucking it up. Fuck! as the Poet sang. As for being sucked in, The Inamissible had apparently pumped out all the air & brought its interior down to absolute zero‑‑which is much more absolute amongst us than you, really matters here & has true religious significance, what though we may not be quite sure what it is, & most definitely, here, has the tang of freshly poured vodka chilled to its icy length. Just kidding.  Just making metaphors, my friend‑‑that's all we do around here.  Now back to our story. The ship‑‑always thinking‑‑or the always-thinking ship or the Ship of the Ever-Thought or the Ship of the Isolations or the Chip of the ice-froze gambits, or the Joke Boat, or The Inadmissible which was its registered ame as I suspect you know you suspect I know, & so the boys tumbled right into the pucker dup entrance to an unlivable hell‑‑unlivable even for * [SPECIES], which had been built never to be loved, nor recognized, nor even actually named nor given in any way or form of math* (*which is always shape by the way like a bunch of very tall ink sticks) coherently configured patterns or combintions rough as the legendary Thousand-Figures Safe (the white safe (the gleaming safe (the safe hanging casual from its equally-unopenable chain at the very center of time) that's right kids), much less) stable & coherent, qualities. In a way, it killed them more. DOUBLE FUCKING SPLITS Their little friend stood outside doing a series of complexly-conceived yet clumsily-executed cheers, complete with chants & little shimmy-shakes & leaps & splits & (not in this order) Double Fucking Splits. "Easily excited," muttered Vekk who at this moment in th novel is revealed to have a capacious pustule of hatred for his mother marring the inhalation & exhalation or inexhalation and/or exinhalation of the psychic halides which are now revealed to be none other than the chemo-electronic Recognitions of God we used to know as emotions, but thought we'd lost! Has to do with the history of the Sector, kept under strict dimensional lock & key of a type for Only Houdini‑‑trained up to snuff on a future so endless your longed-for past exists as a mere glowing "Bob of Ice" like little globulet of twinkling ice that forms on your nose as you...slowly...realize everything in your life has been a betrayal kin to but eclipsed by the shadow movements by this latest, great Mother Ship of Denials Mother Ship of Defamations Mother Ship of Tricks The Inadmissible proving for exhample to be the splinter of a metaphor for your life that was blown (deliberately?) to pieces eons ago by your own Laughing God‑‑you know, the one who tortures you to death, then laughs his ass of for a while & bring you back to life (need I say?) for more torture. Are you feeling OK?  It occurred to me someone could fuckin die reading this thing.  I mean, it could happen.  It would be bound to happen of the thing ever gets read by a lot of people.  Or other creatures who appreciate the best in literature. So don't die on me, Gentle Kapha Reader.  There will be no more torture for a while... Pause while the drop of ice falls off you nose.  You sniff.  Dozens of voices mew the great "Awwww..." of cows or moo the limitless "Awww.." of the tiny cats that run round your‑‑or mine anyway‑‑central nervoice system, clawing any meaning this pain might meaning this pain might have unto unsewn fragments of a labyrinth of feeling once possessed and/or extant, in to a thing denoting nothingness a thing devoting nothingess we know as Smither-Yeams. So Vekk must hve been at once surprized & gratified or surmised & patified like the pacified Namese, all of them dead scarred & wounded‑‑generally horribly, & usually all three when an unpected I mean unexpected flower-bolt strewed his ass like snoughphlykes unto a lost, expiring breeze.  It was *'s breeze, which had expected * to go on forever, what with his dancing & his capering & his dodging & all & all.  But apparently cheerleading had no speacial effects. "Shame on you, Vekk," said Gip sternly. "I didn't do it," guffawed Vekk, wobbling like a dough-man as the memory of the last snowflake that was * actually another idiot wind on another level: that stage of spiritua expansion known as The Idiot Level, or effects tailored exquisitely to that word. "I mean for mocking his effusion," said Gip, because he himself didn't understand it, which meant for dead certain Vekk didn't understand it.  "Besides, he saved our lives." "Not necessarily," says Sumorr, stepping forward with a distinct creaking of boards & a sense of some transcendent, ultraviolet light & the eyes if incomprehensible creatures looking on.  Sumorr squints for a moment at the overgrown* deck of The Inadmissible.  "I mean, there's no telling if we'll ever move this thing.  It fixed it so we wouldn't be frozen." "Or burst by suction," added Gip, the floorboards rumbling & creaking. "Or our hearts stopping from the darkness," added Bictor, a mere bag of pices curiously unlike, much less adding up to, a personality.  Considering his comment, round & round in their heads like the famous Rounselle Gizmo, the others gave him that Puzzled Superfluity look, the look the Son of God always has when he looks at us, which frankly worrieth Us. THE IMPACT CRATERS OF THE PRESENT TENSE or WHY I'M A COMMUNIST Gip stood at the window with windows of tears like wineloads of tears all across his vintage features.  It was one of those magnification protals that magnify the viewer along with the viewed, which‑‑according to our especially bad-designed optical rules‑‑gives you a twin-redoubling of reinforced remagnification, so these were some very big tears‑‑two-quarters, or I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist.  I'm a Communist & so are you! We're looking at here, some with the Visible Creatures of Dream & the Invisible Subcreatures of Subdeam & the whollt nonexistent tears of God as he laugh his ass off at this loss, not to mention...O all right, to mention Gip's exaggerated taste I mean sense of betrayal I mean gratitude. "Gip, you're making a sniveling mess!" floating this Heretofore Insensitive Creature (this is Gip we're talking about‑‑would you try to keep up???) hooted Vekk, his eyes so dry they have dried into the impact craters of the present tense‑‑yessir, the impact craters of the present tense.  The Inadmissibule having automatically protected itself as it has always done you'll recall* our friends stepped out of or ship like driest & most minuscule flakes of their vibrant selves; start recalling...now from water, tosses our brethren unto pot, in which big black magnificatorium they swirl like tortured thetans in that volcano big as your planet. "I think-spoot," began to gather the gasps like so many leaves of an especially frigging spring of our true author Balb as he swimmeth round, "I think the ship's intentions are clear‑‑cough!" "If we can just get Gip to stop crying," exhausted Sumorr. "Or turn down the bloody magnification," cried Vekk, in a sappy voice, it was a hot-sappy voice, that was turning all the thousands of hearts in that cross-latitudinal vat into cream while it was turning the evatorating vap of tears aboard The Sensible into some dry stuff you might find on your fingers as you rubbed, curiously, an ornamental vase sortaatros spinninggninnips thinggniht spinning by itself in the back of a Shop of Egyptian antiques somewhere, only to see the whitish stuff had in fact removed your fingerprints, & you didn't know what this mean!, so you might understand how anxious they were to get out of that-a-vat. "Damned ship's increasing the gravity here!" said the distinctly-panicky-pastoral voice of Balb, which was actually an echo of something Balb, together with a lot of fellow, secret worshipers, had once said long ago, hidden away in a forbidden place‑‑an incantation without rhythm, a prayer sans holiness, a cry of the extinct spirit the sort of cry you'd only want coming out when, say, ou were steaming in a vat of your dumber-brother's (each of the brothers thought of the others of the brothers as his dumber-broher.  That kep them gtting dumber all the time, in a circle, hich as everyone knows causes you to live if not forever at least a very lot long lother) microscopic pity-dreams. Uh bububububu but then full-mag kicked in, I mean, the magnitude of perfect & infinite resolution kicked in to the sky, became the bright sky in the form of the beautiful, luminous vapor of some unidentified motherfucker's eyes, looking down on them.  & then they began all began they all they all began to cry. This burst the blatzing vat & just left them sittig like idiots vapid with tears, & I'm not even sure The Inadmissible could be indifferent to that. THE UNCERTAINTY OF YOUR WANTON DUPLICATE MEETING YOU ON THE HIGHWAY "You were mourning for that little rat?" it said, & if Gip had had lapels, & if the ship could've grabbed them, & if Gip were visible anyway, you can almost bet you would have met the uncertainty of your Wanton Duplicate® meeting you on the highway‑‑same tremendous long coat with the button-over buttons on the front, make you look like a KGB master, I mean, of course, Gip's blubbery lips shakin' with the motion there. "He's not dead," said the ship spirits called The Inadmissible.  "He does that all the time, except this time you survived, thanks to my hull‑‑you can feel it there.  Feel it?  You feel that hull?‑‑so he got excited & die.  Why mourn for a guy who constantly pretends to die?" That silenced things.  That silenced everything‑‑the brothers, the ship, Foloria, the whispers of the intergalactic distance, the lo woo of he interdimensional terminals, in their long coats, just like yours, always on guard, always working to generate these Differences we are all so fucking fond of.  You can predict everything if you try.  But don't try.  I know I have.  I know you won't.  You can predict all of the rather icky, rather fishy-smelling throng of intense idiocies you are about to commit in each & every of an infintude of branching univerks, if you try.  But you can't.  I can tell.  I've tried. CALIGARIAN ALEATORY CONFECTION FROM HELL Finally dried, albeit skeined with that most indelible particles like the ones that fell off the impossible crown of Ganeesh, there, into your head, the fellows looked around.  They scratched their heads & did some Three Stooges routines.  All of them, actually, including some from the Rejected Universes For at least a full & a somewhat fat minute at that minute at that, it was like one of those optical puzzles your baby brother disappeared into at that strangely alien fair you snuck to back off through the prepositions of being as a kid, & you had to make up this like story, about why your kid brother was gone‑‑& (& this is the kicker) why you weren't, & it came out something like you're lost in a definite desert of Most Precise Mirrors, & you were stying of thirst, you were groaking, & so you had to drink your brother‑‑to save him if not only yourself.  It was the best you could do, OK? Liquify & then drink, somehow.  Yuck! The ship did not come into focus, not even as the Caligarian Aleatory Confection from Hell‑‑"like a bunch of broken snowflakes or of snowflakes that didn't make the grade" as Sumorr summarily said‑‑but this only in highly-drugged post-reverie. & then it did, & in the light of these Bloomzillas™ it looked like something from the nightmares Giger was too scared to sculpt. The Inamissible looked broken, like an optical promise, broken, & The Inadmissible looked bugged.  Hell, it looked wonderbugged! with voices flying on wing on some kind of voiceless commands to strange to explain even to a fellow superbug (you are a wonderbug like me, are you not?) & a lot of violet gem sort of oints flying around according to Lawes Unbelievable & mainly‑‑& this is the main part‑‑just a whole lot of overgrowth. Well, it was more like a kind of an ingrown overgrowth, except it was the ingroan & ingroan of a thousand special varieties (& blushing complexions! shot with the make-up gun? We're not telling!) of undergrowth which were the forerunners of some species of plant. The guys such as they were had all seen them.  They had all brushed up against them, or rather had them brush up from behind geeking them into that creepy, spider's-thread dance complete with coughing apostropophrcies, but then they fell into this Gip thing and... They all at once & together became violently suspicious of Gip.  This is the sort of thing that comes of cutting cut-rate brothers from the most tawdrid of subgenoic materials, lumping them together in bundles like your most forsaken clothes in their vivoid bundles, then cranking them out like you'd created some new form of life or something. But man, were they suspicious, or at least the external shell representing these scorched image of an erstwhile pose.  They had those firey eyes‑‑really balls of fire haunting the cavern of the vacant eyes, & with their lips & cheeks & cheeks & lips chiseled into some South American satiric gargoyle pose. "Gip, you * [expletive deleted for your life & pleasure.  Regret to report *n curses gash more deep than the gelatine can.  "Gelatine"‑‑that's slang for flesh, your kind of flesh, your kind of rotten, gooshey flesh]," wailed the ghost of the brothers now lost in the Deeper History, available only in the Deeper Archives, the Deeper Archives, which might be right here be might, but are nowhere to be found.  "You set us up with that tear-machine over there!  Decide your punishment‑‑quick, quick, quick!" This decide-your-punishment blip was an old talrak trick, a game for the wicked little denigrations of clay known laughingly as "children," also a mind-trick, by which the victim‑‑too stupid to fight his way out of an old gramic head-web, much less such coiled & like a wave recurling backwards itself according to the Completion Backwards Principle, which I personally should like to see rescinded if only it might turn just one more curl & see itself being rescinded, both from the outside of the flexive little sphere it calls home, & the inside, where all laws either begin or end or both begin & end from the inside out‑‑obediently & rather automatically rather automatically rather automatically rather automatically rather automatically blurts out the worst curse on himself from the Book of the Curses Unimaginable, from a section in that jokey chapter 5 headed "Curses/Tortures on Oneself: The Idiot's Section. But Gip was looking to absurdly inane within the release of his own lifelong accumulations of grief‑‑from widows, the lonely, also from the steam coming from those manholes along the clopping street...and from worse places, too...anyway, too placid to react by spritzing out some horrid torture, which the boys would then circle him with and, while not indeed torturing him, it usually being too complex for this quintet of drooling dudes, snare him in their effusive sneer of the thing. "Tear-machine?  What would I ever have to do with that?  I remember nothing, & believe this ship has once again driven you all mad." "Shut up!" But at least Gip was grief-free, compassionless, ready to do his job again, if nothing else went quickly out of whack. But then there were the plants to contend with. "What's with the plants, Ship?" sighed Gip, fingering some of the sapless, seedy little moss that grew down anywhere, between his fingers, which grew down also anywhere. TAKE ME BACK TO THE SEAWORLD OF FUNGALIS "Hey‑‑we're the passengers now," said the plants.  They spoke like a perfect chorus of ants, only with the willowing great wimple of a giant sneer, a sneer that was like an ugly oil-pool rainbow, all sinister & jagged in shape, though of course one knew these shapes meant something, only one was so overcome by boredom at the meanings of the bepuddled sneers to possibly stay awake, much less follow the sentences, much less follow the plot... The rather powdery-looking knaves‑‑looking-knaves not quite unlike nothing so much as a troupe of incompetent queens doing the scene at an incompetent ball‑‑looking up at the Presumable Area of the ships, but found only these grey & odorless weeds everywhere, especially from the roof, just falling & gangling about everywhere...but all down from the ceiling of the sheaves, like I said... "I couldn't help it‑‑they took over!" wailed The Inadmissible in a pool of plastic blubber. Everyone in the movie theater & everyone outside the theater & everyone on the screen, & the technicians you could feel, invisibly, behind the screen, looked down at the pool & up at the mushroom-covered dome of the spiral craft, all of them reaching the same thought, but at slightly different times, that the ship was incapable of really crying.  Seeing this, the miserable Inamissible changed his tune. "Forget I said that," he told them‑‑& they did.  "I meant to say, 'These are my new passengers.  They're shipwrecks like yourselves, only fungus [and here he shivered his timbers, creating a rustle of the leaves of imagination that just about everyone found amusing], as you can see, who want me to take them back to the Seaworld of Fungalis they have always wanted to see.'" & then he said pointedly, "They're paying me well," although the funguses themselves blushed & everyone in the known universe (for this was said very loudly) knew it was a lie, including‑‑& this is my point‑‑the lie itself!  & this despite the fact that THE MOON OF ANOTHER EMOTION Balb pursed his lips disapprovingly until they formed these Drupulating Vectors of Lips, great flushed globoids of lip, immense & startlingly lipsticked lifeforms of fish (from the Planet of the Red Fish) & he wrinkled them round as well, using their giant sphincter, & the other put on Various Queried Expressions from their own bright bags of Perilous Confection & they started rocking back & forth on their toes & heels, squishing a spot of fungus here & theroid, & whistling with their various lips & holding their hands behind their backs & looking archly at the Archway of Nothing here & there.  The Archway of Nothing was The Inadmissible's most stunning effect‑‑a wall of sequins falling from nothingness into a silver harder than the hardest pool every which way as it fell. "Having a problem with those lips there, boys?" said The Sentient with almost-perfect glibness, but for the first time it was hentient. In any case the only sound to come from these five sets of great lips was a string-thin, gossamer sort of "No," except the "o" was refashioned by velocity into a complete spaghettification of the vowel.  The fungus rustled silently. Someone‑‑it has never been established who‑‑pared his nails restfully, alleviating in case you wondered how fictional characters do this all the pain & the unfinished business related to his family, his sexuality, his survival, & his Con nectedness to God through his lighting of the sacred lamps within his chapel, where chapel is his body & the lamps tell you where talrakan chakras dwelled.  Everyone's expression came back to normal, as it dawned on even these five that The Inadmissible had just 1) saved & 2) all but taken what's left of their lousy lives. In a perfected-after-centuries John Wayne movement, just checkin' with the other guys for the sake of the sad, endlessly raining, consciousness of the camera incessantly whirling, taping time to the ends of time & then rewinding it back again, which both was Vekk's & is my worst imagining, Vekk said, "Guess we'll have to kill all these funguses, ay?"  & the others drew up their freshly-inked drawers & gave that Singular Nod that only cowboys give, & they waded in with their double-quintuplet of fists. At once the ship began to chatter in some sort of hasty apology, or perhaps it was meant to pock the moon of another emotion but missed, hitting instead the icy asteroid of despair, bouncing thence to the pallid moon of suffering, then on to the rogue asteroid of apology, as if The Inadmissible were now beginning to have emotions if not aims exponentially greater than their Maker's, much less the maker's intentions CUT to SMITHY, sitting in the empty hangar, surveying the loss of a tear symbolized by this impossibly complex ship.  Stolen, we all think together with him.  CUT TO The Inadmissible's sort-of apology. "I didn't want them," the ship stammered.  "They came about when I froze myself & sucked out all the air, so as to preserve myself for the next decision that would have to be made.  When I sucked you all in, they grew up in bunches like a volley of endless fists coming into my face.  I can't kill them.  No one can." But the soldiers grimly slaughtered on only to get lost within these wreathes which growed in on them even as they ah harvested their way forth.  Yea, this fungus was growing up right behind their swathes, & next thing you know the guys are lost, calling out to one another. each in his own bower of liquid flames, these being the famous liquid-flame fungi that had so far oergrown upwars of a thousand worlds, though they got along well with most species, who either never noticed them in the first place or grew to love them as a sort of atmosphere. & certainly your flamus liquidus fungoidus carried a loving atmosphere around its everpresent head, the whole thing being but an exfloration of a thought, which explains why they grew so fast, & grew within Th'Inadmissible's hostile darknesses, of which even these funguses thought with a shiver: the Hostile Darknesses. THE BROAN CAFE & indeed, the ship took them across the crystal network of lattices which held the sky together, then placed them at none other than the Broan Cafe, at the very crest of the ice-mountain Broan, a place no one could ever reach, which was in one sense a marketing misjudgment but it did keep the place very pristine & of course hospitable to the first & last of their five customers amongst the entire five customers the Broan Cafe had ever had, so there was no one to cuff 'em, despite their holding out their wrists submissively & with an almost yearning hollers & hollow hallows & holy shadows (where there were no actual shadows, not even if you cup your eyes) begged for arraignment but there would come no cops to snag these five brothers existing shivering at their glass table & the demitass brought to them, each like hot little flower, & they'd drink until the bitter liquid purged their souls & generally made them forget everything.  Every now & then one or the other of them or those would lean back in his chair, viewing the endless range powder-white mushrooms I mean mountains, & sigh & say, "This is nice. This is very nice," & other‑‑or perhaps the same one‑‑would say, rhetorically, "Where are we, man?" & then take a cup of the lethal tree, each cup brought on a platter by a shimmering figure they could only extrapolate on the basis of its warped reflection in the silver.  It was, in short, only the old forgetter-bar trick the ship had done. Their senses went a big whirl around the dusky worpools of gold* that stand for the metaphor of galaxies used in the 24th stanza of Freekissimo's Visions of the Drub, where drub stands for univers & where universe stands like a naked galaxy in mist, some vaporous form of space-dust that maeth you to sneese your brains right out, no kidding, & getting so wet, & yet still so very beautiful & when the senses came back‑‑each one feeling as surely as an eyeball refractid the whole universe in its refractive, fluent glib‑‑there was Fesh at their table surrounded by an absolute roseary of purely lifeguards lifeguards looking peachy as hell, & body guards & chemical guardians sealing him our stench, not to mention the guard of vaccinations he'd received against every new bug, invented by the nanosecond by the tiny but nonexistent I mean invisible but deformed I mean were but hyperactive brains or whatever they had down there beneath the Easy-Reading Scoop also known as the Scoop of Hell, resembling your old high school, but never mind) smiling & tipping his drink, irreverant of gravity, as the liquid formed as it fell too slowly a series of fluent scoops, resembling Beztor's (notorious therefroe everywhere banned wherefore everyone had read it) "Eroitical Scoops" treatment, thence through a vast inventory of unseen mental walls that he suffered to keep us out of, & there to a number of pints across the universe (I recall Foloria & Vell slipping there, Floria & Vell slipping like wet webs at dawn as your hand falls through them, along with other, darker places, something resembling a golden cave...), into his mouth, where he tasted & savored this most delicious nectar of the mind. WELCOME TO NO PLACE TO BE Much as lovers in your world do melt into one being, constantly fighting with itself & taking huge moments joy from itself, so Fesh seemed joined to him, as if he were the Sixth Brother the boys made up & endlessly talked about & printed in the universe & accessible through all manner of redundant suicide, I mean technology as in "all manner of technology & made up & talked about & printed in the universe & accessible through all manner of redundant suicide, I mean technology." Looking extremely comfortable‑‑undoubtedly through implants in the several pleasure of his brain, which actually was not much to talk about, so there went the genius of commerce in the sense of capitalism endlessly talking about itself, & he reached his arm to the table in that Universal Move of Reaching Slightly Backwards & pouring another drink so did Fesh pour another drink, and, with the exact same serenity which comes from the longlost text of Stealing Other People's Pleasure, a comfortable little bouquet of mubes Fesh himself had built, he began, in present tense he begins to take more & more joy from emptying the boys' tankards, drinking the fingers' worth in each shot glass & then sucking out what was left in the tankards, meanwhile the garçon gone completely away, another body in the oçean of snow down there. "A strange little planet," Fesh sade or said‑‑ostensibly to himself, but in Full Theatrical Mode so that everyone would hear or heard it. Lookatim crouch like Hamlet!  "Covered with this fine white snow that eventually consumes everything, even the crystal mountains, one upon which we sit."  He made a silent laughter, filled with contempt & a certain psychological stability no one had felt in him till now, before the boys who'd stolen his ship. "Little rivers of angst flow down to something," Fesh went on.  He was being briefed by his little Mental File-Keeper, we can tell.  "Possibly some dark Sea of Ennui which would kill you the instant your finger went in.  This is No Place to Be." The boys freaked out as they were intended to do, born to do.  Some people's conferred goals seem small, tiny like this one‑‑barely worth coming out at all, & this was so for the brothers.  We PAN BACK to see them doing their dynamic Dance of Unhappinesss atop the hill *, & within this view the enormous sadness seeps away, till we see them wrenching around, trying to pull off their own heads or crush the face of some one brother, & it is at first just ludicrous, as it always does if you leave, even slipping on your ass down the rough mountain of snow, amonst dunes immeasurable of fucking snow, while Fesh calmly drinks from a heretofore, hence nonexistent, dark blue vial, perhaps enjoying the show, but definitely concentrating on something inside‑‑his mental clerk or some other mental entity of which he was too full, unable to supply his boss with whatever Fesh wants & Fesh therefore Fesh needs. PLANET AMNESIA WUWU WUWU WUWUWU WEBBED WITH ROADS I forget what planet this is, but it's wuwu wuwu wuwuwu webbed with roads of all kinds‑‑elevated, multi-leveled, cloverleaf, suspesnsion bridges, or suspension bridges, by the industrious Bluj, those dominating wreathes of solid gel, odd in color, many colors, other colors colors you can't name but yet you see your selves within themselves the Bluj hold this color as their favorite sound, said to connect one perfectly to God, which gets into Rough Religion, which we will not any of us attempt to cure at this peculiarly ƒoft ƒmudge of time, pure time and the Bluj, as someone just like me was just saying, lived to work material, big alien craftsmen & alien engineers, using to the hilt the Ancient Technology‑‑doing everything the hard way, but always perfectly. With no imaginable need for bridges on Planet Amnesia, the Bluj nevertheless had forged, for they lived for work, compulsively devising & then completing their projects.  They were built so they could not stop, & so their work was everywhere. All throughout our sickly sector find we amazingly huge, amazingly solid, astoundingly delicate in their obedience of the physical laws, which don't change here‑‑anyway, amazingly ~ roads, bridges, buildings, & wonderous sewer systems exist all over here‑‑sometimes a godsend, sometimes a bore. But in both cases, one might say the Druj lived to be ignored, just as the subsequent centuries of incessant snow, that is, the subsequent centuries of snow, made all the roads & tunnels & tracks, the derricks & the mad I mean manned I mean blujed robots stop...and then disappear, as Amnesia threw her white chiffon coat over her face, chiffon of metaphor like snow oer her perfect face, so that you might never see the face bend the face in snow, not to mention your non-awareness of that sighing & snickering down below. VIRTUAL EYES NO ONE SEES THROUGH It's like young Dorothy said, smack dab in the middle of the epic Whiz of Oddard.  She says, "Gee, Toto, I'd love to kill myself right here!" & Toto barks the longest, most extraordinarily encouraging of barks throughout the next twenty brick stanzas, with echos in the distant reaches of this poem, so far along you see it only as icebergs & mist, just foggy icebergs & the thickening mist.  So you see, she lived out her span of The Wiz wanting more to kill herself than to fraternize with geeks & fight those monsters from the sky, say it now: monsters from the sky! Now that makes you feel a little better, doesn't it? OK so maybe it doesn't, but I wanted to talk about Fesh but was filled with the music of that strange bark, the dog obviously syumbolizing one of my   ccoouunnttlleessss aalltteerrss!!! ccocouoununtntltlelesessss aalaltlteterersrss!!! cooonnnlllsss aatttrrs!!!      Most boxes ignore, but this box don't ignore.  Don't you dareignore!!! Author seems to be cracking up.  But anyway, I find that when one's species is virtually extinct, one has no desire for anything except death, which brings us to Fesh. Like most of the riche, Fesh had long forgotten what wanting anything might mean‑‑much less what wanting to die might mean‑‑& had all psychic wounds healed genetically & chemically, also ritually & causally lived without sex, an unceasing BrainXtender™-induced superorgasm keeping him in a pretty good mood most of the time.  That's why Fesh's eyes were always rolling up, by the way.  For formal occasions he has some virtual eyes no one sees through, of course‑‑like you'd put on your dentures. He & his rarefieid kind were perfectly transparent, almost polymorphic, living in a warm tank of primoridal illusions, all of them very gratifying lived without gravity, mated & reproduced by sex & other, more exotic, much more pleasurable means & cleaner means more likely had someone or some thing so these things for them so that he evolved a race of no-gravity kids, kids who‑‑because all they ever did was float‑‑grew very wide & fat, but relatively thin from top to bottom, like swelling, illl-made pancakes or that rubber float you blew up till you fainted in your lungs or the gross yellow creature xrawling awkwardly on a leaf that you relexively had to kill & yet even more reflexity have to run, which of course you did even as we all did, all at the same time we are talking Focal Time here, the singular current of time which is the same for everybody, no matter what shape of time, if time at all, were written in the tablets of the harddrive of their univerts & so. & they were smart, these flat kids.  Translucent so they didn't block their father's sight (& then their grandfathers' sight), & smarter, as the unspun by which I mean de-hexlix'd laws of genetics dictate here, so the house‑‑more like a generation ship than a damned house by now‑‑was soon filled withzsoftmubes, projected thoughtforms, that were perspicuously perfect yet incomprehensible, at least to the poor. & the kids were so huge it would take three more generations to create a way to get them out, by which time they, along with the house, which house which whought about nothing but growing, that was its only thought, that house...and anyway, their smartness was not shared.  They floated about, bulging with flesh & genius, like a swarmy smarm of specialists too deep into their own constructed thing to learn your hyperlanguage.  That's just how it was.  Home is never heaven, as you think it to be when you're away.  No, home is hell.  Home is always hell. Within his gut did Gip grip all the facts in the world.  Not actually, but he did have this compulsive need to know everything with which he came into contact‑‑& there is some weird stuff & spooky stuff out there‑‑& he mubed everything thoroughly look, it's like chewing your food, though we lack food here.  You have to clean your plate & chew down every sickening mouthful.  You get the picture and read things & talked strange, elusive experts & the occasional sage or two, & he went down every event tunnel his thoughts could bear.  Lat'es face it‑‑the man knew too much.  It seems unlikely that Gip will play a central role in this story, so I will not mention him but when he somehow acts, OK? OK. THE CAMERAMAN WHO PHOTOGRAPHED ONLY WORDS Gip swung gipswung into action, pulling the clogged mudflowers from the cockpit, then the others caught on & got to helping him, digging & scraping the nasty vegetation of which the ship did seem so bloody Proud. Finally they had a hole to crouch in (you could here The Inadmissible smickering his Special Snicker in the ozone there), then a cockpit-shaped hole, & finally a dirty cockpit, but with instruments visible. Gip slid like the memory of a circus into the captain's seat.  He turned off the gravity just to have some fun with his bros, whom he realized he had hardly known but was now ineluctably in love with, so after some comical struggles & bumps, they swam over & floated like bedizened divers with everybody's head held close. "Let's go!" Gip cried. "Where to?" said The Inamissible, with unusual‑‑hence, very suspicious‑‑seriousness. The brothers were forced to stop everything to figure out this one.  This "where to" question grounm to a halt at the last brink of intelligence they had.  They had to clear the decks, & that meant Bob, my director, the Cameraman Who Photographed Only Words, & the rest of the crew, plus anyone or thing supernatural, plus etheric bodies that might be shaped around & astral bodies like big bloomy spheres filling the room, generally with sadness. Alone, the brothers pooled their resources...   Time Deleted Time has been deleted here‑‑a great deal of time.  Take heed ye.      ...and in the spin of a galaxy, they figured it out.  They suddenly understood why a sentient ship such as The Inadmissible here might, when you told him to "go," ask you where you wanted to go‑‑even if the machine, as with The Inadmissible, probably had no intention of taking them where they said, unless of course they were trying to psyche out the machine by asking to be taken to a horrible place‑‑such as the mills of poverty or the Core Polie station, just east of Ragwub Boulevard & south of the Capri Building, standing out very luminous & tall in its raging pinkess.  Yea, that's it.  Yes‑‑they had pink cops.  But anyway, if they tried a little switch on the ship, the ship would take them, in this sad case which is sadder than that sad place, to he problematic place he had the unspoken but definitely felt the big compulsion to take them in the first place, or very possibly no place at all, ejecting them out somehow, or killing them with the brush of a moment's thought.  Or it might have something even worse.  It was useless to speculate further‑‑which even our mystically conjoinéd bros could not effect. So they shouted "Everyone come back!" & they shouted loud & long, for many of the thickets of beings & creatures at all different levels of energy & solitidy, some of them for example existing as barely-tainted fields, & some even less, with no name nor description to give them countenance‑‑many of these were upset, so it was like herding a goddam flock of crazy lambs or lining up ten cats in a perfect row (a glowing thought, but equally effectless & even more unatttainable)‑‑it took one of the ship's Spare Eternities to do. & when it was done, & they returned to their floating pose, Gip said "Go!" again, & The Inadmissible said "Where?" whereupon Veck whispered something into Gip's ear which the others felt, & they began nodding enough to break their necks encouragingly. "To a small café in a foreign place, a place where nobody goes," & you could even feel the ship nodding with a dizzy sort of snapping feel.  They had done it.  These pitifle critters had meshed their heads together & come up with the place The Inadmissible could not help but to have taken them. @END...p. 200? Yea, they sat at that sad cafe.  It started to snow.  A bird with a camera loaded with words in the peak of his beak flew round & round them, giving you one of those helicopter shots of the top of a mountain, & the men there sitting so still they had to now & then come back to themselves & shrug the powder off.  End of the novel, Fesh & Sumor both thought. It started to snow, having forgot it had started to snow. "End of the story, I guess," says Gip, glancing to the left & right,, though at this altitude there was no left nor right. It started to snow.  The individual flakes on this place (which has never been found, possibly in part because not a soul has wanted nor dared to try, & The Inaccessible refuses to comment, just letting the strobe-lights flash over its darkly wounded hide & its darkly lying hide & its concealed wedges of thought you feel right in your brain)...the flakes as I was trying to say were made of a fine material‑‑a majestic, gleaming substance wrought by God knows what chemical oxymorons & phantasm by a long lost race of conjurors, who clearly cut costs by reducing memory to that of a sleeping bug.  We are all sleeping bugs at one time or another, by the way.  When we almost wake from sleep & see some light formed stolidly into shapes but do not comprehend‑‑then we are as smart as those flakes, wafting down like dreams or a bit of dreams or a little bitsy bit of dreams or a tiny dollop of dreams or a vast cascade of dreaming dreams (this can happen) or like a billion billion gurus with their legs knotted up, fluttering their knowing undulations in their own sweet flakey dream. But‑‑& now to finish the story of the snow The Story of the Snow the Special Snow the Plowless, Infinite Snow & the Dizzy Sanough‑‑the flakes were all the same, stamped out on two to three hundred little worlds too far from their multiple suns to be anything but snow machines‑‑so you had these chintzy flakes of this godlike material falling on you, an indecipherable experience if ever there ever there was one (& there has been not). It started to snow, & it snowed in a very slow way, & so in the slow snow did we ripen like frigid sap, did our saps cool & thicken in a way amazingly like yours, & within the wide whiteness of the flakes another snow started to snow.  It started to snow & that ended everything.  Everything the viewer came to see was ended by this snow, in which of course did another slow snow start to fall, each minor snow exponentially colder than the one before, but at least smaller, & then a still smaller, much more blue snow falling like a volley I mean folly I mean of edged constellations, a very sharp snow which, in a cause-effect sequence, would have ripped our friends to shreds, but instead separate, smaller snows started falling from miniature snowclouds‑‑ miniature, I said, but very happy & robust like perfect murderers, able to charm any court into springing them ("Just Don't Do It Again!" chuckles the Judge with waggling hand.  Everybody goes home in the blizzardly snow.   Every body goes...home.)‑‑but enough with the handsome clouds (but they were lookers, I'll tell ya, they had these prominent ascending ramuses & a great angle to their nose & the curly ears with the falling round it like that thirteen-year-old, blond kid you had sex with so many times it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt but anyway) ...miniature, sharp snow falling from personal snowclouds, over every head, even Fesh (& if you thought those others were lookers‑‑wait till God pluckth of the veil aboard the astral rims of this baby‑‑O!), & like I said that was pretty much all that happened, all that I can say without starting in to actually lying, oh, except for Fesh's constant nodding at the Amulet of Desire then at the brothers, then the Auggua Amulet, & so on.  The guys became the gems, you see.  Forever has its chains of cycles, too, you see. Bictor's butt whistle doubt a tune, a bit dudifully, & like the rear pannel of his rear flannel pants blowses into this big fucking balloon, or so the Legends (the Legends of the Lie (living the dark (parenthiated Wood of Lie where where you can pick lies right off the stem, & begorege thyself, amen, & you waddle, a miscreant) an optical) obvious) the Miscreant Legens say, & so what we have within the dark waddlings of the syntax, or the whiter, cuter swaddles of the syntax, where Syntax is held to be the baby boy who will save the world, though there's a hell of a wait involved.  Let us wait...and so we have two nasty words & either nasty or funny depening on the "Taste Set" programmed by these Strange Star Creatures deep-into you.  Bictor's prone to all manner of ill-mannerd sulliness, & it is not his fault the naked, translucent, & increibly biped aliens struck him up & gashed his damn'd liver down, & it isn't his fault they dumped the into his sweet-seeping bulb of a bulb of a body & dropped there in all the unhygienic retension factors, corrupt corpuscular elicitations, & awfullu unsanitary segments of the great, illusory, Worm of Bad Thoughts, that's the Worm of Bad Thoughts.  I give you time to write it down. Dysfunction. Whoa!  What happened there?  Did time maybe stop for us there, because we were in danger, with a whopping solar flare coming up or maybe just a crash or spontaneous snap of the edges of the ship against the Ghetto Fault right next to the edgy jointure where we live‑‑nice whte house, almost too many segments to spontaneously count (unless of course you have a Counter, but Counters are rare, they are small & mean, they smell, they are uncooperative, they live under houses, a thousand of them live under our house, they could carry the damned house away if they wanted, they could toss our whole fucking flimsy house into the great blue formless space that lives outside of us, always fondling us...but we know for Bad Reasons...either trying to get into our world or suck our world through this great organic straw into itself, which is creepy, which is what those of us who are not insane not insane think think, but what they do is count.  These are the flimsily-built, temperamental divas of this universe.  In a good mood‑‑impossible to predict‑‑they will count anything for you: the number of curves in those paintings full of abstract curves in the element of the sibcurves & the subloops flaming over them, & somehow‑‑some new elemental variety of paint that hooks up your brainwaves assuming you have a usable brain somewhere with this metatechnological fucking paint, so your own thoughts about the ultitude of curves become themselves curves, involving you in a sort of inward spiral of gyrating, loopy looping curves, making you a World of Curves... World of Curves.  This will not be on the test, but if you fail to remember this, you die, which, however, will also not go on the grounds of your central curce.  (Did I say central curve?  I...I didn't mean to give that away.  Pause while I cry & count my tears, cry whilst a Counter squatting near carelessly counts my endless tears, & tells me precisely how many of my tears did flow, with a language of numbers so far no one has been intent to understand...) ...but there were no counters despite their rabbity breeding habits not available at that time), which makes it quite a house‑‑but I diverge from the original Big Bang, the puffing of Bictor's skirts, in anelemental moment that created all of what we paroxysmally call Time, but I diverge, I diverge & diverge myself into cyces, into slices to rare to hurt me or to see, & I think, Bictor is so fine, and "Sorry," a palpably smaller little Bictor says in such a boy's high-shooting voice, one of the many voices that the Natural Child explains (I will explain later, if I don't diverge), but I do diverge, don't I? Bictor anyway says, with such a perspicuous ingenuousness that everyon is stunned, not by his fart, but by his sweet simplicity‑‑ certain shade of Sweet Simplicity a bit harder on the yellow beams of light, great yellow beams of light streaming from a mirror, carrying us away. THE IDEA OF THE WARRIOR & Bic was wont to say, ripping a smile the width of seven ripped Yrordial Rainbööz which are fat as you could want through the evil shades we wore, in lieu, not just of eyes, but of solid facial matter of any kind there & therein & therehownow, the shades flipping from black to eons & from mirroir to ego, all in a trice he'd say this way & with an emphasis spelling out the latter part of the upper echoes of Lattisimor's Last Symphony No. 6 as they blew out the {astral stratosphoric balconieres}, adding to the furious (& unstoppobable (& uncontradictable (& waffleing (& baffling) & tuneful) & spirited) & white-horsed) strain the {equally inadmissible strains} of all those people dying‑‑at this, or that, the first, & last, performance of this great Symphonic Ego Who Wouldn't Die's Sixth Last to the Last-Nth Spathy, as I said.  & in like wise Bicmeister brag'd how he use Special Alogrithyms of his own design for our Empty Fucking Flight, the damned lying bastard where lying means irritating one (1) whole string of memories, just like the snap of that, so it would be in the farm of a form of a form of a Magnificent Fountain of Light (!) or succession of cascading rapids, or the pain of the bloody rapids, or the evil ecstasy when you strip off your clothes & vault like the Angel You Are™ on into it, as if we were you know Flying Three Ships, so even all those cops would never get us. Now the rest of us (when we weren't being him, 'cause we was still spinnin'!) thought the chances of Gip‑‑even the crafted glass version of the caxted graph virgin of Gip that was as I say working the controls‑‑could dnot even for an instamps idge do-dodge this Magnitude of Cops, Magnitudes of Cops, Galaxy of Cops, Galaxy of Rotten Cops, Roughneck Cops, Mean Cops, Tough Cops on a star where your bones melt so they can maul you round mullch besser‑‑cops gone totally bad, cops gawn compleatly mad, mad cops in a universe quite obviously of cops, a Moste Dangerous Place, Galactic Fuckin Cluster of Cops, copspace, cop-reality & the foci of intelligent particles in the space betwixt atween the clusters of supergalaxies cause I mean they had some magnitude of cops here, if I could only find the words, each a world each full of sylphlike figures wrapped in wavering cloth, each on a lone rock in the midst of some corny yet incredibly effective sunset, each with a tiny yet real heart, each heart containing within it the emotion that I am looking for, that I need enough to do anything to anybody else‑‑& that's the kind of thought a soldier needs. The lead soldier at the center of the City Square needs thoughts.  That's all he needs‑‑just thoughts.  He doesn't even need a war or a corps into the which he would be designed, no no, he just needs the thought. He doesn't know this, of course, being as how he is so fulsomely blissed out... Aw hell, let's givem a thought.  But "What thought?" a very pleasing voice of someone I would like to know, whom in fact I am aching to know, indeed I am dying to know...someone I would fake death to know, pipes up, & we realize we have no thought!  I mean, we aren't made like thoughts like made thought made like you. Images, maybe. Movies of some kind.  Thoughtforms injected by others, like nice drugs or nice viruses.  But definitely not our thoughts. They paused to watch as two twin Vuor Comets shot on by.  A Vuor Comet was simply another group of peoplefrom another novel who have fallen into the fabled Vuor Reducer & been math'matically denatured down an infinite slide of increasigly faulty slides, ie., getting smaller & smaller forever, or so our jolly scientists' sleepy-dream. Behind each comet I mean each comet you can see vaporous trails of fogged alogrythms *, vapid yet somehow ugly words, crystalline hlf-skulls, once used for medical training purposes, languid birds too fat & lazy to sing, but not to belch whenever the TV comes on, more half-skulls made of glass, rotating slowly as your half-glassed skulls will do! "Twin comets passing by," sighed *, who at times felt the need to narrate things, thinking to himself (as I can hear him‑‑shhh!) Wel hell, SOMEONE's got to do it, & thinking on, sans italics, That's our trouble.  That's [only not in italics, of course] our trouble!  Our narrator never showed, but we tried to do the show anyway, what with vapid comets & some sort of blown-glass words that never took on any shape, not to mention the tortured neural webs of various meanings, the Web of the Various Meanings.  We jut started out urselves, Bob dircting us from his Fabulous Flying Chair.  But it's no good, I can see that now.  We never should have started‑‑not without the plot.  We never should have started till he came with his sheaves & books & fixed his floundering glasses and...talked to us, gave us shape, like a father, giving us a meaning, like a brother, giving us at least one bloody chance to escape, like a sleazy clark with his feather-pen deliberately snooting our dozes there. Yea well, after a Vuor Comet's gone by, you can't help envy those people, who escaped from the story the narrator tried to tell, who escaped any delineable form of existence under any big thumb, big Cosmic Thumb.  & here were two comets, which puts you into a goodly long fugue, & these two being twins, which makes you so high you have to clutch the earth to keep from falling off‑‑what a day. (a novel of sorts by Kirk Hampton)