Cut-up Experiment


His prosecutors turned the words on.  He was sitting in on the
prisoner term having shaken the world of someone standing over him
when he felt the large shadow view of a man who from the bench looked
up to see him humbling around in a halfway house with the inmate
others, subject to chronic fudging and revision.

He thought he knew all that was to be feared most about crime and
punishment.  He was dead and panicked.  Since his arrest they had
found a pulse, but he spluttered and said, “I love” and I love only.

He ended up with a number, and spent about nine months of it on marble
floors and a piano.  But all he could dance, all he could plunk out,
was I love and I love only over and over again and he assumed the
stare as if sight had departed from him when that shadow had
descended.

Fuck knows what they'll say.

I've been forever pondering the if onlys; well, 30 years now...  but
I've been possibly the most intriguing of lovers.  One in a selfish,
wolfish pair.  Feral creatures, they excuse our horrific behaviour and
watch on, helpless.  We should not be permitted into the homes of
decent people, yet we have gained a reputation, told mostly through
letters, as romanticized, idealized lovers.

Because authorial imposition (or “filtering”), allowing deeply
introspective and mentally exhausting fascination was denounced as
glamorizing existence outside your imagination, we fill an important
gap.  We fill an important gap in society: The (duplicitous) Life.

See, an author will kill a character to preserve her sanity.  In the
process she becomes bald, stares at a photo on her dressing table,
saying, “That's me—depressing.” Not that she would let that stop her.
But then, see, they send us in: he's plunking out the if onlys and I'm
rolling around on the marble floors.  Feral creatures.  Enter the
contractors.

“Look, we've got a situation.  Book in the study with a knife in its
back.  We need you to deal with the culprits red-handed.”

Well, this hulk needs a little more incentive to get him up off his
toy-piano stool, so I hack off one of the contractors' arms and wave
it under his nostrils a bit: “Killing to be done, honey.” The other
contractor's holding out a piece of paper so I stub the bleeding end
of his friend's arm on it for signature and toss it back to the dogs.