OFLUXO

Here, now, the dream of un chien on the loo: Two-fifty in the morning, and the blows begin.

Dry run for a spaghetti western. Set in crepuscular sepia tones, spurs that tumble into a weed-infested cell, flour, oats pouring into crevices unseen, glass bursting forth from inside pleasure domes where the johns and the whores bury their night shit.

The townsfolk: Mrs. Miller in the saloon with her eggs and his slobber pooling on the splintered wood floor, Zeke Washington hopped fresh off the stage with a Jew’s harp, Samson Corey in charge of the pound where some nights they gnaw out each other’s legs, most dawns they nap pillowed in piss and steak blood.

An auburnt stench, whipping rain, the sewage river into which sloshed cowboys will fall punched in the throes of desire stoked, sating delayed, some paradise that evolves into a tropical postcard’s mirage — and how hard the sorrow. How unmussed the banker’s anvil. You try to focus, and the scene escapes me.

Stumpy laughs in the wings, janitors marking the morals on the floor so the players can better see how to collapse. How to bend.

A stubborn jog-in-place, more mystical, more liberatory than if they had cruised forward like on the Southern thru-ways.

Inevitably, the cattle-rod emerges. For they refused the Cohere.

Some were asked at the scene of the crime what they saw. A few forgot. Most sipped their whiskey, crawled in closer with their furry ones. Almost none, however, thought to knife the king. By the time you read this, the knight will have been reborn. The mothers will brew their lemonade. Mrs. Miller will keep guard, gossip, reveal a relentless nothing.

The bandits have long gone. They’ll have left three-dollar bills, tentacles, arms with the cigarettes still attached, two business cards, a severed ball with hair, vomit, smeared mascara from the tornados, our canine incisors. Inward, inward: they parry’d, repelled. Squint with your might, you’ll sense that they left no key, barely a clue. Yet squint, we must.