A sackful of rubble upended from the rafters.
The years, as they are wont to chime, have not been kind.
Springs eaten at by various body fluids protest and expire. Explode. Cockles and whelks sewn beneath the waterline disintegrating in clouds where fishwives dance in lead clogs.
Pablo Dillinger, errant choirboy, sibling to that medieval guild, is never hasty. Too rotund by far, a portly disciple, he is slow to respond to flattery or jibe. "Later" is his mantra. A Vedic hymn fallen on deaf ears mostly.
A sullen mediator. A sulky correspondent.
A Prussian brat.
News comes to him that some words or other have been published in Sacramento, of all places. News falls unheralded out a trove shipped across the seas, greedily received, plugged through all the same by this dreadful pause he is powerless to commute.
Red and black. Well, more of an orange. Dusted with ochre.
It reminds him of the thirties.
Bertolt deconstructed in the wings.
Bottle caps studding the stage where the have fallen on the comet tail of Kristallnacht.
Skulls.
Even as the first air strikes detonate benignly, the scaffolding has come down. Labourers have fled. Joiners, painters. Bakers of bread.
Pablo carefully unfolds a yellow slip. Until it occupies the space served up on a napkin.
8½ x 14, halved.
No staples.
He hoovers up the ballpoint.
The brotherhood has been busy.
Fuck, yeah.
It tickles him immensely to learn that the word is right now in the process of being dispersed, undiluted, to see his initials in print, to think of entire paragraphs dribbling into corner culvert incontinent, or spirited away half torn under the windshield wiper of a runaway blue and silver civic bus.
Fuck the Ministry.
The primary content is thus. A 9mm parabellum handgun, fully oiled and loaded, manufactured in 1969, parcelled in a tricolour of vests. A panther on a leash.
If we are not yet despondent we are disconsolate, nonetheless.
No fleas on Ahab.
He already has paid six years in advance while on remand waiting.
