Chapter 2

On twin tails of a comet penguin men polka dot the night------ waddle white suits past pale the white Empress Night, flickering graveyard stars ---a pitcher of inky black upended in a choir and manger

II. Lowing of the clouds lowering overhead like bombardiers rifling the Firmament, black braying back.

III. Millpond, satin and creamy, then buttercup crush of waves

SERENADE

A green flotilla, verdant armada stone hand encased in an arm of ocean off blue-grotto bay.

Something avuncular where land meets sea --underdog, whipped cur, adult "son" posturing to the elder, pontificating man.

Melaque after dark or was it Aguascalientes'? Monterrey at sunset prior to "the" pop festival or Morelia, on eve of feasts to that native patriot'?

Vera Cruz, 1915, at the height of American occupation with Pershing tailing the hirsute Pancho Villa in Sinaloa outdated rock & gunboat diplomacy --no longer exotic fare plate of frivoles, fried banana Mahi-Mahi.

On the palette, dreams are fickle, subject to "drunk and disorderly resisting arrest," outmoded and fuzzy with age.

Policeman of the Olmec intellect, you dance late on feather boas this Mariachis of the soul with glittering purse and yellow, travelling nectar Tequila.

HIDDEN AGENDA

Mariachis, almost a Spanish temperament within those stars, --a screen peppered to black, pebbles as pinholes bright in the night air.

Winged bats, moist velvet foot-pads that spring from ink spots onto an El Greco canvas where Garcia Lorca's green, Andalusian hills find the wind a gypsy bandit sage, red flower of the cacti, ballad to rakish cloud.

A ship shamelessly at sea-- the scorpion cloth of open wounds, dark implants, sturdy oak constellations, English yew spouts tremulous shafts across weather-burnt sky.

A dock in a prison of rose-petal harbour. Piers along deep, inner space. Our planet, rockface. Sheer plummet. Accordion of white light.

Up green ache of mountain the muffled sound Goya's Colossus, the head of the giant voyaging thru embroidery and stellar, black space; tombstone lock on a pulsating world.

ADVENTURER

How desert islands in a cartoonist's imagination invariably are flat, palm-studded peopled by a solitary, abject yet humorous man.

In real time, no delight; such islets are razor hot, rock sharp treeless, barren slabs ... examples of art shirking, but not shrinking life.

Three days growth of beard, bottle with note on the incoming tide comic survivor swimming up (tramp steamer in the distance), shirts waved in unison predictable disappointment et al, glum hands to face then the inevitable credulity splitting retort amid plaything for the crabs.

SLIPPER

When I was very young onto school, a slick of water curled under a behemoth, silver poplar tree ... there, white underbacks of leaves waved in showy pride the dead underbellies of bass ... as tall boys, big with rakish, probing, anthracite eyes, stooped in the creek their red, exposed flesh colour of school brick.

HELLULAND

We built bottlecaps off ship's sides (soft, cedar bough), Viking masts shining thru imagined Norse seas.

Sporting logs, (sweet, cedar-wood shavings) piercing beer hats/silver foil, grey wraps & burlap, Atlantic capes, our twin peaks soared.

New Found Land (a child's faery shrimp logistics aide-de-camp simplistics) marvelled tale of warm, butter moon with outpourings around penknife's blade.

To tame Sutton Hoo, (I am very close to myself tonight) bronze copper, cruising wintery water, Anse aux Meadows, occasional dirt shack skraelings, jagged blade & arrow backward into time for Helluland, yet marooned in the Land God gave Cain.

TRINKETS

My mind a buzz saw, wood chips in decapitated thought soil chilblained hands

II Cleansing wood, the keen smell of sawdust --good, raw earth drenching the nostril, clean odour of nature like my brain, a broomstick sweeping the coffee pot speaking ... bubbles massed in steam inchoate in their pensive rivulets.

A THIEF'S NOTEBOOK

Baggage. Banal brigands, turn-coats, stiletto to dirk appraise warm flesh upraised over a pie-shaped sky, bread crust moon.

On oyster rock, with grinning, red hibiscus, jute and henequin smother the lavender caress of stars.

WARHORSE

Taken as metaphor ... Ophelia's funeral oration, derogatory snout of the Morning Glory breathing pollened fire overladen steps of the church.

II Limestone rock caulking in grey limpid cracks ... doublet and hose then gold doubloons down sunlit honey where a smear of red lichen onto brown-yellow moss colonizes rock.

III Poor Ophelia, dicing for a sedentary-free Hamlet, duty-free of fissures + frost.

IV Elusiveness, water rushing over stone torrent of words (Ophelia receiving these), red hand of the berry swollen shut, prisoner in the dock bird of quarry, pit & gunny sack.

V Night plummets to quarry, sky to earth in brazen glory. Magic of the palm spans an upturned hand ... "To each his own nothing's known."

TEETER-TOTTER

He was Popeye the Sailor Man --at least in Picture book and poem the mind falling from a drooping ledge, thrust of twilight though working up to the bargaining edge of words ...

Then, synchronicity and cuteness aside, the all too old pretending became the gaping edge of Popeye's spinach can, a soul lost not to Sweet Pea or Olive Oil, but barnacle and rip-tides of a brain slipping its moorings free.

CHEMIN DE FER

Had I been a gambling man, eschewing the "shoe" of chemin de fer ... perpetually perched upon that throne ... effete kingdom of the dice.

II I am that gambling man ... taking free access to many a natural habitat, lure of the open road, contents under a bottle cap, the riverine delicacies of female flesh. Svelte, like the croupier's green vision of cloth, tingley-trigger smooth yet addictive to the touch.

III Or the pleasures of Ovaltine (not necessarily the brand name) ... by the handful or cup ... upon a summer's day, the mind blur of expensive art.

IV Blackjack. Three card stud. The poker-faced look of many opponents peeling cards from the bottom of the deck, some ear-marked for success with time-honoured stratagems (& doctored hands) that leave me reeling (or is it nursing) patent-made regrets.

V Something primeval about wanting to trade up your fortune at the expense of the House. Ambuscades. Indecision.

VI Games of chance the apt metaphor of our daily roulettes.

WITHIN REACH

There are two images, a moon within reach yet trapped under snow-- an old woman's threadbare shawl with peasants furiously working brooms scraping ice shavings into howls and husks of frenzy.

Ii Then the same pond, this time summer with fishing nets, and briefer shawls pirating light's wanton swoon, a spyglass hour moon all bathed in yellow colour of kerosene --a rich creamy butter-- goldilocks let out on weekends her spun, golden tresses lowered onto the water like so many little boats nimbly hopping aboard.

lii A kerchief folded on a fence a man wearing an overcoat living there in white satin swooning to the pianist's expert touch down magic chambers soothing, soothing there to fold and tear the pileated moonlit edge of her skin.

COUNTESS

The pig's head omelette-- something akin to a tatoo buried squarely on the upper torso of the man wielding an axe, chopping wood. Shoulders drooped, the bizarre rendition had a female counterpart --a snake, fitted like a fish-net stocking, coating the upper leg of the dancer writhing to music, so soporific, near the copper shield of the table, ever-molten ash, air-borne with the foetid smear & puff of cigarette smoke.

COUNTESS II

Imagining the smoke burnt imprint of a tatoo with tapers flickering, the bejewelled gaze a dragon's snout must bring or the serpent coil, crimson flame curl of dashing cobra, its very fangs drawing lifeblood from the fleshy perch in smooth, red scorching.

On the pectorals of a sailor. Perhaps whiplash of the granite waves, grim trucker with a "Mother" grasping chains that see burly sandbags in place-- hirsute biker, cords of hair lashing his tattooed lady the lavender caress of scar with implant that of the chopper itself, her fleshy buttocks careening off the road.

PALEFACE

Old Sawbones, pale as a sheet, white sand, whispering edge of the sea.

II The mind tarries not one place long, (longitudinal wanderings off a map). Is shiftless, both a shirker (and army deserter) devours like larvae, a bullet ledge for leaves.

III I saw in a rusty tankard a gallon drum (ghostly galleon at that), a tin can floating for all the world shores of its alkaline prison, pirating salinity with anchoring sounds, brackish bench-pressed sound of waves wedged between far-off distant gulls and mezzanine, dimly-lit funeral parlour of the sun.

CUD

There were a series of three animals --wise men I propose-- interchangeably looking (throwing off their guises' as non-sentient brutes), scrounging the grass (eyes foddering me) chewing on looks, cud-like, -one a black goat shorn of his devil look and a burro, mood entranced, in armour of mangey velvet.

II Swinging bells, making me believe the twilight caper that morning lay more in reindeer's breath than any solidarity with oat or hoove.

III A strange lot, they'd ramrod their gaze with blare of lightning, peering into some primordial instinct one normally tucks onto a sleeve or cranny when thunder strikes.

IV Pelting rain, the white mare, streaked more like a camel with her own dung and manure, (shadings differ) the sun a tingling dew refreshing cantaloupes; the sparkle of their walk investigating me in solid cacophony of faith.

V A form of worship, to be exact, the Christ-child in a manger we four in shared trance a growing sluggishness to their fear building by prospect of food and inter-species bond.

CURRENCY

One of the cows was Belladonna, another Nightshade still a third, Witch's Butter-- the farmer in question responded with an eel in tow that resembled a hoe & a Raggedy-Ann calf with an elixir for a tail & a spendthrift tongue spreading its way thru the emptied grass.

REFRESHER COURSE

And he told them "the universe is a ripe apple in heavenly consummation with Newtonian physics". Comparisons grew rife with planets in the cosmos measured against all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.

Sobering stuff, this astronomical speculation. Each sun a star fathering an impressive roster, its "family" in the earthy scheme of things.

So one kid spat on his shoe and asked if a gob, hypothetically speaking of course, could be likened to a solitary ocean.

GHOST TALES

With leaves twitching the autumn air and the burnt almond breath of landscape heaving relief, the afternoon heavy-footedly walks across evening's threshold.

II A garment is held high as adrenalin in the marble glow of wintery air. Mud puddles reflect the faery shrimp of clouds while cone-shaped coniferous trees perch on lawns like starlings.

III High above to skating and sugar-icing rinks in misty hues, a ginger-bread man manoeuvres past the ghost tails of a dead luna moth.

WANDERLUST

Who administers to my needs?

Is it the dandelion, so ant-encrusted, that yellow pollen dangles from a shiny abdomen suggestive of some actor's smeared and garish make-up?

Or the cicada's song, difficult to describe, laundering thick summer heat?

Perhaps, then, the Red Admiral butterfly especially active at the close of day and drawn to wooden lawn-furniture or the exposed human limb?

If none of these breathes vigour or tonic through my nostrils, what of tubs of fresh water?

Take pea-pods for crude, rudimentary boats and children as make-shift sailors, then they both shall spy the secrets of seas. Bold harbours will be their cues, astrolabes their hatchets in which to chart many a perilous adventure.

A volume of Tom Swift and his Motorboat tames the haggard breast, soothes the savage beast.

A trip to the fruit-cellar beaded with moisture and clammy with imaginary threat, chastens the cobweb from the dusty ledge and sees a privet-hedge hawk-moth trapped against the window-pane (a dark spot pressed much like a pirate's patch against both time & space).

If meandering and nearing journey's end, think twice. Better red than dead. Brooding MacIntosh apples stain a slippery floor but the door to the orchard is always ajar.

By night, an "I And The Village" Chagall painting draws a lad (and landscape) to stare and stare. Thickets of wild-grape, strawberry tendrils, two hares boxing in the meadow, a Winterspoon or Whip-Poor-Will towering above groves of walnut, lilac. Night air is fragrant (and lush) through a peep-hole and gate-way to the stars.

Barns with ricks contain pitchforks like a mis-shapen mask protruding ever so faintly sinister in silhouette through a visionary sky.

Remnants of ferret skin, lie interrupted, upon entering the chicken-coop.

The soldier drinks, his tea and egg-cup abandoned.

I don't have to go anywhere. Dark and moody, there is an arsenal of thought with stout marshal batons in my knapsack.

The power to be led (and lead) stiff memory in rum kegs and wine casks. The brooding entrance to another world, if not in the palm of my hand, then very nearly a shout and stone's throw away.

PASTICHE

These shell-queens, too, are blithely catpaws, shorn & musky acorns with indexed fingers erect at manicured attention.

II ... Showboats with green faces far as swallows fly, a lilac in oasis ... scarlet bream ... blue ointment where the ocean is periwinkle patches, a robin's egg clarity pressed between blue-nosed tavern wall & bottles clinking.

III See plush cords, the suede interior svelte & slinky an upholstery simonized with natural springs where bubbles encounter founts in apertures, the rich measure of open ground or mezzanine curtain slit along a riverine walk & jungle clearing.

IV Twilight. Golden tulip. Golden olive, "Fool's Gold", a lithesome snake-girl gyrates her dragon-flared, limb-length tattoo with red-eye dots itching in emerald waiting; footpaths overhanging serpentine curves or laser beam dancer legs, paddle white, under angel tint of stage-light.

V The cut off jeans compete with campfire glow ... slipping a musket-width, nostril breadth around turbans, bonnets, bubbles. Murex.

VI ... Elegant white ibises and egrets stand like sentinels; herons flying in their wide wings braking and their long legs dragging ... and the snaky-necked anhingas flapping and sailing into spread their big wings to dry in the sun.

Sa nom m'etruit

Her NAME escapes me Nomen fuit

Just the faintest hint of spring

UU

MM

MOTHER of PEARL with ODALISQUE.

BOCA

"Nature abhors a vacuum", theorists of both philosophy and politics assure us.

What's more, the phenomena is not confined to mere physical science given the nature of human opportunism. Glance a map of central Europe for further insights. One side always replaced the other when a "common," enemy expired.

Boca might well have studied such eventualities.

Boca was a writer. More accurately, a "touch-dancer" with the written phrase, deftly painting the catchy one-liner with effortless ease and grace. Boca knew his craft, be it the arena of story, poem, drama, (it didn't matter the genre). Unfortunately, his oeuvre remained fixed and static. Boca never progressed beyond titles.

"A right, jolly good thing, too", said Boca in his own defense.

The short burst counted most, whether in thought, sport or field of battle. The utterance of a single breath. That was it! It all lay in the aside, the pun, a retort, the récit. If this were all to the story, there would be no doubt whatsoever; Boca excelled.

"In the briefest expression, perhaps", said the critics. But, as they were quick to point out, it didn't lead "anywhere".

"Where is the larger, more important fruit? His finished verbal passion?", intoned one.

Still, this chance fortune led to the inspiration (and success) of unusually vivid titles.

But ... titles? Just "titles", said others nervously? Yes, proclaimed Boca. Titles. Not epithets, or rejoinders, cat-calls even repartee.

Not even wit in the normal understanding of the term. Just mere titles. Bushel-baskets of them. Worried looks crept onto the onlookers' faces.

Encyclopaedic came the flowering. Ad factories should have tapped such a larder. Any creative department could have done worse than with Boca's dripping imagery and gift for the keynote phrase.

"There is majesty here", said one, "and more than a little Blake. I am reminded of the great symbolists."

"One has to be practical", cautioned still another. "What's here is hardly epigrammatic or even purely an aphorism in any truer sense of the word."

"I'm simply perplexed", said the man finally to his colleague and both left without further ado or thought to Boca's work.

Indeed Boca loved his words, tinkering with the very essence of language.

"A great beginning", cheered a rare voice. "Let's hope one without premature end."

Boca continued to conceive titles by the hundreds. He didn't merely dream up a few, in snatches, he proliferated them in vaster and vaster quantities. It was if a salmon left to spawn could endanger a sea shelf or river bed under the sheer quantity of her seed.

"A one-man explosion at the typewriter", chortled an onlooker, happening to see the quantity of Boca's largesse. That was before he stopped to inquire of the nature of Boca's work. Then perturbed, this same man hurried away to the utter indifference of Boca who kept a steady pounding in spite of the interruption.

On they came. More and more titles. By the hundreds-- for scripts, larger dramas, treatises, epistles, monologues. All. And all without a scarce concern for their ultimate use.

Are we to believe each one came to naught as the sceptics predicted? After all, in this practical world who has use for dreamers? We already know Boca was stymied at the title level. Nothing ever graced his newborn creation beyond that first utterance. It was like sending a baby into the world without proper bedding or clothes.

One nastier commentator even alluded to Boca's work as the equivalent of premature ejaculation. All buildup with no satisfaction. "The promise", he chuckled, "without the delivery".

And that is what came to pass.

Each of Boca's titles, true to prediction, came to "naught" or, rather, nothing much. Blank. A zero. With each "title" one ran aground on the larger abyss of its central problem.

That being, as Boca had been warned by his legion of critics, "one of size".

What good are titles without textual description, chapters, scenes, the "overview?" said one literary agent gruffly.

Boca, taking a respite from his typewriter, had had the temerity to approach one such man in the comfort of his office with reams of suggestions.

Indeed.

People shook their heads at Boca always scribbling furiously. Always working but apparently accomplishing precious next to nothing. "Something" was evidently being done in the strictest sense of the word, but what? What?

"Could his ... well, problem be explained?" one vocal opponent of Boca urged.

"What the hell is he up to?"

Strangely enough, for the seemingly longest time this did not deter Boca. He was his own universe. His feet were on solid ground. The air about him teemed with ideas. He was too busy fishing for the "mot juste", he explained in a moment of clarification.

"One man in the right is a majority", proclaimed Boca, remembering a snippet of John Stuart Mill.

Too busy was Boca replanning the structure of the Colosseum so it might better accommodate his label, his notion, his re-christened version of the ideal verbal escort to accompany that ancient edifice.

And write Boca did. Titles fell increasingly from his pen.

"The Barking Tree."

"The Leaking River."

These were but two. Boca thought he would improve on Tolkein's efforts, at least in the direction of title. After all, to send a work into the reader's lap without proper introduction was like trying to get acquainted without the proper introduction.

Maybe Boca had a point.

"Assembly without Hope" and "Nirvana without End" touched on his mystical stage. He dropped this and proceeded into the area of historiography. And afterwards, dry epistemology would see him concentrate his efforts. These forums were indeed worthy of his attention. Too long had they been neglected. All were in need of good, metaphoric dusting by title.

At last word, Boca was inching toward Kant's, "Critique of Pure Reason".

"That one, in particular, has a poor ring", he was heard to say.

On they came. Precise. Hard-hitting, or so he thought. They made the mind's eye swell with the promise of more and more. Indeed, that "eye" could get bloodshot reading all of Boca's interception.

But the "more" in the sense of the follow-up, the "delivery" or accompaniment of pages never came.

Nowhere was there to be found the Hemingway to follow the "Moveable Feast".

Or "The Edible Woman".

Even the promise of thrillers for a scary submarine epic like "Three Eggs on my Plate" never materialized.

Nothing. Just titles. More, then more and increasingly more of them. Annoyingly so. Scraps of paper decorating a table without an intended victim ever coming close.

It was as if so many salesgirls had left price tags off matching merchandise. That's all that remained. Just the stickers forlornly, white and detached, staring up from their adhesiveness.

More than just a little tacky.

A woman given to comparison confronted Boca.

"Imagine a zoo where the curators had all the animal names, but they were not paired with their owners. That's your stuff. Everything in a weird isolation."

Boca could not be Borca and not even Carl Sagan could rescue him. No large bottles floating in formaldehyde with the decapitated heads from Belle Epoque sailors were possible here.

Boca was more obscure than Gaspirilla Island. More so.

And a final verdict, if there is need for one, can be seen in Boca's last will and testimony.

He let it be known of his intention to chisel the "ultimate" one-liner. One to grace his own tombstone. On this he set to work with a last burst of frenzy.

"To mirror my tragic-comic fate", as he would have said.

Perhaps Boca is still at work, either on the snappy final wording ("the right elasticity") or in the mechanics of the engraving itself.

Only a stone-cutter could estimate the probable expenditure in time for the latter.

Novelists in dire need of fresh insights should enlist Boca. He's definitely available, if difficult to reach.

Boca might have rescued many a masterpiece from the dustbin, if not the Box Office, had his specialty been known.

I look at Boca and hear fire bells. His plight remains the very stuff of tragedy. By epic standards, how many Bocas are there worthy of a balladeer and myth maker? Credible Boca may be, but understandable?