Pedro Biscay is conducting terror in my bathroom.
Pedro Biscay is formalizing my filth.
I trace the paths that call to be traced; I revel at the infinitesimal moments of discovery in conversation. This is, of course, to confirm my conversing. I do.
I do converse—I’ll let that be first, guessing there’s worse.
So, yes: I trace and tread and place my faith in the fjords of Our face. And, inevitably, I ask: “Have you been visited? Visited by a small man—a man about this tall (and here I gesture to them)? A man named Pedro Biscay? Has he visited you? Has he called?”
And as I wait I slice ginger and sing—
and tell silent stories of every patient eyeball interred in each frozen waterfall.
Though, really, I can already know which way the wind blows—blowing from the first (and knowing what’s worse). I can already know, already say, because I am visited by P. Biscay.
In my periphery, he’s stood by me: ‘neath countless highways, beckoned by endless, ravenous halls.
In my infancy, he’s played with me: drumming clamshell rhythms under the guise of Rimbaud.
We’ve gambled up the Gorge and ambled down the Avenue, lugging secret recipes of the great chef: Count Janou.
From the tops of trains Pedro gives lunchtime sermons, jumping and humping and shouting and purring:
“We are all fixed in the matrix of the world! Cast forth, cast forth!
Tumble and hurl!”
(I can’t help but sweat and sob and pull at my ears,
jeering down at passing ostrich auctioneers).
I trudge and heave like the Night Chimney, and call out: “En garde, Sir Buzzard!, we are unrestrained—the fresh pheasant quiche replete in our veins
& saintly ragged sorrows can no longer
borrow;
I leave old decisions in their desert-mountain reunions.”
Then-A Great Unravelling!
I lose the mark of the Seven Djinns for questioning my sins.
and Pedro—well, Pedro leaves, for a little while.
He has gone, clad in argyle, down roads where ideas lie prostrate upon the earth that birthed them.
Then—Tumultuous Latency, Tantalizing Litany come careening for my unfrothed expectancy. They’ve gotten me sick and gotten me weary.
HMPH, PUFF, GRMF…………………………
No more Big, I will be Small. No more flouncing and sweat-ensconced now in bees,
it’s best I sit:
After I trace (for I’ve traced enough), and after I tread (is there bread enough?), and after I cry (is the sky the stuff?), I begin to smile (because They often do) and know that there is nothing left to know and no one left to bruise.
Spin me a story, stolid and self-affixed!—don’t spare no details, girl!, of the ways of Yourworld.
Pedro Biscay, back from track & train, kicks off his boots, and I do the same. Outside, the weather makes clear I have nowhere to go, nowhere for to steer, and somehow, wonderfully, no way to complain.
I pinch and mold Ears out of red clay and prop them up to listen.
