The Soft Machine

hanging out, unfurls the nastiest colors of the spectroscope.'

A hard-faced matron bandages the cunt of Radiant Jade—

'You see, dearie, the shock when your neck breaks has like an awful effect—You're already dead of course or at least unconscious or at least stunned—but—uh—well —you see—It's a medical fact—

All your female insides is subject to spurt out your cunt the way it turned the last doctor to stone and we sold the results to Paraguay as a state of Bolivar.'

'I have come to ascertain death not perform a hysterectomy,' snapped the old auntie croaker munching a soggy crumpet with his grey teeth—A hanged man plummets through the ceiling of Lord Rivington's smart mews flat— Rivington rings the Home Secretary:

'I'd like to report a leak—'

'Everything is leaking—Can't stem it— Sauve qui peut' snaps the Home Secretary and flees the country disguised as an eccentric Lesbian abolitionist—

'We hear it was the other way around, doc,' said the snide reporter with narrow shoulders and bad teeth—

The doctor's face crimsoned: 'I wish to state that I have been acting physician at Dankmoor prison for thirty years man boy and bestial and always keep my nose clean—Never compromise myself to be alone with the hanged man—Always insist on the presence of my baboon assistant witness and staunch friend in any position.'

Mr. Gilly looks for his brindle-faced cow across the piney woods where armadillos, innocent of a cortex, frolic under the .22 of black Stetson and pale blue eyes.

'Lawd Lawd have you seen my brindle-faced cow?— Guess I'm taking up too much of your time—

Must be busy doing something feller say—Good stand you got whatever it is—Maybe I'm asking too many questions— talking too much—You wouldn't have a rope would you?—A hemp rope?

Don't know how I'd hold that old brindle-faced cow without a rope if I did come on her—'

Phantom riders—chili joints—saloons and the quick draw—hangings from horseback to the jeers of sporting women—black smoke on the hip in the Chink laundry —'No tickee no washee—Clom Fliday—'

Walking through the piney woods in the summer dawn, chiggers pinpoint the boy's groin with red dots— Smell of boy balls and iron cool in the mouth—

'Now I want you boys to wear shorts,' said the sheriff, 'Decent women with telescopes can see you

—'

Whiff of dried jissom in a bandanna rises from the hotel drawer—Sweet young breath through the teeth, stomach hard as marble spurts it out in soft, white globs—Funny how a man comes back to something he left in a Peoria hotel drawer 1929—

1920 tunes drift into the locker room where two boys first time tea high jack off to 'My Blue Heaven'—

In the attic of the big store on bolts of cloth we made it—

'Careful—don't spill—Don't rat on the boys.'

The cellar is full of light—In two weeks the tadpoles hatch—I wonder whatever happened to Otto's boy who played the violin? A hard-faced boy patch over one eye parrot on shoulder says: 'Dead men tell no tales or do they?'—He prods the skull with his cutlass and a crab scuttles out—The boy reaches down and picks up a scroll of hieroglyphs—'The map!—The map!'

The map turns to shitty toilet paper in his hands, blows across a vacant lot in East St. Louis.

The boy pulls off the patch—The parrot flies away into the jungle—Cutlass turns to a machete—He is studying the map and swatting sand flies—

Junk yacks at our heels and predated checks bounce all around us in the Mayan ball court—

'Order in the court—You are accused of soliciting with prehensile piles—What have you to say in your defense?'

'Just cooling them off, judge—Raw and bleeding— Wouldn't you?'

'I want you to smell this bar stool,' said the paranoid ex-Communist to the manic FBI agent

—'Stink juice, and you may quote me has been applied by paid hoodlums constipated with Moscow goldwasser.'

The man in a green suit—old English cut with two side vents and change pockets outside—will swindle the aging proprietress of a florist shop—'Old flub got a yen on for me—'

Carnival of splintered pink peppermint—'Oh Those Golden Slippers'—He sits up and looks into a cobra lamp—

'I am the Egyptian,' he said looking all flat and silly.

And I said: 'Really, Bradford, don't be tiresome—'

Under the limestone cave I met a man with Medusa's head in a hatbox and said 'Be careful' to the customs inspector, freezed his hand forever an inch from the false bottom—

Will the gentle reader get up off his limestones and pick up the phone?—Cause of death: completely uninteresting.

They cowboyed him in the steam room—Is this Cherry Ass Gio? The Towel Boy or Mother Gillig Old Auntie of Westminster Place? Only dead fingers talk in braille—

Second run cotton trace the bones of a fix—