Exquisite Corpse #2
Cantilevering across the causeways, the visions became speckled eels. Yet no one dared think of them as slippery, rather, slick. But the trick, you see, is how you grasp them by the tails. Thinking fins Alfonso began to studiously rub himself with teriyaki sauce assuming that the transition between surfaces licked should be seamless as possible. The blades of grass band players needed to catch their breath. Putrid is insufficient when it comes to describing it. There isn't anything halfway about it: there is a story there somewhere. "Consider the alternative," someone soon declared. More professional wailers arrived than were necessary. It became a tintinnabulation parade. The ringing in his ears was disorienting not only scrambling his sense of balance but also his sense of how objects were arranged in space relative to ear other with the result that he was afraid to make even the slightest movement for fear of falling down or bumping into something. Ting-tang, ding-a-ling! Ting-tang, ding-a-ling! or so it went. And so it continued going neither moving forward nor backward nor sideways nor anyplace at all just frozen in place. The brothers Rigor & Mortis, were having a battlefield day. Yet this characteristic spike persists in her EEG. From a distance it seemed so silly though, to think that one family's entire existence could be so intimately tied to three little words: death by hanging. All this surprised Ludwig greatly given as he was to bouts of vertigo and periods of anxiety so intense that he was unlikely to go outside regardless of the weather or the occasions that might await him. When he did venture out, he required a companion, a safety net which was most often a giant stuffed rabbit named Umberto. How one goes about naming objects of an inanimate nature is largely determined by the semblance it has to the thing which it represents. In the end, however, the dead stay dead. Many were the times we tried (and failed) to stop the abominable course of events. It was unlike those carnivals upon ocean liners, and those ocean liners filled with inconceivable delights.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot
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