Vasche Vexvelt. Imagine Babylon. By Moreno Franco

You Are Here...

Look at how easily you slipped into this Babylon of a city,  with all of its lunacy and intransigence, the booze, the drugs, the sleaziness, the laziness, the divorces, the porno shops, the naked encounter parlors, the weird people wearing their weird clothes, driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways, Schmaltzing their way through each others night life as if they’re are all the best of friends, in the filthy air with its glossy foliage everywhere, and badly decorated interiors, and the restaurants and bars having the air of hollowness: like a slick movie set.

It is a certain cheapness and trashiness which bothers me more than out and out evil.  Like a music video which presents the promise of drugs sex an’ rock n’ roll – but which any one going there cannot handle too well – because.. well..- because now It Is Really Happening To You… every one is living in Hollywood.
Designer crime, cell phones, plastic sex to match the plastic cards. . .  wishing it wuz reel It’s a fukken miracle - more so that I am alive to record the last days of Arm –a - geddon out ov here

I always believe that if I keep sight of my own values – You can fight evil. But trashiness is insidious, :slipping around one, and slowly permeating the soul.
I personally don wanna go there… not in that pig-swill. Might mess my mind. Even worse. My Clothes!

Then I gonna be real bad-ass crazee about getting you laid out all nice and sexy special like, on a rail-road somewhere where, you c’n kick ‘n scream until the steam train rolls over your sorry trash arse.

Now you want to live your “Real” Life in this city, not running off to some distant star, like I am. And I never tried to coax you to come with me. Because you cannot go there. Not with me. You have no ability to deal with the exotic and the bizarre because it is not “Real”. You prefer the reality of the intended – with out going there your self. You aint worth shit!

You need:  bonds, mortgages, appearances, overtaking the Jones’s, properties cars et al. Apart from the fact that you can drive fast but not well.
Like to eat well but cannot cook.
Nothing wrong with any of that?

But do it with someone who believes With You.

You See - Smoke and Mirrors

Sometimes we miss this important factor: the longer we have lived, the wider our experiences have become, the more complicated our lives become, and eventually we are bound in so many interactions; a web of emotion and circumstance and event, that nothing is simple anymore and everything is subject to interpretation.
Interpretation, however, is a waste of time.

I disguised my intelligence, which allowed me to manipulate my peers and, over time, my superiors.
My insights into the intelligence of others, and the slickness of avoiding unpleasant situations were a conflict resolution technique, as well as a survival tactic.

But, at least, I developed such a flair while I was doing it.

The world is full of designs, patterns, coincidences and cycles that appear to indicate the existence of some magical power. And you might forget that these things are the result of subtle natural process.

Even the most logical interpretation is an attempt to bend mystery.  To herd mystery into a cage and lock the door on it. It makes life no less mysterious. And it is equally pointless to seize upon patterns, to rely on them or to obey the mystical regulations they seem to imply.

So my one effective course against you  was Entrenchment. I at least, admitted to mystery  and the incomprehensibility of my situation. But I had to shore up my web, clear it of blind corners, set alarms. I had to plan aggressively. In the beginning I had merely reacted to danger, without the forethought to challenge it.

To survive, I had to become the monster of my own maze, as brutal and devious as the fate I sought to escape.  It was a kind of militant acceptance that you practice without being aware of it.

Yes I can tell
Heaven from hell and Blue skies from pain
I can tell a green field from a cold steel rail
A smile from a veil
Yes I can tell

I was looking at you and I felt the pressure turn hard in my chest. I knew none of this was real to you. I had never been able to penetrate the screen that existed between you and the rest of the world. I felt the coldness filling me. A coldness that had nothing to do with sorrow.
“I don’t get it”….
“You will if you live. Do you want to live?” I asked.
“Yof Course”
“You will – if you stay away from me”, I said

It was hard not to run when I turned and left you - I felt my breathing coming more freely - with each step I took.

When You Wrote To Me While You Were Away

Ipanema Graca

And you my little Ipanema Graca? Thinking of me…So afraid that I would come back in a “JIffy”.
Porra Conchita! Nema sono ti.

“I never died”, said he.
“I never die”, said he.

For all the heroes going out, how many were boxed, shipped back, expired in their floating miasma of choked off dreams and tears – a menace to navigation, a pollutant to love and affairs of the heart: and all the family back home gets is the memorial flag.
Scores of candidates must expire for one or even two to win, you said.

Always a merry shrug: “Save me from this place, adore my body, explore me until I melt away, Fall into this sky so blue”.  Sunrise in this bed was a mystical event & I should forget, lest I get killed accidentally, when my survival instincts back-fire, I know you would follow me thru’ the Gates of Hell.

Our jealous quarrels: Over my dead body – I said.
Yes here we go into a 3 part digression already. Talking of a subject deteriorated into two other disconnected states. We rush – Jealously. Sinking in exposition, as in quicksand.

Well things deteriorate right enough. Everything is deteriorated. Deterioration everywhere. I know this is not what it used to be. But us? we lead on party to party, el supremo disco, and no one ever to contest the fact: that we may be crazy, but we cannot be stopped, especially La Dona Contessa del Conchita Isis.

I think your theories are crazy. But not crazy enough to be true: How can we live amongst so many wonders and not be overwhelmed by the sheer mystery of existence?  Our knowledge is so small and our conceit so great

I was never at a want for words.  Too much to say, that was my complaint: every thing to get said, and all at once, or I will forget it. Already I forget half of what I have written, or half of what I was in a mind to write. Pen cannot keep up.

“A man with a watch Knows what time it is
A man with two watches
Is never sure.
The same thing applies to women...”
~In my Father’s House

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