I opened up and said hello hegemony and you said hope you like the new
aesthetic. We consensed a while. There had to be some 50 foot trees and
there they were. I wore a hard hat. You wore the Sierra Nevadas. I played
guitar. You played bag-pipes. The airbags came later. How you loved their
surface. The trees were eccentric and blind in their own way. Fred entered.
My beauty scared him so he stole a rifle and deployed it among the furniture.
I controlled the fruit. I purchased a small dirt farm. You leased some
airwaves. Fred went into encryption. He fried an egg while wooing encryption.
2
We chose a city and said hello, people. We described our projects in
fun English. I used worms as workhorses. You aimed arrows at the 39 bus.
We discovered beds and bread. We used the bread for pillows. Fred ate bread
and said thank you for the bread, bread god. We all said thank you to the
bread god. The worms were spinning and calling for bread. The city was
very bread. I bought a shoe. You thought about the surface and asked if
the surface was a god. I gave you a book and you got smarter than Fred
and me. You raised the worms high. Fred took the bus and worked the
city. He used coupons and built a personal empire. He looked at his teeth.
We made American quilts and coverlets. Everyone changed. The quilts and
coverlets were for the bed. We looked for more bread. We saw a man. He
wore two shoes. His name was Murphy. We said we beg your pardon, Murphy,
we want bread. We followed him to a place deep underground. He held us
in his arms and said here is your bread. The worms called us back to bed
and we formed a parliament. We crafted policy. The policy favored worms.
The worms got stronger.
3
I named myself John Cage. I said hello my name is John Cage to the milkman
and the fruit seller. They said do you compose and I said I compose the
public good. They saluted me and said hurrah for you, John Cage, hurrah.
Fred said he wanted ownership of a small dog and a big car. We asked what
he meant by that. He gave us his philosophy which was defeat expectations.
I drew a picture of the dog and the car, and you named it Fred’s dog and
car and Fred said thank you for representing my car and dog. Shortly he
showed us core values centered around the integrity of the ant. He showed
us discipline embodied as ant dance. We learned slang like cup o’ noodle,
asset class, and tailored to suit yr needs. I exteriorized “is that lingo”
and Fred said you are excluded for a time, guy. I thought to cry but then
I demonstrated like a group. I sang the people’s song. You professed a
proverb. Then I wanted ants. Ants to observe and play with, ants to be
the god of and ants to learn. But the city was anti-ant. It was an experiment
involving new apartment complexes and you did not like that.
4
Fred built a bus and named it Unlikely Ant and pushed it to the bus
stop and said get in ant haters because in me there is the power of many
ants. At the stop courageous and charming Riley said two proverbs and a
homily about ants gone wrong and offered some original music. Riley enacted
4 ant problems maybe 5 on the sidewalk and gave us lessons on how to solve
them. The lessons were rhythmically reinforced. We said thank you, Riley,
but we don’t need art right now, we’re full of bread. Riley said here I
am, a lonely Neanderthal among Cro-Magnons. We said what can we do. The
answer was build a cave. We built one of wood and recyclables. We liked
the cave so much we kept it for ourselves. At the intersection the enforcement
official said hi, ladies, where are you going all dolled up and we said
no place in your ken, officer. Then he asked us for our mood sheets. We
dolled down quick to the contemporary basement aesthetic. Riley in his
harness pulled the bus. A group in a flat space shared much despond re
the general city plan for 2020. Fred seconded that by adding a slash after
his name. We had a meeting and outputted the bus as bed. We thought about
bread and changed again. You learned the word gigaphone and said it to
the world as an aggregate. The bread had weevils and we wove them with
us. We hopped and grooved against the city plan. Reliable Riley, said Fred,
thinking of the bed. We were relatable ant-inspired beings in a moving
bus, our cave wobbling above. Our privacy policy was playful and energetic.
The source of our difference we kept hidden in our cave. God had been orchestrating
this. We performed easy-to-understand skits dressed like certain ants we
loved. We performed logical. You compared god to a back hoe. Pigeons ate
birdseed off my chest. Fred savored social work originally. Reliable Riley
died from a malignant brain tumor. You tried to cry then showed us your
new look. The bus plus cave stood still. Fred trained himself to smile.
I portrayed myself as a romantic rogue, a romantic rebel, a romantic rascal
and changed my name to Romantic Ron-Ron. I reinscribed the Romantic tradition
on the city surface via the Internet and history. We celebrated us. The
city plan was growing. We waited days for something to say. We said more
bread for the dead and played dead. As a network we did. So we dared to
die square on the city’s steppe.
5
You thought we pleased no eye and taught a serpent to ride a tricycle.
Fed up with bread we turned to clouds. We drew them down with fishing line
and clouded up the tundra. Fred strapped a cloud to his back. Such fragility,
you said and brokered an effective relationship with some strangers. We
made a new city and named it The Place of Places. Then we made another
and again named it The Place of Places. Neither place was a good place
but each place was our place. You coaxed a joint task force to manage the
collective memory about deceased dignitaries. We had angels then lost them
and it rained non-stop. The people in our Places of Places turned against
us in the non-stop rain. You turned and looked up at the sky and said,
god take it easy on us, we’re low-income dummies with low body esteem.
A hand-like structure came down from the clouds and snatched you up to
a space shuttle made of whale bone. I saw that in sleep therapy. I awoke
voiceless and symbolized this event to Fred. With the aid of a vacuum cleaner
and a juicer I symbolized it. To solemnize your Wraith Among the Stars
status we played foosball on a table hewn from Glenn Gould’s Steinway.
I won big and Fred punished me by wrapping me in Saran Wrap. I cursed him.
Boo-boo I said. Big dumb boo-boo. And he stopped his wrapping. We were
fun and helpful friends again. We became more than friends when we decided
to get gay. Getting gay was an easy move through music and magazines. But
now that we were gay we didn’t know what our next move was. Fred said a
good gay move was to help the needy. But we are the needy I said. Fred
said he knew and helped us through ritual squatting and Tai-Chi. I swallowed
some kind of bug. Bugs had discovered us and crawled on us in our sleep
so they were easy to swallow. My bug crawled slowly around in my
stomach. Then you made your feelings known to us. How did you do that?
How? You said to follow you to a place that was pure g.o.d. “And leave
The Place of Places?” Fred said. You said we should think less about place
and think more about the illusion of space and about the debt we owe to
our sister world. You taught us and we believed you since you were invisible
and we were not. We followed our feeling of you, which was tingly and cool,
everywhere. We travelled to the local biscuit maker, we went to the races,
we went to school. We used key terms, which you had painted on our too-long
tongues. We wrapped our tongues round reality, round the legs of children
and the tails of kittens. We raised our arms to support your heavy heaven.
We danced a dance that sent out a new idea of the city; then we shimmied
the old city away. We sang real loud:
