I walk down the street in my shady blue eyeshadow sticking my legs into baby carriages and fending off the requisite mothers with great swats of my eyebrows, which send them reeling into New Hampshire, which houses them for a while and then urges them to explore new possibilities.
In the darkroom I emulate the work of Fritz the Cat, who was known to adhere to the principles of modernism except when exploring the virtues of CIA-sponsored gases--these are the times we normally see him.
The pictures show the mothers sailing, sailing, like vagabond, derelict paratroopers. En route they shuffle their recent decisions, notecard by notecard, establishing in their order an aesthetic compromised only by their refuge in the notions of Giotto.
It is a difficult thing to not emulate Giotto.
The babies tickle my feet, which annoys me.
One notecard: "Thursday I will sort the menage of my recreant bludgeonings. List to the side of dilemma!"
Another: "Bankruptcy fueled the fascists--live with it."
The notecards land in Iowa or sometimes Michigan as the mothers think about other things, including my eyebrows. I have one photograph of a mother thinking about my eyebrows, finger to lip, her own eyebrows furrowed to the roots.
The New Hampshire authorities are fed up with me and write letters one per week, which I stow on the ceiling of my bungalow, eventually burning the lot with a gilded candle on a silver candlestick. Several of my neighbors have hurled their fists through the dividers in order to peek. Flames, flames, upward through the roof, into the sky, throwing the soot of New Hampshire authorities letters in an arc whose less than explosive endpoint is often myself, preparing to fling a disgruntled mother into New Hampshire.
Note the disparity: while New Hampshire is urging the previous mother to explore new possibilities, all the while clothing her in the best manner likely, it sends me a letter of the following sort:
You are cordoning vast cataracts of the torrential blossom of the human maelstrom from the gaze of the mother-on-the-street with her condolence carriage, ambling, ambling God only knows where but somewhere, and you with your flings. You with your brows!
Two things to note: the highly-wrought figures of speech and the lovely error of calling the carriage "condolence." Is it condolence walking? It is. The baby cannot walk; the baby is plump and nosy, a dim hoard indeed; the carriage is, on the other hand, as fine a stand-in as any for some of the things that some mothers lack, which leads them to pump themselves up and live with the error.
Perhaps there will come a time when the authorities of New Hampshire will stop their endless inquests and paste their 25-pound 50% cotton flammable bond to their own ceilings and see their own neighbors hurl their fists through dividers. Perhaps that will happen, and then I will throw a modest celebration in the bathroom of my new home, which will be likened to Camelot in all the popular journals