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notmuchtoconceal · 2 years

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The Best Carpentermass Ever! [Excerpt]

- who do you think you are?

- simply he who thought himself into becoming himself.

- that doesn't mean anything.

- we are carved from the same cliff face, father. you're a fool to think you'll ever find fulfilment in the adoration of others. what you are to them is simply an excuse to dream -- and in their longing, they will always come to resent the reality of you.

- you got a lotta ideas. don't know where you got em. certainly not me.

- my humility, in all its falsity, offends you with its frankness. you are weak before me because you covet, father. that this can be mistaken for strongman leadership is simple inattentiveness.

- big guy! big guy, kill him! kill scribbles! do it. do it now!

- what will you do, father? i am a force which you can neither suspend nor subvert. my supremacy is apparent to vegetables of the ward and field alike. i simply am, and in such a way that awakens the perceptive to the truth of things. i am a raw, unflinching engine of creation. i pull from the dry earth canopies of wheat and slash them in bountiful harvest. you father -- you awaken only the yearning for slavery! you are the cloven mandible which spitroasts the human spirit! you instill pride in the worthless and enmity in the worthful! i do not wish to be brash, father -- i pray i flatter you with the depth and elegance of my critique -- you are a man of taste, i argue and implore, today, tomorrow, and have many days before -- but you have written checks intended to bounce, and so with regrets our ricochet must roll back to shorten fat lips far out of bounds!

- the gun! the big gun! whip it out! blow his brains out. his pretty face off. he wants to be art, let him be art. make him splatter. make it happen.

- i meant my every word with the utmost sincerity, father. i cherished your renegade spirit. your open embrace of your innate discordance. i saw in you the primal evolutionary force which motivated me to fight and long to die for my country -- to bleed out into the cartridge my every frayed and tassled synapse, mended in crown metal spirographs to a force of root-gonadal aggression which rent me in twain as it reconstituted my fibers! ( o ) : -- i have written your promises in the papers, father. i have let the truest value of your words shape my goals and motivate my actions. i have written your promises in the papers, and thus they will be true -- for we sing our songs which make the herd dance. these poor souls who cannot love for themselves and so cannot fight for themselves -- i do not delight in degrading them as i degrade myself, but i am only one man, father. i am insulated. i am envious. i am amused endlessly by my own capacity for cruelty. i cannot give them everything. i am aware of my every lecherous, vain, and wicked impulse, and i succumb to them with gusto when it will titilate the fancy, but i cannot give that which is not wanted! i am oh so terribly sensitive myself, father -- as are you. there is no cause for shame, for we act truly in our hearts with the commonness of family.

- the what.

- the open embrace of the base is our truest love! we beautify ourselves for flattery -- but oh. doesn't it stir something in the floors, the depths, to know i'm flattering myself for you, father?

- how are you doin this.

-it must be my award winning smile. so few, it seems, can appreciate the gift of a gilded ear from a silver tongue.

(- brass balls, bro.)

-thank you, thank you. my factless autohagiography shall be on sale tomorrow in candor of shopping strata plaza for zero scrouples and fewer sense!

- are you guys followin this?

- the technical language and literary arts which languished so long in our country father -- these dreary, plodding monosyllables echoing off galley walls, deadening the neurons they course through. we degrade our country to so openly hold our masses in contempt! the people of a flourishing state ought be warriors in word and deed, balancing their meagerness in the world with the infinity of their cosmos, for if all men strove to walk among the highest spheres, we would rise like helixes of gravitational debris right up into the heart of the sun!

- he's still alive, dumbass!

- joey needs to expand! joey needs to consume! joey will drive water from water to separate in its centrifuge what is muck from what is crystalline! the power which arises in obedience by its nature obliterates. there is a time and place for obedience, as there is a time and place for obliteration! if a man such as i can find pleasure in servitude, men such as all of you ought find the pleasure in rebellion!

- bzzzz. bzzzz. wrong answer!

- one must restate counter-truths with such alacrity they string the mind to taffy, for how else do you play them like a lyre, father?

- it ain't music. not to my ears. not to anybody's.

- they talk of it as self-flattery, to emit pleasant sounds as though a songbird ( o ) :-- as if it was not simply in my sensuous nature to make my tongue dance for you! to have you sway and hang and caressed ~ stirred in the grip in every gonadal tap of my scant and scintillating syllables, as though i were not intimately loving you in my own way /~ a way which you spurn, as though i were showing off my learning? my learning you too could learn (notice how free i am to gift it!) but the brutality with which i bash a skull, or the grace with which i toss a javelin into space --/~ in these you covet and crave erasure ... it sickens me, father. it sickens me as an animal does lay dying in the road. the impulse to violence ought best serve mercy. what are you craving father? you reveal only your own piteous lamentations -- the depthless self-loathing which corrodes you -- the sad, sad, sad, oh so sad and common instability you share with the whole of humanity! what appetites lie festering in your black heart? if i can't rend strings of lyric love for my sires and brothers, how am i to be a good son, father, or a good anything for that contrivance of matter? i turn to, still, in some faint and vacant corner of myself for some light, some warmth, but you are not the depthless void, you are not a distant speck -- you are a black hole all yawning and you crush all light i give you. you cannot come near me. you will consume me. your emptiness is annihilating. you're nobody. how can a man as miserable as you live day to day? i torture myself, nothing more, when i feel for you, and as i was a compassionate man, i have subjected myself willingly to torture -- for the sake of my state and art alike. oh, how a good boast can raise the spirits now and then! perhaps it ought help to periodically remind oneself that arrogance is a symptom of high spirits, not something in itself to covet -- as it helps too to remind oneself that small men covet small things!

(- nobody's lookin at brux. nobody's lookin at brux.)

- do not bray like a pack-ass who yearns to be bare more than cargo, father! the love of the earthiness of humanity does not radiate your compassion for your fellow man, but oozes your resentment of learning. the gut-level hatred that anyone could expect of you anything more than you merely are -- your most grievous fault, father! you mint hollow mediocrities in luminous bronze.

- is this a curse? are you putting a curse on me?

- why do we speak to each other as though we're on some horrid eternal business lunch, father?

joey said what everyone was thinking in a way which none of us would ever dare to dream, let alone understand.

- i don't wanna be here! i don't wanna hear any a this! somebody should be stoppin him. why aren't any a you stoppin him!

- allow me to do you the honor myself, father. i have always been the best to ask to get results from myself!

he spun on his heels. in a straight line, he marched to you.

- do me the honor, sir. oblige father and end my miserable life.

your trigger unholstered itself of its own accord / the muzzle pressed itself to joey's forehead.

- how consumed are you for me?

(our euphorie)

every cell, every fiber, every impulse screamed for destruction. you held yourself at bay. he slid his tongue into the eye of the barrel. he moaned with a hideous and breathy deep abdominal vulnerability that stirred something in you and made father -- made father blanche.

- it takes only the proper channels, don't you see? don't you see? once i had been a tributary far from land, adrift with drowned men and weighed down by a gelatinous raft of bones. the stagnant waters running deep bore the most lush and rancorous blooms. i was carried far from home by a man from a foreign star in a vessel welt in emerald and gold. you took me to the highest wellsprings of our country, and poured me deep into those waters which nourish our people. you drank me deep --

on command, they bellowed out.

- AND CRAVED THE SWEET

... OF MY CANCEROUS JULIAN RANGOON.

- you chose so poorly, father.

cambrian waters churned the magma in your heart.

a pin did not dream to drop.

(brux spoke here :--)

- no, it's true. i mean, look at me. i'm an uggol. i'm bucktoothed. i'm leggy. i'm begotten in a salad of tendons without dressage, and i look like beefy jerky. sometimes i look down at my arm and think i'm in still in my leathers. then i realize -- oh no. that's just my arm. also. i'm covered in crude again. how does that keep happenin, mates?

lux stammered, for he was about to undergo the labor of translating difficult emotions into simple words.

- dad, sir. you know. you know i'll always care about you. that goes without saying -- but also. you're human garbage. you're a blistering trash fire of brain diseases who shoulda gotten douched with some therapeutic grade dude piss like -- twenty years ago. how did it get this bad, dad? i thought nobody said anythin, but they were sayin it all the time, in a million different ways, and i was just too dumb to listen.

(joey, once more, was the floor :--)

- it is the power of imagination, cpt. drythen, which compels us to exhaust the countless substrata before we circle back to tap the spring beneath our topsoil.

father had not yet resolidified from the cloud.

- like, really. i wanna be sympathetic. i get it. like -- eh. there's -- there's nothin there -- y'know? in the middle of you? you know, you just feel -- why not be beautiful? none of it means anythin. we're all gonna get our heads blown off, might as well smile every day til we get there. why not be shallow? we all look the fuckin same on the inside anyway.

wally spoke openly.

- aye. i'll say it, too. i work for miserable bastards, but i don't mind it. i'm a miserable bastard myself. a man ought be entitled his misery, no matter his lot in life, and if he is not in a position where he is expected to boost morale, he ought be proud to wear his misery openly.

- you make me look bad, dad. like, i wanna be proud to serve my country, and i can't -- i just can't with you.

- i am a clerical wretch. my contempt for these drains of efficiency in flesh ought be taken seriously as a symptom on the blighted soul of an otherwise proud servant of the state. if my sufferin so openly offends you, take offense to my conditions -- i suppose you know not a day's work well enough to grease the gearshafts of your rusty heartstrings with a big gobby tear or two! nor would you contribute much -- i expect rather unexpectedly, to the coiffers of the drunkards you made drunkards for you could offer nothing more'n numbness out in the blisterin cold!

- what's the fuckin point of fightin so hard, dad? what's the fuckin point if none of it means anything?

- that our citizenry is so foul is indicative of a lechery of values, symptomatic of a rot at the heart of our core architectures! you, father, do not honor the gods ( o ) : -- you honor not man or woman, beast nor root. you have blackened us with cane sugar and simple syrup. i curse you openly as i would a blight upon a tree. i would sooner see the heartiest branches amputated at first contact than allow what foul pestilence you spew to contaminate within ten yards of another trunk!

joey bowed back into position.

- do you see, father. the flame of liberty is no becaked candle for which we may dim the light of valor so you may extinguish it to the snappings, cheers and wrigglings of your beaked and intolerant breast.

- don't knock the knockers! they're knockers of the year! you voted em that! you picked me over all the other girls.

- we strengthen ourselves of our own volition, for we seek the vigor of blood so the sap of the tree of liberty may linger long on our tongues!

- why's your happy tree on fire, huh? ya mix metaphors like a whiskin bowl. maybe one i bought for ya. maybe for a lacrosse meet. maybe for your swim game.

- i am a swimmer in the summer, and a wrestler in the winter. in the spring and autumn i give myself to the regional bloodsports.

you could picture joey's ass in his silky white rugby shorts.

- i was a good dad. i bought ya things. all the things ya ever wanted. they were good tax-payers. i bought em all. ya never played with em.

- why, the amendments the major has been amending -- the revisions he has been revising --

- revisions. what revisions? you been makin revisions big guy?

...

- cpt. haruspex has won the hearts of our neighbors with his candor. he shows us to be a bold, affable and free-spirited nation possessing of a sharp and singular people! i have met many heads of industry, and through them known their hands, their hearts, the vacuums behind their eyes. they long to be earnestly known -- they, like all spirited men, women and gradients, delight in being the light which makes roses bloom in the shade of the sequoias! with the amendments to our architectures, we are well equipped to move negotiations with our generous brother nations from boot to boot, boot to tongue, and fully into tongue to tongue. in the shower of free exchange, we shall know again the taste of our own soil!

- you? you, big guy? after all i've done for you. i took you in. i clothed you. i fed you. yeah. in a palace. in all that leather. lettin ya play wit all your food before i ate it. and what it'd get me? nothin. you think anybody else'll take you? nobody else woulda taken you in before, but now? who's gonna wanna take you in after they see how you treated me, huh? you're ugly. you're a monster. you make babies cry. i make babies cry, but it's only cause they can't regain their composure, bein seen around such a popular guy, you? you're not popular. nobody knows you. nobody likes you. you just control em with fear, that's all you do. all you gotta do is fuckin stand there like a sideshow attraction, everybody's too scared to talk to ya.

- s c r e a m i n g

- brother jacek --

- cpt. psychoraggia --

- screaming. screaming. screaming. the screaming never stops. the echoes never stop. why can't you fuckers ever settle things in -- never settle things in -- ( ) -- in sigh -- in sigh -- in sigh --

(- i scream. you scream. we all scream -- when i d(r)eam.)

his eyes met yours.

- brother, i know you hear them.

he implored you.

- haha, haha. what? cat got your tongue, big guy?

there were misty mountains in his eyes. there were storm clouds without counting gray behind the mists in the peaks of his eyes.

- please, sir. talk to me, sir. say anythin, please, sir. i need to hear your voice. i need to hear my brother's voice.

brux stood with him. brux's hand was on his shoulder. his hand buckled against brux's shoulder.

- come here. come here, mate. it'll be all right.

- i failed him, cpt. brux.

- nah, nah ya didn't, mate.

- he won't speak to me, sir.

- mate, mate. shhhh. refine the purity of your intentions. did you act soley for virtue, or did your heart yearn for covert validation? you can't earn favor with the big man if you can't earn favor with yourself. you're a big strong guy -- corded with muscle, marbled in striated bivalve. look at yourself, mate. remember who you are. you're not scared. you're a big strong guy. big strong guy. you don't need to be pet. you just need another man to respect you, and to appreciate what you do, and why you do it. i love you, cpt. jacek. you're such a big strong murder boy. you make your mother so proud, i bet. she huggles you so hard, i bet.

brux had put an arm around his shoulder. jacek half-crouched to be seated in awe to his intentions. he turned from him. the staged half-hug in which he looked so heroic, to beheld you with wondering eyes.

- i needed you, sir. the only time i needed you. i could have had you any time... all those times you meant nothin. the only time i needed you... the only time it would have mattered. you weren't there. why do i only need you -- when i know i can't have you. why can i have you -- only when i don't need you. what damn good are you, sir? what damn worth are you. why do i give you everythin -- knowin i'll get nothin. why do i expect anythin -- knowin i'll get nothin. why do i --- why do i -- why do i --

psychorrhax went to him.

- it doesn't make sense, brother. it doesn't have to make sense. it's selfish to ever expect it to make sense.

he held jacek in a half-embrace, where neither was the other's shadow. right arm over left shoulder, still in three-quarter profile. what they intended -- and succeeded -- with this manly choice of staging, was to highlight their studliness as well as their cleanliness.

wally strode forward. his arms fanned wide to grab hold his brothers by the scruff of their shoulders, collapsing their skulls to his ...

(@) :-- brux was dislodged in the reorientation.

- aye, brother. it makes no sense! we never wanted it to make sense. we wanted enigmas posed to us, knowing damn well the answers. it was nice to think nothing of it; to waste time on idle thoughts! we could dream up mighty fine blue tomorrows asking ourselves all the dead long night questions which we damn well knew the answers. you were never stupid, brother. you always knew. you were stupid for his sake. for what you knew offended him. you wanted so badly. so badly wanted to love someone. you didn't care who. nobody mattered. nobody could ever matter. these fake things you only needed to feel. all the fake things all the people needed to feel. you're not a real person. there are no real people. all your generosity could ever breed was lies (69) :-- false hopes to string along days hopin to milk a smile from the deadwood -- and was it worth it? was it worth a drizzle of secretions pulpy with splinters too soggy to prickle or pad, let alone velvet the vulva? what could contentment mean to a malcontent, there need bein victors for which we all go to spoils.

brux was starting to shout. shout without a care in the world.

- i care for you all! i want you to be happy! i try my best, but it never seems like anybody cares for ol' brux -- and i don't want em to! i don't want anybody to expect a damn thing from me! i only wish for once somebody'd care about me the way i care about all of you, but i know damn well that's too much to ask -- everybody loves in their own way, but brux needs to be loved in his way, and brux knows he's weird, but, like, should that be brux's problem? as weird as i am, i do so much for all of you, you ought bare the burden of my weirdness! you ought love me in turn the way i love you, even if you find me repulsive -- yes, i want you to return repulsion for repulsion! i do everythin the way you do, and i feel so alone, god, you can't imagine how alone i feel, it just, it just makes me shudder is all -- i'm not weird, i love you -- why do you make me feel weird for how much i love you -- shame on you for making me doubt the basic decency of my love for you.

joey went to brux. with his left hand, he crept around his back, and took him wrist in hand, elbow serpentine in coiling.

- do not think less of yourself, brother. you are a sensitive soul, and a sensitive soul, in spite of itssex, yearns to be fawned upon like a cherished daughter -- but you, bruxer haruspex, my meat hasher and skull smasher, are farther from cherished than you are a daughter.

brux leaned to him. joey only half turned away.

-i was a fool to ever call you cruel, joey. you know damn well how my foolish notions hurt me worse. i wish i was brave as you, joey. that i could turn away from people. turn away from these silly thoughts i need to be happy. i wish i was strong like you. to bare bein so alone -- oh sol polaris, there's nothin i'm more afraid of than endin up all alone!

- we are all alone, bruxer haruspex -- there is nothing to fear in admitting that this is, was, and will always be the truth.

- you make me forget, joey. i never feel like i'm alone when i'm with you. i feel the world turnin when i'm with you. i feel life has purpose -- it's so damn stupid to say, but i love you, i love you.

he loved him.

- i love you, i love you.

- i'm alone. i'm alone.

you were alone.

- how can you be alone when i love you?

- my loneliness -- has nothing to do with your love, cpt. haruspex. i wish it could be different.

- i love you. i love you.

stars spun in the west. stars spun in the east. stars spun above and stars spun below. their light could not reach the others.

- i wish your love meant something to me. i would love to love you, cpt. bruxer haruspex. your eager soul. your gullible heart. your pure and idiotic love. i wish i could feel for you what you feel for me, but i know --

- that i'm not worth it.

- yes.

- that i'll never be worth it.

- never say never -- again.

- you love me, joey. you truly love me.

- yes.

- you waste time with me, hopin i'll get it.

- i wish i could tell you.

- i wish i could listen.

joey's hand met brux's shoulder. brux's hand met joey's shoulder. they met one another. their leather crunched in slow expanse.

they wanted to laugh.

cpt. laika stood forward.

- your transparency has been a continuous source of inspiration to us, cpt. haruspex. you are second in my heart only to the major's indomitable frame, as his is second only to cpt. schriebermachen's brazen and impenetrable breast -- he the cage which encloses and protects our still beating heart with the warm quills of his tar-black wings. i believe we will do well to take cpt. schreibermachen's words into our own --

- transparency. frame. heart. you're not the planeteers!

- be silent, father. i am speaking.

[ ]

... there is no environment. i am the environment. you can't quiet me! i quit! i quit ... i don't know you! you don't belong here!

you let the silence linger. you stood in father's office without him. watching the floors. watching one another.

- as a greater man once said with less |. -- it is truly arrogance to resent the inevitable course of my rightness.

you walked out the door. laika locked it behind him. lux sat with his legs curled on the floor, playing with a replica miniature saw-horse he saw. wally was miles away, five feet from here. brux did well to uphold the complete and utter facade of his obliviousness.

jacek was in your eyes. he was lost inside your eyes. you wanted to reach over and to hold him, but you couldn't. you wouldn't be able to regain your composure -- if you leaned over and tried to ... look something.

how could he bare it?

the influx of agony in your eyes? coring him like the flesh from an orange. how could he bare yours when you could barely bare his?

joey bore the weight of the silence. as he was singular in attack, so too was he singular in retreat. the vagueness after victory which is not retreat, but return. the sudden weight of having no further height, and so having nowhere to go, only gliding down, not into lowness, but calmness. to settle in that way which so superficially resembles defeat.

joey put his arm on laika's shoulder. he was holding him. their leather would crunch as he would hold him. their eyes followed in the gloss as he held him. it made your dick hard to watch how he would hold him

- so proud a you, lil bro.

- aye am aye, sir. my name is laika psychorrhax, cpt. templor of the eagle marines, and i have no source but myself. my roots are the trunk of cpt. joseph schreibermachen, as his roots are the trunk of major [ ]. we fracture space as we fractal one another, trunking in lush fields to tesseracts of sigil'd chaos, that we may branch all aspects of all dimensions at once, to fill all the air with greenery and wood.

- trench my colon like a ditch digger tonight, lil bro.

.| -- (alas, i am writing!)

joey was like a son to you. joey couldn't have been anymore than two to three years your junior.

- it's a disease of the mind, sir. virtuous thinking begets only further virtuous thinking. i yearn that we should degrade ourselves, brother, in some fetid pit of despair, where the tangle of our overlapping miseries entombs us in a swampy embrace of your matted fur and hulking frame to my blade and nick begotten flank -- consecrate our brotherhood by bathing me in your rank miasma, sir. i who lash like a cult still brood like a mayor (9 <-o-> 6) ... you fertile moron.

in the next room, brux was clapping his hands

- well, i think that went a lot better than i expected!

#/#[excerpt]

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