EMPEROR “Bob”

We went on the open track to see the old man lying dead in his throne. Almost dead, anyway. His face had grown wan over the years until he looked like a Munch painting. The frail old man sitting in the imitation leather chair presiding over an EMPire of nothing. The kids had flown the coop, settled down, started their own franchise and started cranking out even more ingrateful little cocksuckers the cycle continuing endlessly. Spitting seed from coast to coast laying track down a genetic highway leading everywhere in both directions.

Broken old pavement bumped hard underneath my bike. Sometimes they called me old iron ass I could ride for ages on these old broken down bike trails. The next morning I woke up feeling like I’d just spent all night being savaged by inmates and ready to hop on for another 30 or 40 miles. I could just push and push weaving into both lanes jumping over the bumps the cracks in the pavement where EMPress Earth tried cracking thru the painful scars laid by a devastated race.

I fell backsidewise and cracked open the wave back in the body of a three year old rubbing himself to tranny porn behind a couch… I spent all day back there I’d never seen anything like it before naked bodies on waterbeds fucking furiously things I’d never thought of the bodies they looked like my parents bodies we used to run around naked no shame no hate no fear then you grow up get a gender start wearing pants hide everything away in the name of privacy and shame I used to run around like a jaybird naked in the undies until they showed up from the outside with their pinched faces and woodcut expressions of hate and contempt and fear. They wanted to kill themselves and they wanted to take me with them. I fought the impulse to put on pants but it came over and I no longer ran around in my shit and piss stained tighty whities no more putting on the towel as a cape and no more kisses on the lips from dad. It was like joining the world of men at the age of 5.

I fucked on thru the tower to stand before his throne gold and orange radiating out from behind you could see the lines for miles the smiles of children being praised the frowns on the crying faces of children being scolded, scared into submission. The cold, impassive figure sitting on the throne that you dare not approach. It never occured to me that he’d be sitting on the throne, dying. He always seemed so invincible, frighteningly so.

It happened the first time when I was less than year old. Pneumonia. Texas. The summer. It was 110 degrees out and I had a temp of 103. I was always prone to high fevers, the flame of the sun had licked me hard. Kissed me deep at the center of Tip and sent me flying into a Malkuthian world to be punished by an unremitting ball of cancer emitting light. He cried that night, but it didn’t count because he was drunk. He cried again when his dad died and he became EMPEROR over his own, nowhere to go for imperial counsel. It extends in both directions the rising boy Caesar full of virilty, spreading and seeding making his law flesh. Ossification of norms and conventions the ideas of the past now lawful expressions of his will over the clan the genetic highway guiding them his word the only law over the flesh. Dying in the chair throne watching the racing figures on the screen giving damnation or salvation at his whim, sitting erect above but decaying, falling fearing for…

He came into my room when I was sleeping, touched my hair while the dog watched and wondered where the fuck his life had gone.