I revert to type (as usual) stumbling around the dingy brown bar on the other side of the Atlantic. Two educated lesbians grill me on my understanding of Ulysses.

“Do you really ‘get it’ tho?”

I pause, taken aback. “It’s like The Waste Land. I don’t really care about getting it. I just care about enjoying it.”

They clearly didn’t expect this answer and star at me, befuddled, searching for the appropriate comeback. A troupe of Irish hooligans enters the bar, drunk and rowdy screaming about gear and shit and blonde-brown hash

“‘Ave ye go’ any mate?”
“Yeeeuh yeeeuh yeeeuh whare’s the shit then mate?”

We retreat to the basement barracks where we’d all been living for the last month. It takes forever to find a permanent place in a city like this, overrun with tourists and nigger rich Irishmen getting jobs selling gear. A tubby red-headed American comes downstairs with his blonde bitch girlfriend whining and cloying at his side.

“Um… doyuhlikethinkIshouldputsomeshoeson?”
“Uhhhh… I dunnno…”

I laugh out loud. Fucking Americans. The embarassment to the human species. Only thing worse than a white man is a white American paying for fuck and drugs and booze everywhere he goes trying to buy everything friends love loyalty respect. The two loudly announce their ignorance to all within earshot and the Irish giggle like little girls at me.

i saw the best minds of my generation stilled by insane hatred left
hatred of music
hatred of clothing
hatred of self reflected against self other paths
seen not taken frightening out
of the ghost cell centered in the chest dropped down and identifying the self with the

MOON

phasing three quarters gone waxing the source of reflected light waning losing dropping out the evening’s illumination falling down slipping away when we see the end coming and we know where the end lies periodicity the hobgoblin of malkuth sucking away upon the appearance of a new phase of the

MOON

when i walked thru barcelona i gritted my teeth hard looking seeing sky air fearing pickpockets hearing the voice of spite in the back of my head spitting obscenity neurons firing like pistons to reassure me that i was right that i was always right lord of the manner and always right the voice coming from the limbics the voice that i hate the voice that i suppress bud off cut off ignore lie about the voice of the

MOON

back in the Bonzai City i can pull the ground up around me crushing artifice of holographic oppression the city around me imposing boxes prison terrarium fucking blocking out the sky uncle tom house slave trees grinning like children staring up the stars happy to just give us something to look at some air happy to be around the people my hands fill with earth energy ley line power pulling the city of sinlessness to life around me i can see the bulldog i can see the tram i can see the brick roads and the men in suits and the junkies and leather daddies and whores in their cages i can smell the funk of shit and the garbage lining the street at the end of a day waiting to be picked up by underpaid immigrant labor muslims getting fucked from both ends and as stars retreat so we see the

MOON

all i wanted was to be nice all i wanted was to help all i wanted was to see you happy all i wanted was to end world hunger all i wanted was to see art all i wanted was him to love me all i wanted was all i wanted was all i wanted was just another voice of the

MOON

She laughs at me when I land on her, face first snuffing blue dust into my nose. The massive key feels heavy in my hand. I unlock an invisible door and I’m back.

It was my birthday and I was crying in my bed. I was coming down off of everything and not taking it well. Baby is stroking my hair and telling me to breathe slow, but I can’t. All I could do is pant and mumble about how I can’t feel my dick. Baby still had her skirt and heels on and I want her to get naked so we can screw. I leaned off the edge of the bed and vomit into a steel bucket. There’s bile in it and a little bit of blood, but Baby doesn’t know that I’m sure not going to tell her. I could feel the stubble above her lip when she kissed me. Baby hated waxing her face but did it every other day because I wanted her to.

“Honey you need to take a bath and calm down.”

It’s happening again. I don’t know what, but it’s happening again. I can’t remember what I was doing for the last minute or so. It’s like someone just created me and put memories into my brain to make it seem real. I know the boygirl holding me in hir arms right now. I know the room around me. But none of it seems real. I can’t but leave her and she won’t remember me after anyway. I love Baby because of how she makes me feel, how she makes me laugh, how she makes me forget how different we are from everyone else. The greaser witch and his tranny girlfriend in this bombed out version of reality. She takes the kerchief out of my back pocket and starts wiping the vom drool from my lips.

“Shit, Baby, I’m so sorry.”

“Why?”

“Shit, Baby… shit.”

“Its ok.”

“Fuck, baby, I need to go.”

I hop on my bike and ride away. I can feel him behind me in the blackness. The rider, the reaper, I am became DEATH. Big Daddy 13 riding hard behind me. The circles of spacetime begin to converge completely. It’s happening and it feels like two ball bearings grinding themselves into oblivion on either side of my soul. Phoenix force rises in the heart and burns. I pedal harder trying to outrun him, even tho I know he’s stronger and smarter than me. I can’t beat him at chess or even Twister for that matter. I can smell his stink like the reincarnation of Citizen Kane behind me, licking his lips, getting ready to cut me down right in the middle of the road.

What will Baby do?

******

What the fuck am I wearing?

I walk out of the Chrysler building on to the street. The kudzu has extended halfway up the building by now. It’s over a hundred fucking degrees out and I still have my jacket on, hiding the tattoos underneath. The Filth have been looking for me. Nothing big, just the usual harassment of Outsiders on drug and vice charges. None of the kids in the building are enrolled in school, we’ve got some teenage girls living with their adult boyfriends… not to mention the labs the Filth surely know about. I figure I’m going to get pulled in for questioning, but I don’t want to make it any easier on them. I unlock my bike, start riding and light a spliff with grey salt in it. I look up from the road for a second and see a Committee to Re-Elect the President sign which beams “LET’S STICK WITH JERRY IN ‘08″ in bright patriotic colors. Next to it is an almost completely defaced poster declaring that “THE BEST JOBS ARE IN YOUR ARMED FORCES!”

Join the Army see the grave. Join the Navy get gang raped. Join the Marines and at least you get to do the raping. Join the Air Force and yr a bus driver with megatons of firepower to drop on any brown folks who get in yr way.

I feel pretty fucked up almost right away and almost eat it on my bike. I have visions of losing my teeth and having nothing to replace it. I’m the closest thing to the doctor in the building because I can suture wounds, deliver babies and perform abortions. Nothing to be done about lost teeth, particularly if I have to do the work on my own.

We had squatted the Chrysler building. We wanted the Zeppelin mooring. The penthouse had been reserved for group temple, while the floor below had been divided into four elemental rooms for the appropriate types of workings. The upper floors of the building belied the shabby nature of the living and training quarters below. The upper mid-section of the building had been reserved for practice with various kinds of weapons- edged, firearms, explosive devices- anything we might need if the Filth ever decided to clear out the area. The lower mid-section was home to the classrooms where we trained children, adolescents and youths in the finer points of magic and hand-to-hand combat. There wasn’t much time to waste on cultivating the soul. These kids needed to know how to make things happen yesterday.

I began climbing the stairs up to the 23rd floor where most of the cadre lived. We hated taking our cues from the little Stalinist cliquelettes overrunning Europe, but there seemed little choice. Not everyone wanted to be a warrior, especially in a time like this. Some people just wanted a place to eat, shit, fuck, raise their kids and live their lives outside the jurisdiction of the Triumverate(!). Some people wanted to teach the kids, grow the food, work on spellcraft full time… I worked more with esotech division called Craftwork than any of the fighting. I pushed myself up higher and higher, feeling the strain in my thighs and legs. I remembered that when I was in London I climbed higher than this every day.

The 23rd floor was painted all grey on the inside and had a chemical lab down at the end of it. We made the bulk of our cash pushing methamphetamines to middle America, with a small heroin operation that we were using to undermine the Rastas. For all their talk about clean living they were easy enough to get on the needle. Their entire prostitution racket was hemorraging money into the best Hong Kong Hank money could buy. They had me working on quality control with the grey salt.

23rd floor… 23rd door… why?

I snuffed the fag on the end of my heel, grinding the embers into not-being yanked out of the continuum. Smoke buried deep inside my lungs for later release from tar stained cilia working overtime kicking smoke back up in a movable womb of yellow mucosus. The trash can held the microphone listening ear, soundcatcher of the Triumverate(!). Presiding over the coup lies the Triumverate(!), the blossoming fart bomb of ‘63 that cut the hippies off at the pass and left us all swinging our hips to the rough sounds of Memphis grinding. The inner cities standing as shining beacons of liberty against the honkey motherfuckers too fearful to set foot on liberated ground. Smoke filled the backsky and I could smell asphalt it was the last thing I could smell lungs clogged thick with tar of a different kind.

I don’t know how I got here, standing on a street corner but I know who I am and where I am. The sun beats down hard and the papers cry out

“GOV REAGAN TO REPLACE LBJ ON TRIUMVERATE”(!)

The old man had finally up and croaked. The younger kids didn’t get it, most of them couldn’t remember the Second Republic. This was it, the Triumverate wasn’t temporary anymore, it was replacing its own. The strange alliance that dissolved the Congress, that disbanded the local police forces, that put cameras on every street corner and a microphone in every trash can. There was talk that Bush and his intel cronies were working on something new, something that would record every phone call. I didn’t believe it. It sounded too Big Brother. I bumped another toot of the grey salt and lit another fag, strolling down the hot city pavement.

The city! What city! The city! Low rise grey tenements on the outside and the crushing, empty glass towers inside squatted, controlled and off limits to the Triumverate(!) and the Filth.

The thing I can never get over tho is- why is it always summer?

I pulled my stash out of my pocket and perused the contents. Gray powder in two large bags marked off 50g each. Five hundred mil each. That was three good doses. I could really get to know the Big Chief. I licked my finger and scraped up some powder off the outside of the bag. Dust, really. The stuff the air had stolen when Doc C was pouring the shit into the bag. Chemists. He loves his art. I folded the bag back up so that the two inside bags pressed against each other, then I kissed it and put it in the cup of the king. Atop the shelf, staring down from the family of Mammy and Whitey and the Bornless One and Rupert and Cornelius and the little grundy man that she made so long ago out of my teeth and blood and cum and spit. I set the chief down next to Whitey. I figured they’d have a lot to talk about. A small little pinch for the pocket of my hand and then…

***********************************************************************

Intelligence agents all around in this kind of place and you can never be too careful meditating over the black keys on the key. Police stammering around looking for the dope trying to collect in a bar full of intelligence agents. The girls are nice in a lithe, teenage 1994 kind of way all grunged out with striped sleeves covering up needle marks where they pricked themselves with the orange crystal from space. Notes jotted down on the paper (wherever you can find it) inside the cover of the future cut up deconstructing the memes of the violently ignorant cutting the virus up putting it back together making the animal new like a fucking chimera bursting out in flames and fury and spit and CUM CUM CUM.

A little bleeding on paper and its got the DNA brain shoving it down the line. Pretty soon tho you end up in a wash of crimson life (meaning death). Killing thousands of so-called virgins by the hour just trying to keep the momentum going. Robbing Paulie to pay Pete getting the sticky stuff from the inside out. Girls sit in the corner with their razors cutting and casually licking up the dribblings that come out. A clique of vampires over in the corner French kissing sticky red back between each other. I do another bump of the gray salt and start looking at the queer boy in the corner who looks like something more than human in his makeup. Some fucker with a sick sense of humor gave him sock tits.

Police! Police! The raid in progress coming after drugs and vice from the occultniks waiting for the next event. Everyone continues eating and drinking and fucking and drugging right out in the open. The polizei have no power here, no force, no fire. They blandly walk around drooling and rubbing their cocks, trying to catch of glimpse of something good in the bathroom or the corner.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY yooo donta sucka my cocka i arrest you”

“Pull it out and lose it, filth.”

Slinking back over in the corner. I bump more and feel my brain bleeding down my nose.

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.

“So yr a doctor, huh? What’s yr training in? Semantics?”

“Memetics with a general-”

“Memetics, huh? -PsyOps you go then, Benway. Oh, and a word of advice- get yrself a hat. We don’t have many superstitions here at Intel, but one of them is agents without hats are dead agents.”

“I understand.”

“And put on some fucking colors, man. This isn’t the frigging dark ages.”

I’m standing in front of my Inspector’s desk on Jupiter, meeting point the intertextual timewave nexus which linchpins harder at years ending in “6.” The deeper in the “6″, the harder the nexus point. Calling an agent 1000 years into the future on little notice is standard practice around Intel.

When yr standing in front of an Inspector yr standing in front of a man who has long since abandoned ideas of rational thought as a coping mechanism. The further up the chain you go the more the lower channels run on autopilot. It’s a blessing and a curse and not good practice for an agent.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TO: u.l. benway, empire city, jupiter
FR: inspector mugwump, the directorate, jupiter
SU: change in grade

agent benway reassinged to grade inspector
do NOT change cover story
oversecretary assigned to yr case will contact on need-to-know

does nobody understand?

xM

I wandered vaguely around nowheresville when the man in the blue cap approached me, his long latin mullet flowing out the back. Ride her truck, Jon, dearie. Vs everywhere all around the five sided space coeffecient. Trickster ghost walks around me, his hat pulled low like he’s trying to sell me oranges off the I-5. Or maybe he’ll ask for some change.

“Cho meng, I can chow choo where the TOWER ees, meng…”

I wanna ask his name but know that such data remains irrelevant in my current state.

“Learn chore numbers, meng and choo won’t have dees problehm, no?”

Hard to argue with a man in a hat like that. I make idle threats about how I know what the TOWER looks like and how I work for very important people, but he says he’s not trying to trick me and he’s never even heard of A.R.M. The white dust kicks up hard from the rocks in the road guiding the experience of walking in psychogeographic spaces since time immemorial. I keep falling sideways, losing the view of my guide and glitching in and out of places I’ve never been, couldn’t be and should never have known about. Indians from long dead colonies on east coast shores trading wampum for maize, circling settler wagons and then burning them to the ground. We had a phrase back in those days “one settler, one bullet.” One day when I settle down, get married and knock up a transvestite I can tell my kids all about my past life as an Indian and watch them gawk in wide-eyed indifference.

The Indian is gone. I look down and notice flowing blonde hair, and just about the hottest set of tits and ass I’ve ever seen. I turn to tricksterguide.

“Why am I a woman here?”

“Why are choo a woman eneeewhere, meng?”

Ego erosion, beyond the physical loss of the self in spacetime. Directions become reversed and the flame pours on hard again stripping away all the flesh and bone, but more the idea that I should be afraid of walking around with tits and ass, hunting white settlers, death, life, sloth, activity… all dualities, potentialities and moralities become irrelevant in the TOWER. Dualities manifest as odd juxtapoz… “gestalt dynamics” he cries out “GESTALT DYNAMICS!” synchronicity solution equation pumping out ineffable answers and swordsmanship.

I can’t see the snake or the dove, but I know that they’re there. The eye blots out all, its massive presence emitting blinding light in all directions infinitely simultaneously. The weight of the building crushes me and I’m afraid that I’m going to scream or break out, fall back into matter and see the same old dreary shit that surrounds me when I jerk off.

“Congratulations… you have left the tower. You may choose another ____.”