Berlioz 72

i was listening to Berlioz when you called me. saying, mournfully, i miss eating pebbles. but Eda, why you ever ate pebbles, i never quite understood. you used to say, Lola, i love the spasm of a gag. the writhing, sliminess of pink saliva, empathy and arrogance contributing to the necessity of your sadism. you would run naked across the stretch of a wind fascia, crashing at the tip of a wave break. in the summertime of '72. in poppy fields and sunflowers. a legendary opiate-addict. a farm prostitute. pregnant with a sagging ovary, deckled and trimmed in a practical life. Eda, when you called, your face was frail, your voice was numb. pulsating tender. a monotonic whistle crying in the circularity of an auto-tumor, in a loop of thermostatic acidosis. i wanted to crawl through the burnt aluminum and biopsy a bass treble, immortalize in a jar of spring cotton, gelatin and pacifism. you sounded melancholy. maybe a mild depressed. or maybe you ate a candle, and shot LSD in your blood. and screamed at a stencil sketch of your van Gogh, you stole from the pawn shop by the MoMA. you used to tell stories to orphans about jellyfish and puppets, about sex and money, about the personality continuum and the Depression. and flirt with the Navy men; one you married, one you stabbed, and one you mutilated with unreal violence. on Saturday nights, and tuesday mornings, you would tie your hair in delicate braids and light them on fire. listening to recordings of Dickinson and Plath, you would inhale the smell in long effortless breaths and bleed from your chin. in a confusion of your experimental living, your drug poetry, vitriolic personality, cabaret of peace and reality, Eda, you have inspired my soul.

a few days ago, Eda, we stared at a water drop. to the image, a little shy, you yelled a name. Ethna, a voyeur and a child masochist. an entrepreneur, you sold orchids at the museum of bagatelles and serenades, for nineteen pennies and three shillings. but today, you are limbless. washed by the sonnet of the peculiar monsoons, the leverage of spring lilies, chanting to yourself a deviant Genesis, imagining, in silence, the lattices of topaz, table salt and MSG. you used to be a War slave; an abused organ, emphatic in frills, galleried and sold in the market of economics, contested with boots, persona and bullets. they forced upon you a feminine humility, a scholar of spice, a treacle of praise -to misuse and abuse your stern integrity. but you escaped the skinning, the hanging and the suffocation of science. Evelyn and Dorimer, are asleep.

in the course of your neuro-degeneration, you will smile at the air. thoughtless and excused. demented and enraged with the tutus of syllables. your speech will slur and fade to a dim. you will remember, i hope, the modularity of entropy, the caravan of spiel, the redolence of chains and hypothesis of the universe. i said to you, Eda, if the universe expands, and gives rise to chaos, who is to predict with certainty that our physical laws will remain stationary, unchanged and untouched. on which theory of induction can you prove to me, two times seven shall always remain the ripe product of teen fours. the concept of chaos, theorized and analyzed, applied and implemented. Eda, you see, the paradox of concepts? formality of a chaos, analysis of screams, citations of strings, elastics and aromas, making up the posterity of your remnant.

i was listening to Berlioz when you called me. saying, mournfully, i miss eating pebbles.