Bobby Alter is a
nineteen-year-old undergraduate in Portland, OR, where he primarily
studies linguistics and French literature. He has newly founded a blog,
the
Hungerjournal where he will keep updates on his
writing and further adventures in blissful poverty.
A
cardiovasc/// BOBBY ALTER

Sing goddess, the fuming, of the fuming Christ-anger of the ancient
angry, fuming demi-god Peleus, and of his son, Achilleus, and of their
devastation, and of their crying, sing O goddess of their great big
crocodile demi-god split-heel boohoo tears and, crying lacrimosa, sing
to us in thirds & thirds & thirds, give us guns to
shoot each
other
“bangbangbang oh haha oh how nice what what oh, how nice:
Crépuscule (the flesh; diurnality); a cardiovasc. A
cardiovasc
is a singular rue in an angular labyrinth of numerical avenues and
bellowing blvds. at the end of scarborough. A cardiovascular fairy tale
is therefore an algorithm of carefully placed proteins, and a
crépescular fairy tale is a child's mind-toy involving a
dusk-colored terror. In scarborough there is one fairy tale that is
prevalent above all others about a man named Roland and his wife the
whore-at-work Alice. Roland is a cardiovasc, which is a machine that
transmits capitalistic desires into a series of binary operas. The
language of scarborough is similar to our own save for a shift in
logical substructure i.e. the reconceptualization of the act of
vomiting transposed into color theory. There are only four colors in
scarborough, and each color has seventeen different names depending on
what month in is in scarborough, and in scarborough there are seventeen
months, one for each of the holy founders of scarborough, six of which
were identified cardiovascs. The number seventeen, however, is only a
euphemism in the language of scarborough, for a number whose quantity
must not be uttered, nor even conceptualized, and those who attempt to
undertake such a task are biologically succumbed to fits of prolonged
orgasmic sensations, which is the desensitizing defense mechanism of
the cardiovasc.
Roland becomes before a mirror. He takes a pencil which he has
sharpened in the holy waters of the fountain in scarborough. He holds
the pencil in his left hand which in scarborough is the hand relegated
to the holding of surgical instruments, the hands of virgins, and the
penis during the act of male urination, which is a holy act in
scarborough. Roland stabs himself in the torso where his liver is. He
must remove the pencil quickly so as not to poison the organ, whose
function is unknown in scarborough. Remember bugs biting at your big
heroin-like big blue-like veins each time you tried
to read a book
tossing massive invalid pages, shrieking, ahh, bahh, them books !, them
pages
pissing
and crying like pissing at every page
hands getting smaller and smaller
that them there all the world &. all the world your friend in
loneliness
yes
yes yes yes yes I remember.
The
fairy tale
of Roland and his wife the whore-at-work Alice begins in a certain
café like all the rest, it was a sort of newspaper amidst
the
headline "Czech-land Losing Sparrows" or somesuch because that was the
time that desperate sparrows began flinging themselves upon the earth.
A café thrust upon. The ineffable imagination; the pale
palette
unique to the tile and wardrobe; tireless ‘75. Pink
rose-patterned plastic, garish, overflowing construction acrimonious,
malleable, unsettling. A material a skinned exogenous rhythm poised
between things organic and inorganic; bountiful kitsch: garden of
garrulous neon: effervescent Eden:
From here unwound the chairs and tables
and endless
perfect rows of jams and sugars and also white-suited chainsmoking
Roland Gallimard. In one corner greasy-haired Sad Sam Timothy a
hustler. Fingering a bouquet of paper flowers. A whore roles a
gumchewing eye. Bursting through the front, yellowish. A glassdoor:
fantastic foreigner, carressing. The hair of the nearest child's toy;
an ironic cupola's bonbon tune, aghast.
Skillful premonitions towards a dubious
orchestra.
Stunning blonde lollipop baristas each with names ending in -a; four
bourgeoises emerging: dripping with blood and coke, a leatherjacketed
afficionado waits behind a wall with a perfect pickup line. Fall out to
the giggles and coos of the cocaine: "O row-land!," their wide eyes
dripping in hopes for a sip of a man's teeming decadence.
Ladies wipe noses, precious, white
powder on a white
glove, blood on a stolen fur, princesses of the city's indeterminable
class of penniless aristocracy. Gallimard folio editions. Contemptuous
pin-up: a photograph.
Roland who is one of the seventeen wise
men of
scarborough remembers a time apart when the heart grew fonder, the
second act of his endless vomiting; one day the room was dark, and she
was gone. Then he saw her in store windows, street corners, large
elevators, dim stairwells, musty streetcars, concerts of elaborate
orchestras, crowded parties, alcoholic deliriums, obsolete libraries,
within corn fields, at the feet of maples, among the homeless; she
dominated his peripheral; at department stores he ran his hands through
a red cloth.
In summer on the street Roland
sees a boy yawn
for eleven seconds. Roland stops and lights a cigarette. At the end of
the yawn the boy drools gleefully and Roland says, What's your name and
the boy squints. A woman appears and takes the hand of the boy and
looks at Roland and holds two fingers to her mouth as if smoking a
cigarette. Roland takes a drag and walks away and feels thinner and
repulsed by the woman and at an alley mounts a bin and grabs at a
brick-rimmed window and asks the woman within, Where is she, where is
my dear sweet wife Alice, is she out yet or still here or what.
"Out! Out Roland, no one is anywhere!" says the
horse-haired catholic mother-lady of said Alice, matriarch of family,
sputtering Catholic-type woman, saying again, Out out, until finally
Roland convulses with boyish chuckling, hops around the alley-street
corner, jumps the row of dead flower beds, steps up the half-undone
brick steps, rasps at the door, and chimes, "Mother Steinmann, your
darling, boyish, flowers, things made of candy, so open open, yes yes
yes" thinking furiously, O but God woman, keep that bald man Howard at
bay!
The door swings to a half-open, Roland
enters with a
cheeky French salutation, sticks a curious neck into the dark
livingroom, eyes just missing dormant Howard, enters into the small,
precarious kitchenette and, first taking a glossy tour of the icebox,
terminates a neglected naked burner, sits at the wobbling circular
breakfast table, pulls at a morning-old teapot, pours and, the mother
entered, says, "Look here!”
Annabel's mother says, "I could call the
police,"
and the cardiovasc, crazed stubble crawling backwards into the skin of
his cheek before the matronly Catholic, exclaims in a voice,
"Look here the police: my badge," a
desperate
phantasmagoric: a peniscular, a panicule; a ring of
eyeflowers…
"Enough Roland," says the mother, and,
despondent,
turns towards the alley-window as if to tend to the dishes.
"Oh but I come to talk, mother," says
Roland, lapping a cold liquid.
“My ruined daughter…”
"Ah yeah maybe I haven't seen her, so I've really three stops left, so
and I thought one idea might be that she'd come all the way home to
mommy and daddy to be fed some lovely bowls of ah, cornflakes and
pancakes and take little soapy baths with little rubber duck things
see, maybe just needed one night or seven or so in that old
pink-sheeted shortish little bed of hers, a thing of freud in any
capacity, for there's O so much more I'm afraid, you see."
The mother continues on with a silent washing, and so the cardiovasc
seems to say, "For do you know, mother, that your darling palish
red-cheeked pursed-esque little daughter, being my wife and formally
Steinmann but now formal-like Alice something Something-cardiovasc
Gallimard my surname, that she, mother, being your daughter and only
wifed-child, now employs her self vicariously, a red light-type hourly
lady?"
The mother, hands within a drawer of silverware and things, pets a
large knife and, silent, turns to that meticulous cardiovasc, the
anti-abstemious, virginity-larcenist Roland, and, streaming smog-like
rivers of that garrish contemporaneous mascara night-of-the-times,
turns the tips of her red mouth toward the yellow linoleum floor, and
Roland says,
"Well then, mother, is that girl upstairs then?" and the mother many
times nods her head Yes, biting her lip and waving one hand about,
stabbing about dumbly with the knife in the other.
But Roland says, "Ah no no you are
wrong," and,
delicately undoing himself from the table, handles a clean cigarette
between his lips and leaves. The door behind him, the mother raises her
voice so as to reach the living room, saying, "Howard..." and from the
living room, the amphibian-throated father croaks,
"Woman I told you never to let him in again," to which the mother
replies,
"Howard I tell you that boy loves us all." And Howard thinks, CHRIST IS
FIRST YOU SHITFACED SON OF A BITCH.
A Marxist dinner engagement at the meat-packing assembly line. A
burlesque affair. Peter Quince kept making jokes about fondling the
chicken breast. S. the thirteen-year-old daughter of Peter Quince
performed fellatio on six meat-packers and eleven Marxists and blushed.
Roland the cardiovasc was called upon to clean up the blood of those
who did not survive the affair.

pounding
synapse-coiled cool wet unbalanced sensual subclausal conventions
signifiying and unsignifying, and Roland thinks, O minstrel galleons of
Carib fire, and is unable to look at her directly, from the corner of
an eye reconstructing the contours of the light upon her in broad
strokes against the soft grey back of his mind, and he thinks, Bind us
in time, O Seasons clear, and he smiles and feels his heart in his
fingers, smiling, and she, Alice expressing, says,
“YOUR
COCK: YOUR SHOULDER.”
Grey, glossy-eyed Roland lights a sort
of final
cigarette, and, turning at last upon the full form of her naked,
overwhelming femininity, says,
"I crossed the city in search of you,
lady, you."
"I've done the sheets over, you at last."
In the morning Roland awakes to find a
decadent
Alice sprawled on the morning-cold wooden floor beside the bed, she at
work about to lick a sort of glossy, thin photo ripped from the inner
hinge of a dark, rejected picture-magazine, and, seeing Roland,
retracts the small pink tongue and announces,
"Roland: there is a God above us."
But in the same morning Roland had done
a thing, and
Alice came upon him with what begin with the pencil within him and what
had ended with Roland holding his liver in his hands and singing a
child’s song and thinking that it was a baby and dying
knowing
that he was a father and the last cardiovasc of scarborough.
Ah, ha-hah, no Roland, coffee nice, oh black battery-acid nice
night-type &
“medium roasts,”
boardcreaks, ‘Ah’ say all, ‘thine
Alice... awaketh…’
I hear there’s a port city
drink it now