Abracadabra, says Mephisto, the firefly
buddha of Rue Morgue, and the whole wide world
changes from a stumbling rick-rack machine
doing the rag time, the bag time, the I'm-on-the
edge-of-a-drag time to a tornado of unmitigated
fury. Yes sir, we are trampling out our vengeance,
grapes-of-wrath time is here again when I think about
Her Majesty, myself, all alone on her throne, tiara askew,
inconsistently worshipped, even by herself, and I could
just die to think how I betray myself in the great
Kabuki theater of my mind, the No Theater, so to speak, but
latitudinal issues aside, here I am starring in a
mystery play. Everyone's in place—cows, shepherds,
no-good-rotten Herod and his ridiculous Roman soldiers.
Only the savior's missing. What's the point, then
putti aside, of the whole big preposterous
Quattrocento mess, the fights, the plague, the frivolous
rococo results, postmodern la-di-da incarnate?
So what's a girl to do when stuck in the last vestiges of the
tawdry twentieth century—have a drink, a fling, say
Uncle? Oh, there's no loathing like self-loathing,
vox populi, vox dei or something like that. I'm rejecting
Western thought here, monotheism included, shuddering as
xenophobic clouds gather over the darkening earth, yeah,
yeah, everyone hates someone, me included, cowering in my
Zen bomb shelter, longing for a thermonuclear whack.