I am among the neurotypicals, travelling through places stuffed with hidden mistakes and layered with inconceivable hurts that would be true elsewhere.

Selves are created by environments. It’s even worse when it’s the other way around.

Everywhere, there are nonsense nations, bordered by bald, leafless paths, beaches of quicksand and crocodiles. I swim with terminated wraths, wreathing wraiths, roaring raging moralities about how values are not what they used to be. 

The Gate to the Neo Nazis’ Club House on the Pirna-Sonnenstein Euthanasia Site in Saxony

Of course they are.

none.

In forgotten prison cages, floating in cranial coffins. On the red chalk banks, where jolly gallows stand, surrounded by swirling flocks of angels that are not there. 

They call:

echoing.

Hallowed.

The sacred of some nowhere in their refrigerated morgues.

Gloom. 

The stars of all true romance, where greetings are ritualistic, with kisses and slaps.

I am not yet on the maps, you dear armchair gorillas!

• I am still ill and squeaking,
• working the infinitely empty room
• using languages you don’t speak,
• a mic that mutes,
• and doing the shuffle dance, once again,
• upside down and hanging.

Because neurotypicals believe in a concept called time, I have drawn this little map to illustrate reality more clearly, as a point of reference. Ed.

I am snowed in under brown smoke. Buried on a communal farm. Sawed-off, armed to clamped yellow teeth with a taped pipe bomb for the attack.

And that’s just the man you think I am.

The man is horse-haired and triple-gunned, a mad planning ape, pacing the floor, now rehearsing the last slogan of the attack to the Cambridge wards in refined rain, his foot in pain while knocking on doors, down endless streets of identical gates,

armed with detailed phone voter stats. 

A map of Richard’s journey, which he left crumpled on the floor. Ed.

He is greeted by insane, false-toothed smiles, some with ratty hair under tweed hats, begging to be allowed to vote Liberal Democrat again.

What fun. 

Everything has remained the same!

Sign off on your wills!

Poets Have Failed to Explicate Creation!

Minds and Brains persons are constantly changing the DSM towards best descriptions and categories of disorders, presentations and assumed material, brain malfunctions, acronyms from case stories of varieties of social demons, while economists have their own turgid and invisible wild creatures, whose hidden movements, rising and falling, are actualized in symbolic materials and dancing lights. 

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Dear Reader,

what Richard means at moments like this is that the self is a mask doubling as a virus, that you can pick up down at the corner store, or, if luck will have it, at your local cigarette kiosk, run by your apartment block warden, and, come on, you have one, you know you do. Here’s a whole collection of dress up parts for Richard, I stumbled upon at an identity kiosk in Erfurt (formerly it had served cheap East German cigarettes), in the hope of finding someone to put them on someday. Richard had obviously torn them off and run off without any disguise at all.

And so we search on. Ed.

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Back to Richard in his labyrinth:

“They are both daddied by Marx, the almost poet, and the bad boyfriend, Keynes, the pacifist looser of investments and inducer of crashing frights. Politics, I’m saying, has pathologies: promises, accusations, bribes, tax-funded vacations, martyrdoms, massacres, crap kingdoms, wars, Clausewitzes, Sun Tzu, bleeders, bores, backstabbing and heroic betrayal and (redacted) ‘whatever’. Here’s some of that ‘whatever’.”

Richard catching some voltage at the old East German Border Station at Point Alpha, where an entire transmission line was redirected into a fence, and, as you can see by the levitation, into a Richard with a burner phone in his pocket and a pacemaker in his knee.

And they call that a world!

The hunt goes on.

But, poets!

• God, what is a virtue?
• What is vile?
• What to weep for?
• Why smile?

Love dying as dust.

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Ladies and Gentlemanners, so you can be maps of this journey as well, here is the hunter’s ditty that Richard sang under his breath as he prowled the halls in search of a self, any self at all, to sit with. A vain hope, I know, but one does get nostalgic in one’s terror. Ed.

Dirty doves and divine lust: every mystery of human strength and fragility mystified improperly. Huge egos cracked like reptile eggs. Supposedly immortal princes pouting: dying dregs, like me.

It’s over. 

Happier Days: Richard Flogging His Books to an Attentive Audience in the Fulda Gap

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The long and short of it is how on Earth does one keep the proverbial chin up when the world is a grave, celebrated far and wide as the apocalyptic film of the year, screened on every retina:

My garage has become my Dad’s,

as has my grave,

with unused recreational instruments,

elderly dream cars with busted lights,

half-hearted crafts

and an old dog that licks in sniffy darkness,

all to remind me of mindless

loves I still have.

Lives I think I have forgiven

and understood.

Oy vey!

I have only tried for the best life. In my misunderstood circumstances, I remember my father’s last words:

I haven’t answered yet.

As the screenings in our minds become seamless in my theatre seat with the sticky spilled Orange Crush under my feet, literally glued to the spot, I watch, aghast.

Who will I be screened as today? Who you?

Another Day in a Refurbished Jewish Department Store in The Fulda Gap

The question has taken on a certain urgency. The last of my three personal enemies has died. As soon as I heard, I found myself cast in a new film, viz:

I do not mourn.

Real enemies, that’s what I’m talkling about Not the surreal social ones I spent a career fighting:

• Mugabe,
• Nixon,
• all sorts of South Africans who have no names,
• those who had done nothing to me.

NO, the personal ones:

• one a development aide posturing as a benighted fraud,
• one a thief who, in being exposed, was hidden, officially, and then ruined my family,
• one a political charlatan, a police agent or equivalent,
• a provocateur,
• a vacuum for mincing idealists,

who propelled me to prison, twice, beaten near death, and left another destructed family.

I say nothing here about continuous painful memory.

Welcome to Fulda, the city in the Fulda Gap, which was supposed to be the site of World War III. It was all planned. There was even a cathedral there to stop the Russian tanks in their tracks. Ed.

Meanwhile, back in the labyrinth: One of Canada’s initial trolls, a predator entranced with selfies, a posturing parasitic hollower-out and self-groupie, a small part of why a culture never was, even before e-intellect (sic) webbed us, made another family into a passed wind, like Russian dolls but backwards…

…a small void within a larger one, all within the never and the nowhere.

After each death, I became a different person, only to reflect, again, my self:

nobody. 

Do not forget. I am among the neurotypicals. I am giving them a report from the world. I do not know how they will read it, but then, I do not know how they will read you. Until next time, watch out for snakes. Remember what you can if you can.