The Green Hills of Morok

She wakes for what she wagered was a moment. She has not woken. Spoken. Soon she sees. What does she see? I declaim.  A Commonwelt; a reign of black hussars swarming over the plain face of a damsel in this dress; many women have difficulties expressing their selves and/or being clear in and about what they really want and really hate; a bomb; two rabbits thrusting by friction to produce a swarm of babbitts; quahogs unlimited; a bicorn; a picture, in which squirming hordes surround a great spinning blue orb dripping with metaphysical gibbets of gibbering giblets; they swarm onto it and onto each other, spelling out letters of the old Copulian alphabet as they go and on the run; from the orifice of one of the more distressed inhabitants of this sphere emerges or regresses (the directionality has been impaired) the limb of a remarkably self-actualized cohort, by name of Welsh; surrounding this entire filigreed structure is a pool which reflects in its red audacity the still an

We rejoin our contafulous pair in the most pear-like of circumstances: enhanced by a nuclear cruiser, they hang by the merest sliver of repugnance from a basket of large cherry droppings, put expressly upon a razor blade for their own  entrapment by Mr. Tweed.  (Ah, Mr. Tween … captor of nations,  Magenschmerz  of all vibrations, redeemer of the vile, emperor of the undressed, undeserving utterer of the underserved, main waiter at the Café Tom on East 14th St., vast and ultimate power of gasoline fumes, etc.)  (Not THAT Mister Preen, you fool!)  The situation, as you can well imagine, my friends, is desperate.  They have no need of regret, no remorse courses through their pale brains, for they know that their lives have been suffused with Pig Latin, the Other White Language — and yet … and yet there is a hint of trouble in Willina’s pinkish eyes.  She reaches over to Pubert — she begins to breathe into his ear — she recoils at the smell and thinks better of it — now she thinks worse

Scraunched. Splirged. Threalt. Crug. Snik. Bep. Ap. Q! December 12, 1909. [1]   A light rain fell today.  In the hotel room no one was listening.  The señoritas [2]  said I was dashing in my purple outfit.  Was dashing the right word?  I don't know anything any more.  The rain flickers fleetingly on some streets. March 14, 1919.  More rain. [3] March 22, 1999.  For too long have I been sitting in the hotel making passes at myself [4]  and feints at the front door [5] .  If my daughter, God rest her perfumed old soul, were still with us, I'd make sure that she would get me out of this fine fancy pickle.  Fine, French, fiduciary-assed pickle. March 24, 9999.  A light rain fell today. [6]   In it I saw: the pelts of fifty thousand hussars who had been dematerialized in their suitcases; a smattering of German; two pickle-dogs who had lived life to the last drop of goodness; a man who was left over from the days of Petunias; a war case from the tele

And now for a quickie. All is water.   How to make water in 5 easy steps. Donkeys and turtles smell alike: they both arise, emerge, and ignore the shining equilateral triangles. One thing you must remember, and one thing only / Which you must never forget nor fail to recall /  To keep [it] in your liver forever and a day / For [it was] spoken by the goddess so that all may have ears / Remember this: ... [fragment ends] 275c:  So you say, then, Moronides, that a fish without a woodvine would still be a just fish, and if it were just, then a beautiful fish? -- Yes, Cockates: you have hit the nail on the head. -- And that fish, being beautiful, must of necessity also be petrified? -- Yes, I suppose so. -- Now consider this, Moronides: does the woodchopper know wood? -- Certainly, Cockates. -- And does the shepherd know his sheep? -- Almost every day, Cockates. -- And the horseman horses? -- Of course. -- And the plowman plows? -- Yes. -- So what do we conclude? -- You tell

From now on there is to be no more fisticuffing about these parts, lads of honor: from this day henceforward, shall we discuss e'er again the plenary beatitudes of Erewhon? or the cuspidors of St. Theresa?  From this date into the foreseeable destiny of Man, can it ever again be said that we are mere stockholders, mere place-markers on the shores of His Ocean?  Or is it His Oven?  I was just remarking to Mrs. Dinwiddie down the lane the other day that if you think about the latest price increases youll see that theyre not all theyre cracked up to be O not at all because you see His Majesty himself was the One who ordered the bacon that day at Leicester Square surrounded by his admiring acolytes as they say you know that means sycophants or something like that those words they all mean the same to me and all I know is I need some lemon waters to control it cant you see it wont do otherwise because the man at the corner the other weekend not last weekend but the one when they had t

At some moment Tamar has decided that she has been awake for a while.  She looks down and across, surveying her attire: a damp velvet dress lingers on her.  It reeks of a portal opened by crowns of smoke.  From the street comes a vociferous vociferating voice of vivacious young clods.  "Niña," they call in a language spoken in Venezuela, but not in Brazil ... Mr. Clemens, high priest of Geography at the Cathedral of Callousness (AKA St. Elizabeth's School for Troubled Girls), Clemens the Inclement, would chant out the names of South American sovereign states, whining for one, then bellowing for the next, in a great cacophonic concerto; the girls backed him up with a symphony of tight-lipped groans and rumblings -- Paraguay, Uruguay, Paraguay, Uruguay, Paragraph, Urugraph, Ur-Graph, Urmensch, Ur....  And at night, each tossing in her starched dormitory bed, they'd try to forget the concerto's chants; but each effort would only recall its dreary melody, fixing it

Morok. Smoking Morok. More, smoking more -- broken, coronary crowns of smoke. For Tamar the smoke is a portal.  As it obscures the walls, the escutcheons and fleurs de lis of the wallpaper, hides the grate from which a feeble heat is rising, the lamps, even the antediluvial wardrobes of the Pensión Madrid, the tired fumes bring to light a passage into a broken, imperial element, the element of Morok. Who could map the place that the exhausted clouds reveal?  Who could trace its streets, its cobblestones made of a single human hair, to their origin, a beginning commanded and inscribed in the Book of Alacla which takes root inside Tamar's smallest fingernail?  Is it ... could it have been that despite every escape, despite the systematic journeys beyond all systems, her farthest imaginable goal could only be the street outside this cold window that is now befogged with her obsessions?  Might it someday have been true that no matter how far she ran, how many forests she bu