mist has flopped over onto the embankment like a sailing ship. Others walking disappear into the white and the mattress whores have moved off their usual perch to avoid being hidden by the mist. They walk up and down, keep moving like sentries to show they haven’t got broken ankles. The ones that have stand still and try to hide it. A quarter a fuck. The mist has helped them tonight. Normally now the pimps are out hunting the mattress whores with sticks. When they catch them they break their ankles. Women riddled with the pox, remnants of the good life good time ever loving Storyville who, when they are finished there, steal their mattress and with a sling hang it on their backs and learn to run fast when they see paraders with a stick. Otherwise they drop the mattress down and take men right there on the dark pavements, the fat, poor, the sadists who use them to piss in as often as not because the disease they carry has punched their cunts inside out, taking anything so long as the quarter is in their hands.
So their lives have become simplified by seeing all the rich and healthy as dangerous, and they automatically run when they see them. The ones who can run. The others drop their mattress and lie down and flick their skirts up, spread their legs with socks on, these ones who don’t care who it is that’s coming. If it’s a pimp he’s gonna check her for a swollen foot so she can’t slip back to Storyville. These broken women so ruined they use the cock in them as a scratcher. The women who are called gypsy feet. And the ones not caught yet carrying their disease like coy girls into and among the rocks and the shallows of the river where the pimps in good shoes won’t follow. But those who are lame thrusting their fat foot at you, immune from the swinging stick that has already got them swelled and fixed in a deformed walk, gypsy foot gypsy foot.
For them it is a good night. Standing like grey angels on the edge of the mist, stepping backward and invisible when they hear a fast rich walk. Like mine. God even mine, me with a brain no better than their sad bodies, so sad they cannot afford to feel sorrow towards themselves, only fear. And my brain atrophied and soaked in the music I avoid, like milk travelling over the border into cheese. All that masturbation of practice each morning and refusing to play and these gypsy feet wanting to play you but drummed back onto the edge of the water by your rich sticks and your rich laws. Bellocq showed me pictures he took of them long ago, he was crying, he burned the results. Thighs swollen and hair fallen out and eyelids stiff and dead and those who had clawed through to the bones on their hips. Rales. Dear small dead Bellocq. My brain tonight has a mattress strapped to its back.
Even with me they step into the white. They step away from me and watch me pass, hands in my coat pockets from the cold. Their bodies murdered and my brain suicided. Dormant brain bulb gone crazy. The fetus we have avoided in us, that career, flushed out like a coffin into the toilets and into the harbour. The sum of the city. To eventually crash into the boats going out to sea. Walk over the driblets of manure of the gypsy foot whores, they don’t eat much, what they can beg or take from the half-formed weeds along the embankment. Salt in their pockets for energy. There is no horror in the way they run their lives.
Third Day & Third Evening
Game home with just his face laughing at the jokes. Refused to enlarge stories as he used to. They noticed that, those who had known him before.
There were younger ones around now who had heard of him who wished to revive him but he easily turned conversations back onto them and their lives. Perhaps they were the eventual catalysts. Maybe. As it was they gradually heard of him being back and brought bottles of Raleigh Rye to leave on the doorstep, and Bolden just smiling and bringing the bottles in to Nora in the kitchen but not touching the cap, not
So their lives have become simplified by seeing all the rich and healthy as dangerous, and they automatically run when they see them. The ones who can run. The others drop their mattress and lie down and flick their skirts up, spread their legs with socks on, these ones who don’t care who it is that’s coming. If it’s a pimp he’s gonna check her for a swollen foot so she can’t slip back to Storyville. These broken women so ruined they use the cock in them as a scratcher. The women who are called gypsy feet. And the ones not caught yet carrying their disease like coy girls into and among the rocks and the shallows of the river where the pimps in good shoes won’t follow. But those who are lame thrusting their fat foot at you, immune from the swinging stick that has already got them swelled and fixed in a deformed walk, gypsy foot gypsy foot.
For them it is a good night. Standing like grey angels on the edge of the mist, stepping backward and invisible when they hear a fast rich walk. Like mine. God even mine, me with a brain no better than their sad bodies, so sad they cannot afford to feel sorrow towards themselves, only fear. And my brain atrophied and soaked in the music I avoid, like milk travelling over the border into cheese. All that masturbation of practice each morning and refusing to play and these gypsy feet wanting to play you but drummed back onto the edge of the water by your rich sticks and your rich laws. Bellocq showed me pictures he took of them long ago, he was crying, he burned the results. Thighs swollen and hair fallen out and eyelids stiff and dead and those who had clawed through to the bones on their hips. Rales. Dear small dead Bellocq. My brain tonight has a mattress strapped to its back.
Even with me they step into the white. They step away from me and watch me pass, hands in my coat pockets from the cold. Their bodies murdered and my brain suicided. Dormant brain bulb gone crazy. The fetus we have avoided in us, that career, flushed out like a coffin into the toilets and into the harbour. The sum of the city. To eventually crash into the boats going out to sea. Walk over the driblets of manure of the gypsy foot whores, they don’t eat much, what they can beg or take from the half-formed weeds along the embankment. Salt in their pockets for energy. There is no horror in the way they run their lives.
Third Day & Third Evening
Game home with just his face laughing at the jokes. Refused to enlarge stories as he used to. They noticed that, those who had known him before.
There were younger ones around now who had heard of him who wished to revive him but he easily turned conversations back onto them and their lives. Perhaps they were the eventual catalysts. Maybe. As it was they gradually heard of him being back and brought bottles of Raleigh Rye to leave on the doorstep, and Bolden just smiling and bringing the bottles in to Nora in the kitchen but not touching the cap, not
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