ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
539
once) our best poor bridge to make it back, no matter how cruelly re–
duced, to the life of those beings who have the power-all too un–
consciously-to shift the changing beat of Time? Or is there more?
And if I say I think there
is,
I tum the key into the category
of my own secret, for as some of you may have sensed by now, the
list I offered up to your amusement is from me, and I am, oh yes,
now I know who I am or was, I am the dead man on the floor, for
so I am, yes (what a pure moment of grief at all that has not been
done), I am in the endless deliberate instant of the vision given by
death, the million dying spasms of the radiating consciousness of
words, this last of me, wailing within, turbulent with the terror that
I no longer know where I am, nor if there are voices to hear me
and answer back. I am off finally, departed on the demented journey
whose first echoes I knew in those over-promiscuous moments of mal–
ice, license, promise and horror at the heart of a cocktail party when,
too drunk with the knowledge of what courage was demanded of
me, and what little I had, I used to close my eyes, sitting in the
saviorship of a chair, and I would give up the ghost of ego-erect
will,
and let the vertigo of the liquors suck me away, a far long way
in those few instants when I was spinning out with a rapidity to
match the salacious pace of our revolving earth, and I was one with
something other until the wife or the mistress or whichever latest
embodiment of the bitch-goddess was at my elbow, nudging me back,
feminine fingers of fury at spineless disappearing man wrenching me
with procreative determination clean up to the living so I would hear:
"Are you all right?"
"I was thinking of something," I would say, "and I like to think
with my eyes closed," but that was the lie of appearances to share
between us, a bread of false flour, forcibly refreshing me back to
my determinations, back to the party after the long swoon away_
But now I go, the vortex does not stop, the winds of the whirl–
pool-God's gyre again?-are heavy with consequence, and I sink or
do I fly? all vectors gone, while in my center, clear as the icy eye of
cocaine, I race toward a point of judgment, my courage and coward–
ice, (my masculine thrust and retreat from the avaricious energy–
plucking hairy old grotto of Time) trailing behind me in that comet
of connotations which is the past topologically reversed by the vision
of
now,
as
if
in recovering the past I am chasing after the future, so
