After I was cut from my mother’s backbone, it was up to my father to shape my gullible mind and that’s the truth.

My father was a surgeon, a shaman and a greyhound. A runner in his youth, he thought little of exercise and called himself a cultured couch potato. As a doctor he loved each patient and included them in what he called prayers. Having grown up Catholic, he turned humanist when enough sense came to him and his prayers did not come out the classic way though they were always classy. While he was operating, I imagine they went something like this in his head:

“Dear God, I don’t think you exist, or if you do, you should have done something for me when I asked. You don’t seem to want to ease the burden of the masses, and when I am out of luck, I don’t see you chip in either. Your holy church is a disgrace and your footprints on Earth are filled with blood. You’re a feeble almighty. I know I am having this conversation with myself in my own thick head but it doesn’t matter. So whether you exist or not: do something not for me but for this poor sod on the operating table here. Let him wake up and get better, for all of our sakes and for the good of his children. Thank you, Lord, who I most fervently do not believe in and never will as long as I live, see you later maybe.”

He wrote poems too, some good some bad but they were passionate and his. He loved to read them out loud and his voice never wavered. A poetic dinosaur shedding tears for bards long gone, he sat on a leather couch in the nude, blew smoke rings shaped like wild animals and picked verses out of the thick air.

He was collector and casanova at once. He’d return from scavenger hunts with gold watches, rings, precious books and feathers of exotic birds. They were tossed on shelves, hung from the ceiling, some of them buried. From sexual exploits he returned with stories of women, one for each finger, and I kept count for him when the tales were good. I would remember the names. The penalty for bad stories was obliteration by memory loss.

He never liked that I joined a corporation—he thought business bloodless and bloodlusting both. But he’s the one who taught me how to throw a bow tie round my neck like taming a snake. When I began to write he became excited and worried, too, which wasn’t like him at all but I understood. Words are scary creatures, things of divine making, weapons of mass delusion.

When he died, people wore dark colours and said nice things about him. They played sad music, which he wouldn’t have even liked, and they had his deathmask taken which made him look limp and not like him at all. When they were gone, weeks afterward, I bought a star on the Internet and named it after him, which seemed suitable, given that he is probably still dishing it out to God.

Published in BULL with an interview. Check out the first draft.

My father was a writer and a great man, and his father was a writer, as was the one before him, and he was a great writer, too.

So that I got confused sometimes if greatness came from being a man, or a father, or a writer, or all of them at once, since the attribute ‘great’ seemed strewn so carelessly among my forefathers.

As for myself, I am a man most of all, then a father and a writer last, but great I am not in any of these, be it character, destiny, or occupation.

I can spell very well and I can raise a storm from a single drop of holy water.
And I sprinkle my verse with fairy dust to make it fly.

My greatness is fidelity to all things I observe from the lowliest love to the highest hatred.

My smallest word is ‘I’, which I use as an eye to look around from under my hood.

Published by Metazen, Oct 2009, with “iCarus” by ms flawnt

The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Wikipedia

I am among the many most definitely and most certainly: me. Definite: because I know where I begin though not where I will end. Certain: because of the many that many have told me that I am, some more some less kindly.

In these two attributes, I am not complete. as Cicero says, a group of three beats a group of two when aired aloud. The romans moved on from threes to legions. Hence it may happen that you begin with three attributes yourself – say, “cute, adorable, likeable”, or “hairy, large, rosy”, or “difficult, rambunctious, ferruginous” – and these three attributes become the cell of a legion of things others say about you or you say about yourself. It may then be hard to get away from your initial set of attributes.

Note on grammar: the adjective is a legionnaire with a tactical syntactic role – to modify a noun or pronoun and to gather and pass on information about the noun or the pronoun’s referent like an agile undercover agent. It is a spy from an un-noun land with a bagpack full of explosives, a chinese fireworker with wings to beware of lest you forget to ignite your innuendo.

I liked my first two adjectives, definite, certain, but I insisted on the third attribute, me, as not being an adjective but a personal pronoun. Other personal belonging people, personalities, human reference points,  who stood by, pars pro toto, when I appeared on the scene, were (not necessarily in this order):

… My mother who carried my me and made me definite, who taught me the letters and how to tie my shoelaces (this being the first and not last of a long line of eagerly anticipated ambitions).

… My father who struck his spark and made me certain, who had a belly of sardonic laughter and a bag full of stories from his travels to the moon where i was permitted to follow him provided I took my vitamins.

… My sister who was not me but near me and most definite and certain, too, older but smaller in size, a mistress of many tongues and with the will of a platoon of soldiers buried in the jolly jungles.

… A beenie family of ancestral persons who planted themselves around the land as only families do, dotted across the alluvion, and in my case most definitely and certainly attached to the big cities where they dwelled in not uncertain contempt for anything countrylike that smelled of manure and a manifold of uncontrollable animals and their indefinite habits: rabbits, sheep, pigs (assumed to have wisdom beyond their bacon), dogs (dirty, doggedly so) – and only cats (via my father’s inclination towards their fierce independence) and horses (via my mother’s affection for the creatures’ affable grace) were somewhat exempted from the righteous credo of the urbanites: people who found beauty in the roof lines of skyscraping buildings and who thought chimneys a clear sign of composure, civilisation and culture.

Later I acquired an ickle cluster of frynds tarted up as if for a Venetian fancy-ball with the masks of: the assassin, the lion, the duchess.

There was a red-headed courtesan who followed me around visiting my fantasy life leaving her dirty droppings as clues, a sex goddess whom I never touched but always imagined, robed as a brigand’s daughter, with a flirty feather in her tricorny hair.

I had a wife to call mine when i feared to lose my fire in the stormiest storm and who soothsayed my successes from laverbread. We had a child, too, who was her own from her first moment flopping like a fish on a table top, a girl of orange pekoe temper with thistle green eyes.

This is how any account of anybody’s dingy beginnings should enter employment: by listing the invididual’s attributes and those whose affections attended his entry into this whole world of wonders.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt obsessed by me moir and a sense of yore

When we lived in London, I had a good friend, a tree named Jeremiah. He was a birch and stood in Waterlow Park. He was a slow talent and came into bloom late in spring but then he lasted longer than most of his brothers and would give me shade and solace when many other trees had already gone bald and brown.

I went to see Jeremiah when I was in a hard place, which I often was in those days. I walked down the sloping hill overlooking the City past the garden house where they gave artists a break who hadn’t got in the London art scene, lucky bastards. Little old ladies and tourists on their way to Marx’ grave would stop by and say nice things about the paintings and small sculptures and some would buy. Here, opinions were brutal and as unreal as stock options. Cognition was swapped for compliments. If you opened your mouth, you had to sit down make yourself at home and eat a scone. The tea was thin and the conversation was thinner.

Further down the rimpled ridge, broken statues were scattered across the patio as if to remind the citizens that nothing would last unharmed and the sight of those missing noses and snapped limbs calmed me. In spring, the scent of death wafted from highgate cemetery across a brick wall and mixed with the smell of flowers and the towering presence of a municipality gone mad and mightily so.

I walked down the hill and I passed old men on benches and couples snogging on the commons. I walked straight up to Jeremiah, who stood alone, as if in thoughts, surrounded by green, and put my head against his bark, hoping he’d talk. Sometimes he kept silent, mostly he asked: how’re yer doing, my friend. I sighed, happy for a moment of recognition, and said, I’m not doing too good today, my dear uncle died, and we fight at first sight and I might kill myself later tonight.

Jeremiah seemed to sigh back at me, an avuncular antipode, and said with the simplicity of sandalwood: Snap out of it, mate. See the heavens? Smell the grass? Feel the ground beneath your feet? – I knew he wasn’t asking, he was telling, it was the beginning of the tallest of tales. I longed for his sensible touch. I rested my head on his roots and wiggled my toes in silent communion.

People came by. Some smiled, most looked away, afraid they might catch the treehugger’s curse.

Lovers lost on the lawns liked it when Jeremiah sang his lullaby while the stars stood by as they do, sparing with words but strong in the skies. Nobody lost their mind: there was always song to disperse the doleful expression on people’s faces.

Later it became winter and we left town leaving the torment behind. But i still get letters from Jeremiah the birch written on periderm signed with bird chant, sweetly fragrant.

with thanks to Heather Vaulkhard for looking under birch trees for true signs of life’s poetry.

i have at the soul level only ever known five women if you dont count my mother: a german, a persian, an argentinian, an italian and an american. now i will talk about them & say what i need to say.

today i will talk about the german woman.

this woman is in a way the most difficult one to talk about because she was my first, and because it was a long time ago, and because there is still guilt. then again guilt comes with every one of these women & perhaps that’s what makes them worth remembering, perhaps that’s why i hold them dear in my heart.

her name was penelope.

she was two years older than me, freckled and pale, her hair toying with red without real commitment. she played the guitar and she sang like a lady of courtly love. she did not take me seriously at first – i sat at her feet: an invisible worshipper before a goddess, one of a number of young males, all of us unattractive in our own manner and unsure of ourselves, in particular of our maleness, which hung on us like a new uncomfortable coat, always the same coat in any weather, hot or cold, but we were stuck with it & we believed, with the faces of our fathers fused to our thick clumsy frames, that it would, one day, hopefully soon, fit us and feel right, no matter what temperature.

The remenant of the tale is long ynough.

throughout one of those overheated summers, penelope sang and sang herself into my heart. day by day, there were less men shuffling nervously around her, eventually they receded & became part of her audience so that she could see me as a man who wanted her & whom she wanted.

graffitti luv.

around that time a malheur happened to her and she broke her ankle so that she had to walk around in a cast. when we made love for the first time, this severely limited our acrobatic aspirations but made the moment more memorable. the cast was covered with graffiti, an artistically most promising thing it was.

moment of truth.

as i said, i had never been with a woman like this before & i went for it like a starved dog for the bone & i didnt think about taking proper precautions which in those days long gone involved carrying and using a condome: it simply had not occurred to me. neither did it occur to her until after the moment was gone (dear reader! it is difficult to write about what actually happened – i will leave it to others, braver ones, to serve you the juicy detail).

Have mercy on oure wo and oure distresse!

i recall that we sat together afterwards at candlelight (big in those days and perhaps still where hyppies live) & it suddenly dawned on both of us that we might have made a person by melting into each other. i remember the shocked expression in her eyes and my surprise at that. it made me see then and there the difference between the depth of our love for one another though i didnt realise it then and dont want to believe it now, still.

Of the bodies, and the grete honour.

her mound by the way then seemed to be as wide as the bosporus, filled with earthly delights, and for the first time i felt powers that i could not & did not want to harness. like a ship leaving the wharf after that long build, after endless dreaming of endless horizon and the swelling seas. like knowing that falling & letting yourself fall is a little death & only one of many many little deaths to come, and yet the fall is so sweet & the ground seems so near so near.

Shortly for to telle is myn entente.

penelope and i parted ways soon after when she moved to the south. got together again, briefly, years later, upon which i managed to expertly break her heart with chivalrous brutality that i had acquired in the meantime, the mean time that it took me to come into my might which penelope had shared with me as her gift.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt with a little help from Chaucer.

i cry my name from the bottom of a tibetan bowl. i wind my shawl closer round my neck & i close my fly for fear i might take flight at the first sign of fear. i ask her, What’s up with you – you seem down, and she does not answer because she’s mad at me. not mad per se, mad at me and around me, burning the air with accusations. What did i ever do? i say. Nothing, she says, and that is the problem. You don’t do anything for me. i quiet.

i felt sick most of that day because we had fought in the morning. i hate those mornings. they make me feel all unhinged and hammered. i drove to work with a chest as tight as a duck’s arse. bits of negative newsflakes were wafting around in the small space between me & the window & the tiny chinese bell that someone gave me who later died a death & i went to his funeral: afterwards, hearing the bell always made me sad so i hid it under the dashboard. thoughts of how the oil would be running out & we’d all have to stay home & make love all day or walk to work or stuff like that provided much-wanted distraction for a moment. suddently i’m back on the self-pity rails: there is a train waiting for me any time of day, with plush pillows & exquisite service: Would you care for another cold cup of tea with a poisoned biscuit on the side, Sire? Yes, please, and make it extra strong. More needling comments on your wrinkled wee-little willy-winky, Sire? No, thank you, I am slashed enough already. on and on the carriages roll on their journey towards my personal shangri-la.

later, we watch cuban women rolling cigars on their naked thighs. we wade through the pastiche of our own time: do you remember when we used to do this, and that? yes i do, no i don’t. or: i can’t be bothered to think about the past, i want to look ahead. what do you see there? i see me & i see you & others. my vision is blurred. someone hands me glasses. they don’t help. i see asian women enjoying themselves with asian men, piercing and pierced with pleasure. i see fathers & mothers & children holding hands & walking out of creation into a curtain of the dustiest dust. the investment of dirty nappies bears heavy fruit. i see prayer, i see pain. somewhere, someone crunches credit under their boot. financial institutions crumble while i’m still struggling with definitions. where was nietzsche when i needed him? how exactly did i become who i am?

my hands were made of iron: i built a faraday cage to shield my manhood from curious looks. thus armed, i left work & went for a walk in the park that always makes me peevish, but more so when i’m horny and upset. i watched the people pass through their lives & i wondered how they might feel on the inside: furry or feverish or simply red-hot. i sat down on a bench to read, munching carrots and sandwich prepared by her for me, lovingly i had to give it to her. the sun melted my resolve to remain a grump. teenagers hopped along, listlessly. no radiowaves ravished my soul. calm & collected i  got back to work, lead my team astray & postponed deadlines like an expert undertaker.

You need to fold your clothes, she says. i take her by the word and swirl her around, my sweet chariot wife, she bakes compliments better than bread. we end up in bed, on the unfolded clothes. many of my journeys ended here, ’tis a pleasant place of childlike wonder, a place to go yonder. it takes a lot longer to understand your body than it takes to learn maths. once you figured it out, what it wants and when and from whom, you can move on to figuring out relationships. chances are, you already passed through a few by the time good hard knowledge rolls around like cash on a day at the track.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt. first published on Metazen

while as i said before i was cut from my mother’s backbone it was left to my father to shape my gullible mind, and that’s the truth. every human is a singularity out there with infinite space around & infinite depth beneath. as a child i knew that and i didn’t because black hole awareness anticipates death and that’s where fear lives.

nobody was ever more afraid of death than my father. he was a collector and a casanova. he returned from scavenger hunts with gold watches, rings, precious books, and feathers of exotic birds. they were tossed on shelves, hung from the ceiling and buried in small caves whose mounds magically opened taking the oblation and closing forever. he returned from his sexual exploits with stories of women, one for each finger of his hand – and i kept count for him when the tales were good. then i would also remember names. the penalty for bad stories was obliteration by memory loss.

he also was a surgeon, a shaman, and a greyhound. although a sprinter in his youth and loved running, he did not require extensive exercise and called himself a cultured couch potato. as a doctor, he loved each patient and included him in his prayers. having grown up as an ardent catholic, he had turned into humanistic marxist material so that these prayers did not come out the classic way though classy they were. i imagine in his head they went something like this:

“dear god, i dont think you exist, or if you do,  you should have done something for me when i asked. you don’t seem to want to ease the burden of the masses, and when i am out of luck, i dont see you ship in either. your church is a disgrace and your footprints on earth are filled with blood. you feeble allmighty. why did you let my father die by accident and how come my dick isn’t longer? i know i am having this conversation with myself in my own thick head but it doesnt matter. so whether you exist or not do something not for me but for this poor sod on the operating table here. let him wake up and get better, for all our sakes and for his childrens’, thank you, oh lord who i most fervently do not believe in and never will as long as i live, see you later maybe.”

my father loved tangerine dreams. he drew colours from the air and let me in on the secret of life, which can be found in a bunch of strangers who suddenly become a bubbling cauldron of creativity and sharing. he wrote poems, some good some bad but they were passionate and his. he loved to read them out loud & his voice did not waver. he was a poetic dinosaur shedding tears for bards long gone. i keep one of these tears in a flask by my bed.

he never liked that i joined the corp he thought business bloodless and bloodlusting both. but he taught me how to throw a bow tie round one’s neck like taming a snake. when i began to write he got excited and scared, too, which wasn’t like him at all but i understood. words are scary creatures, poop of divine making, weapons of mass delusion.

when my father died, many people said nice things about him & they wore dark colours, black mostly & they played sad music which he wouldnt have liked and they had his deathmask taken which looked lifeless & not like him at all. when they were gone, i named a star after him which seemed suitable given that he needed to continue dishing it out to god.

when my dad died he became my father & he was a daddy because i was his son & a husband to my mother of many years, who also lives among the stars & he had grown down finally & firmly rooted himself in my soil & he gave me mother’s milk as good as any.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt — with substantial help from the gods and various good-natured ancestors, on ascension which is father’s day in germany.

i was born in a small town in the county of rhineland-palatine where they eat pig’s neck: imagine, grown men sitting on one of the town’s squares their shirt sleeves rolled up and their ties thrown over the shoulder, biting in the springy animal flesh. beats me.

buried now below an overpass, an old house leans against a wall like a man too old to consciously let go of life. it wants to be carried away to the land of the dead but nobody seems to notice. this is supposedly the house of the original dr faustus who made a deal with the devil for happiness, more than five-hundred years ago. i believe this story with all my heart.

the oldest market in town is egg market. i walked across it many times looking for traces of chicken crime: broken shells, yellow stains, the limp of a gentle woman who collided with a cage, cawed at by the fowl flying in all directions. i did this because there had not been an actual market for many years now – but my father told me about it. this story i did not need to believe in: the street sign said “egg market” and this was a german town. things were in order.

the different squares were connected by roads – they were of medieval making, too, and it was said that there wasn’t a straight path from any one place to any other. even the small river whose name sounded like the german word for “near”, the Nahe, ran around itself in circles. it would made you dizzy.

a friend of my father’s owned a flat in a bridge house. that’s a house built on the bridge. there were two of these houses and they were the oldest ones apart from dr faustus’ den. state money had gone into saving them from falling over. but if a house wants to go, nothing’s going to stop it, and you could see that these house were getting ready to topple, to take the leap in the water, hoping perhaps for another existence elsewhere down the river.

my father’s friend was a journalist. his paper was local, which meant that anything beyond ms meyers having let the cows out and losing one of them in the hills was worth reporting. during summer, you might even find a picture of that lost cow in the paper, with the caption “loulou, the cow ms myers said to have lost, as seen in the neighbouring town of F.” the journalist was not without aspirations – he did eventually make it to the tabloid for the region. he would now report on lost otherthings.

the journalist had a son with a french woman, michelle. the son’s name was gerard. i thought both names were beautiful. they stuck out in a ancestral landscape littered with the names of families having fled in the wake of wars – refugees in the small town whose streets were as untidy and quirky as their stories and subterfuges. “where did your folks come from?” was a frequent question, not infrequently answered by “from everywhere”.

i was born in a small town but I was made of my mother’s backbone. i reckon an angel cut me from it like eve was cut from adam’s rib. she had plenty of backbone for her entire life, but she wasn’t from that town – that weakened her. since i was nervous tissue from her own, i knew how to make her laugh. my wit tickled her senses and helped her forget that she was in the wrong place.

when i grow up, i want to live in dr faustus house, and i hope the devil still comes to visit. i’d love to ask the old fellow one thing or two. the stuff that you never read about: life and death and all that.