Five Silver Pieces To Compensate for the Loss of a Left Arm. To Exquemeling, Melville, and Davy Jones.
1. If there is a reason to drown, and a way to find you in the sea, I think we might get through to the schools of fish and coral reefs we keep clipping with our rowboats. Bulkington will show us, there's nothing for life on land. Still earth is a toxic dirt that homogenizes the feet and warps us into islands. I'll never land again if we can take this masted ship and sail it on to end-of-earth waterfalls. Its a question of you, of me; are we real? I'm still not sure. Look at this life: drowning will never lose its glamour. There's little glory in "one insular Tahiti"----I'll always take scrimshaw and the South Seas over flimsy old fleur de lys and croaking mud. 2. The main food of the pirate, as it turns out, tends to be the respective flesh of the tortoise and the boar. Tender, they call it, and they eat little else. [My god, imagine the scurvy!] If I must eat turtles to battle, and drink rum over water every night, if only then I will be ready for the worst nausea of the sea, the worst breathing down the neck of my arbitrary lines, the worst of worst of you seeing what I say, if only then I can be ready to face the populous oceans with a bloody smile, and face you with my face before you, and let loose all this infamous speed that the sails have built up, -- If All This -- then I perhaps, will have to think on this terrible quivering sea and shelled sky for another moment, for, while it's in my nature to tear into things, I do not know what I will have of this tearing, in the end. 3. They will pay for the loss of the right hand with six hundred silver pieces, six slaves, six shares of whale, six more voyages, six irresistable mannerisms, six sets of identical buckled shoes and rogered hats, six future homes, six friends to bring, six more limbs to loose, six Nancy Drew novels, six huge flying manta rays, or six of you. So much to gain! And what's an arm? 4. The ship at the bottom of the ocean which is all rust and wood and foaming clouds of green-scaled girls is a great place to sleep, much softer that you might have expected, much more lovely, much more stricken and gentle. 5. The whole of Exquemeling can be attributed to this wildness we have, to surpass our own lives with the magic of something Outside us. Without damning my own adoration, I feel that the time has come for me to beg you to remain always, incessantly and, if need be, painfully, outside of me, because I can not drown in magic. There is too much to find in you, and like glass, I'm sure it's far too hard and delicate to enter. --- "I get terrorized, I see terror in your eyes; as we go up, we go down. I can't socialize, I'll be institutionalized; as we go up we go down." _______________________________________________ Five7Five mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/five7five
