Ch. 2 of The Glass Eye and the Leopard

The Leopard continues to erase himself in the knuckles of a loveless Ocelot's embrace.  Already blank cavities resembling certain cancers of abused mouths have begun to riddle his once matte and hi-def epidermal advertisements of sexual pleasures.

"I am sadder," he sez, "The small pockets of my skin for which I have hoped to entreat an alms of your change have disappeared.  Consistently, the women I sleep with imagine they frisk the arrival of their future.  Always they search the orifices and report to me in tears, "Tomorrow holds nothing," declaring the package insufficient.  In such a manner as I continue parallel to them, I cannot but look at my hard-on and watch it swath itself as a dog might dying retreat to a patch of woods."  Stuck in the rut of the inscrutable, such is commitment.  So difficult this ditch to ditch, just so, is faith.




Eye eyed Leopard embracing the bracing Ocelot from behind the long unwatered ficus.  Unto a lamp seated on a book which was seated on a table, he stealed and kindled.  The only light made of Leopard's face a kindergarten of hunted rabbits, and of Ocelots the same but in a rival county.  Generously earnest to tell Leopard what to think, Eye said, disguising the subterranean howl, "All Gifts are spherical and birth themselves.  In Hands, they appear as the moon.  No Gift when born was ever smaller than the Human Being Whose Face Faced it into Existence.  A Face is a wench hauling Gifts over our skin.  The Separatist-Scientists have long divided the census of the population of Faces into the Beautiful-Faces, the Ugly-Faces, the Sad-Faces, Small-Faces, Disfigured-Faces, etc.  Recently, after years of in-fighting, Separatist-Scientists renamed in a Politically Correct Maneuver the Beautiful-Faces as the Biologically-Imperative-Approximo-Symmetrical-Faces.  Long, too long to ever belong have I argues the Beautiful-Faces should be retitled the Favorite-Faces, but after years of conversing with Faces, I know the Beautiful-Face is a Potential-Gift-to-All."

Eye paused, a caesura to punch a hole, almost, in the world and continued, unfolding an origami-ed swan covered in scrawl.  "I have prepared a statement from which I will read."  He coughed.  "I call it, 'Author's Statement to Population-Census of Our Standing Words.' "  He began to read the swan.  "No, things are not other things, and Nothing is and never was a thing.  Nothing is not 'is,' and nothings, not even the sweet, 'are.'   Things exist.  Nothing does not exist, not even in the mind, the mind which is a Place in which Things exist, the Mind by which being a Mind that Exists makes exist whatever takes Place in the Mind. Whatever takes Place exists, even in chess.  Whatever is not What.  What-is-Whatever is and always will be.  What-is-What is a Number of Things.  But what is What-Is-What-A-Number-Of-Things?  'Is' and 'Are' are particles of Food, Language and a Number of Other-Things, lighted.  Like Gifts and Certain Eyes, the Books, contrary to their image of squareness, are spherical and grow infinitely large when nutritiously fed, exercised, parented responsibly, and, generally speaking, grow up in the right climate conducive to becoming a Right Climate for Life.  To exercise correctly the Books, the Books must be exorcised by not only the author who allows the Books to birth themselves but by the exorcist-reader responsible enough to reproduce the Books in the Printing Press of Knowing, Knowing-Ourselves, Knowing-at-All, and Knowing-Ourselves-as-Citizens."

For the time being, Eye paused, feeling lousily termite-like that he had boredly bored into something still quite busily boring.  "One last thing," he sed, turning to face the braced face of Ocelot, "The Bandanna-of-Woman is the Suture against the Wound of her hair."  Ocelot sed, "Not all that bleeds upon you is another's wound.  Residence is a residue."  At those words, Leopard thought, afraid for he knew he was wrong, "Her hair is a wound you wound whispering around your finger, brushed away from lips, in the repetitive contentment of your nights unalone.  Reticence is residence."  And for a while, things ceased to happen, until they did, again.