The thing about mess is that it derails the already derailed mind. Mess gets everywhere, copulates with space and expands like a Bavarian’s stomach. Tidiness is concision, the opposite but mess, it has wings made of shit, and it has grand aspirations, to run like riverluts into every nook and cranny, leaving you ravaged. My place was an armpit because a workman was dismantling, excavating my place as if he were looking for the enchanted realm of Atlantis or Julius Caesar’s underwear or the remains of a subterranean race who had invented the wheel before us or sped through eleven dimensions and assisted us in our evolutionary arc as we aimed high for the stars and fell flat, beaten and wiped and timorous.
My house was a pit mainly because my landlady was a cunt and she had neglected with truly fascist devotion to maintain the upkeep of the place, poured scorn on me and all my ramifications as she worshiped at money’s squalid altar, counted her pennies, wiped her ass with them, saved them, penny pinched and treated all with scorn and six barrels of liquid nitrogen hatred. By rights she and her seed should have been cordoned off or forced into straitjackets, made to eat humble pie, should have been lobotomized and dissected like frogs. But she had money, she had property, she had status, she had all those sticky little feathers that society so favors, so she was ensconced comfortably in her cosy little death machine, playing a fiddle whose strings had been sequestered from the guts of the cows that she had primed and executed by firing squad. My landlady was the essence of all that is evil with a fur coat shoved around its ashen form. When she spoke children and insects perished in the heat ray, when she farted the Earth’s crust was singed and dislocated, when she checked her bank account on line computers developed viruses and hard disks crashed and burned. She was a living death embodiment of what they call capitalism. Capitalism, the way of expediency and exploitation. There is nothing sweet or cute or SantaClausy christmasy about the big C.
Let me tell you what it is, the big C, it’s all the little ants being crushed underfoot by all the big toads and hobnailed boots, those big old boots they have exclusive memberships in golf clubs and other rich boot relatives in Hawaii. And these old contaminating, toxic, carcinogenic boots never seem to have enough money, and they are always a little hard up somehow, despite owning most of the land and real estate and despite having quilts that are stuffed with dollar bills and despite ingesting five star fare that ordinarily would cause cardiac arrest on account of both its monetary and glutinous richness.
And those old boots have friends in high places who like to wield swords and generally make a lot of noise and sound and fury and those old boots live on and on and on and never die, never do they die those old boots because God don’t want them up there in the celestial sphere and you know what after a while those good old boots with their membership clubs and executive class and their double martinis and their imported wine and patè de frois gras very soon those old boots are stinking to high heaven and not all the perfumes in all the world would be able to dent even by a jot the helmet of that unholy, foul stench. And soon the boots are stinking so hard that they resemble walking cadavers and the old boots are dead inside dead inside because they have never really been alive let’s face it and they are plunged 50,000 leagues under the sea like jellyfish like seaweed and they get thrown about and tossed about under the sea within its chambers but even there in the zonelessness of water their stench does not leave them and then finally their submerge from the purity they have corrupted and they dry off, the old boots, they dry off and they decide to tread on some gentle flowers and they decide to roll in designer label shit and then they are finally wearying of this life, wearying of all their bloated pleasure and decadence wondering what on earth they might have left the earth, this world, wondering what they might have contributed to this beautiful planet and then they realize that it’s all gone pear-shaped, that their sons and daughters have wised up and now they loath them, the old boots, with a vengeance and as they finally see through all their lies and self-deceptions and their appalling abuse of power and people and their sickening worshiping at the altar of money and greed and profit and price tags the boots begin to feel they want to change, change for the good, make it all right do something honorable for once save a whale convert a Muslim copulate with a homeless person whatever nonsense it is but it’s too late too late and as Mephistopheles comes for them at last and the pit of hell opens and the old boots are swallowed Mephisto whispers to them you failed to pay the aqua bill of the condominium so now you must pay the price and their stench is so prodigious now that even Satan himself can’t stand it and they finally fizzle and fry and become blobs of grease and these blobs of grease are incorporated into a bright modern architectural structure in Milton Keynes and all then, finally, is right with the world. And they all lived happily ever after, having fun and being nice to everyone they happened to meet.
Short Bio: Baret Magarian was born in London, but is of Armenian-Cypriot origin, and currently lives in Italy. He began his career by writing features and reviews for The Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and The New Statesman, then published fiction in World Literature Today, Journal of Italian Translation, the online magazines El Ghibli, Sagarana, andVoyages. He has worked as a translator, musician, lecturer, book representative, fringe theatre director, actor and nude model. He has recorded an album of acoustic rock, composed and performed piano music in the vein of Alkan and Jarrett (available for free listening on Soundcloud — Floto Music) , and recently staged his monologue “The Pain Tapestry” in Turin to great success. The monologue will be performed again on 28 October 2016 at Florence’s Teatro Puccini – Micrò.His writing has been praised by Bruce Hunter, the Canadian poet, and by Mia Lecomte, the Italian poet and critic. His lengthy, ridiculously ambitious novel The Fabrications will be published in March 2017 by Pleasure Boat Studio of New York. The novel has been described by Jonathan Coe, the esteemed British novelist, as “a brilliant achievement … extremely ambitious, original and accomplished … a novel which unblushingly seeks out the company of the modern masters.”
