FLESHED-OUT
For Rainer Kaus
The pathology of big breasts is going out. “Who do you want to look like?” the head plastic surgeon asks me. I know exactly so I answer unhesitatingly. “Well, like those two gnomic gnats, Beckett and Bob Dylan.” “Who,” he asks again? “Beckett and Bob Dylan,” I say, and refrain from offering additional information. This strategy is also part of the program, to keep it simple. I go for the slender androgynous look. My hair will also turn completely white in six months, so I’m ready to face the world in this final phase of my meaningful or meaningless existence. “Say what?” Beckett asks me, and he never makes any conversation that is not based entirely on body language and no words. I say nothing. Ten vectors of ten-second thoughts go through my mind. Number two has this in it: O, yes, yes, of course, why not, how excellent, this is just brilliant, it can’t get any better that next time, when men tell me that they respect me, they will not mean the exact opposite. And they will not look at their watches in my presence either. Dylan intercedes on thought number five: “A poem is a naked person. Some people say that I am a poet.” Good then, we go with that, number one thought dictates, as number one never has anything original to say. My scurrilous intelligence is being performed on at the level of flesh. The less of it, the higher ground. “Have you been reading about Estragon and Vladimir on the verge of hanging themselves only so that they can get a major erection?” Beckett wants to know. But all I say is this: “I disappear a lot,” just when my hand is being twisted by the good doctor who says: “Not bad. Not bad at all.” Dylan goes, “Pressing On,” and I think: Fucking Freud is home.
The pathology of big breasts is going out. “Who do you want to look like?” the head plastic surgeon asks me. I know exactly so I answer unhesitatingly. “Well, like those two gnomic gnats, Beckett and Bob Dylan.” “Who,” he asks again? “Beckett and Bob Dylan,” I say, and refrain from offering additional information. This strategy is also part of the program, to keep it simple. I go for the slender androgynous look. My hair will also turn completely white in six months, so I’m ready to face the world in this final phase of my meaningful or meaningless existence. “Say what?” Beckett asks me, and he never makes any conversation that is not based entirely on body language and no words. I say nothing. Ten vectors of ten-second thoughts go through my mind. Number two has this in it: O, yes, yes, of course, why not, how excellent, this is just brilliant, it can’t get any better that next time, when men tell me that they respect me, they will not mean the exact opposite. And they will not look at their watches in my presence either. Dylan intercedes on thought number five: “A poem is a naked person. Some people say that I am a poet.” Good then, we go with that, number one thought dictates, as number one never has anything original to say. My scurrilous intelligence is being performed on at the level of flesh. The less of it, the higher ground. “Have you been reading about Estragon and Vladimir on the verge of hanging themselves only so that they can get a major erection?” Beckett wants to know. But all I say is this: “I disappear a lot,” just when my hand is being twisted by the good doctor who says: “Not bad. Not bad at all.” Dylan goes, “Pressing On,” and I think: Fucking Freud is home.
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