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Birth of an Artist
By: Gamer

The holy light, gravity and chill of the birthing room seeped through Frank’s passive, baby machinery – a blind trickle of wind filtering through the strings of an abandoned harp – emitting a dead melody, true as the atrophied sphincter of a mental patient sleeping off a pilfered tub of shortening; the genuine mindless screechsong of the bewildered primate emerging from the bowels of nirvana into a sandpaper Mardi Gras of blankets and smiles.

This honest good growl was the best moment Frank’s narrow-hipped mom ever knew, and the last, too – she died of a hemorrhage, final words being: "My vagina hurts,” and Frank was carted home via the newly-minted widower, Emmett – a man who believed that butchering his infant’s sex organs would make everyone feel a whole lot more civilized.

The circumcision was held in suburban Cleveland (aren’t they all) under Emmett’s proud roof – a tope-green gable; coarse, layered tiles – discounted 10% – now spattered with a fair share of droppings – a Pollock from heaven. Inside, lox lay empathetic in the florescence; wet swaths of fish death, sliced and fortified with cancer nitrates and piled high like a mass grave for the disingenuous pleasure of bourgeois, atheist Judeo-Christians who are taught from birth to veil their designer bagels with pink, excised flesh at penis-slicing galas.

The Mohel suffered a dramatic stroke and, like a novice luthier demolishing a harp for spare parts, removed the whole of Frank’s penis cleanly and expertly. Emmett (the dad), once the bullying, alpha-male captain of his high school cricket team, was irked by the mishap and took up the art of Prozac - became temporarily gay and tried to kill himself. Frank (the kid) was issued a prosthetic penis – Spartan, but operative in “every way that mattered to a young child.”

Emmett survived his son’s ordeal and despite a smoldering, two-dimensional sorrow retained his penchant for mainstream small talk, and a habit of saying anyhoo, and charmed into marriage a big-boned, independently wealthy patron called Queen Joyce, an olive-hued woman with a broad, pimento grin and labyrinthine purse of zippered pockets stuffed with edibles – chiefly jerky.

Queen Joyce purged Emmett and Frank from suburban Cleveland into a Victorian cottage she inherited from Dead Bill, a man who made a king’s ransom designing the cardboard lenses for X-ray Specs prior to a long death in a contaminated well, where he languished with compound fractures and sedative withdrawal syndrome until discovered, dead as wicker, by Joyce. (Dead Bill allegedly bloodscrawled a will on the bentonite saying that Joyce should get the Victorian cottage, find a mate and pursue art in earnest – unencumbered by petty, fiscal obligations.)

At the cottage, Queen Joyce was largely naked, fat as clay, astride a golden horse from a disemboweled carousel, strumming indecipherables on a baritone ukulele, while Emmett, fat-bearded and fully naked, performed an endless collection of impromptu one-act plays set in the late sixties about bisexuality and suicide.

Frank was home-schooled and wet-nursed by a regretful live-in nanny called Poteet, a retired rodeo clown paralyzed on one half on account of glee-killing a pregnant horse that proceeded to fall on him. A mother to Frank, Poteet encourage him to upgrade to a realistic-looking prosthetic. He’d say with an Alabama tear in his eye: “We are only honest when it’s convenient, and if it’s convenient, we’re lucky.”

There were household rules contrived by Queen Joyce. Emmett was forbidden to say “ox,” but the plural form “oxen” was fine. He had to draw eighty circles on food he would consume – in the case of grapes it was acceptable to draw circles on the bag rather than on the individual grapes. He was forbidden to travel stairs carrying a marsupial – toy or otherwise. He was forbidden to hug his son in the presence of wood, glass or larvae – and every room contained at least one or more, Joyce saw to that.

Frank couldn’t ask about his real mother unless wearing a tan blazer – an unfair rule, he owned no such blazer. He had to eat seven things daily; each had to be a different thing – a “thing” consisted in anything that could be wrapped in a leaf, without the leaf breaking – a rule stemming from a misinterpretation of a Chinese Holiday.

Frank had to make “a book a day” – at least three pages containing prose and drawings, stapled together. He made thousands over the years – books that Emmett said: “only a mother could love.” A few excerpts from Frank’s early, illustrated works:

“Once a boy drank poison through two silver trumpets/ he died and his family and friends put dirt on his face/ they had a big party and drank juice and ate cookies.”

“Once a boy loved the sun because it was beautiful and warm and made plants live/ then it burned his corneas out and made him blind/and gave him skin cancer.”

“A stork was carrying a little baby/ and the dad shot the stork to get the baby cause he thought the stork was stealing the baby/ the bullet hit the baby and it died/ the dad killed himself/ the stork ate the baby.”

On the Seven Things Diet Frank grew tall and narrow-hipped, and left the kingdom on his eighteenth birthday with a collection of his makeshift books in tow - intended for kindling on cold nights. He didn’t look back.

As he crossed the bridge, leaving town, he paused, emboldened by the wailing wind, and in a deft motion of body and spirit hurled the fallacious phallus into the river (an act that sealed his fate as the future president of the United States; see Ode To Leaders, page 275.)

The holy light, gravity and chill of the outdoors seeped through Frank’s passive machinery, emitting a dead rhythm, the genuine mindless marching footsteps of the bewildered artist emerging from the bowels of childhood into a paved puzzle of contradictory winds and infinite options. It was Frank’s best moment.

Unencumbered by the prosthetic, Frank walked with a substrate of buoyancy that decision makers in big cities tend to notice...and a faint but promising new motif played along the harp strings of his cortex – a belief that his little books might be worth more than kindling.

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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