Fortuitously Charitable Byzantine Contaminations

1

if you want to get rich it’s no problem in this day and age to find yourself as rich as you want by simply moving with all your strength and spirit from poverty to wealth and there are all kinds of ways to accomplish that feat such as gathering up the loose money you have laying around and investing it in a company that will eventually grow astronomically at some point in the future or you could buy a fishing rod with it and spend all your mornings in the bosom of nature reeling them in and in the afternoons peddling them close to where people live who have no fish for example farthest from the coast or you could devote a good amount of time trying to come up with a plan that tricks some fool into giving you his money soon parted upfront for an imaginary much-wanted thing so much better than what he already has or maybe kidnap the bank manager or someone with their paws in a bucket of cash and threaten to get rid of his kids and wife if he doesn’t load up a sack and bring it to the parking lot without alerting anyone or you could go in hard with machine guns blazing and in a few hectic seconds be ripping down the road with a mother-load on the seat beside you and a future looking much brighter than it ever did or could by just working your dumb ass off only to keep seeing your bills go up as the system nickel and dimes you into despair and apathy where you just settle into waiting out the zoo-life until the end like a game lost early but still a whole lot of time on the clock

2

no one should ever begrudge a person in the desert a drink of water which rule can be found in the fine-print of any religious text worth its salt after all that would be crueler than putting him out of his thirsty misery because necessities so basic and universally fundamental like air or food or sleep should always be offered to those less fortunate in the sun on the side of an oven-hot dune unable to get through a single nightmare shivering under the stars and waking thirsty and dry and completely empty of ideas there but for the grace of god and still obligated to address those insurmountable problems without any way of doing so except to dig a hole and hide until the sun goes down or lick the morning moisture from grains of sand if there is any moisture and you get up before it evaporates and that’s the main reason it’s important to always give a person in that situation a cool gulp or a sip or a swig or a drop if they need one and they usually do way out in the middle of a treeless nowhere under the sun and it would help them immensely were they also to receive an umbrella and just think of the impact that would have on the person and on you and on the whole world once the story goes around as an example of how one should behave as a human being when you come across a hopeless someone out in the middle of an evaporated ocean with not a drop to drink and really quite delirious from the sunshine

6

Jesus came to a place upon some group of villagers stoning a jezebel of the time lady of the night one of those who strolls into a village and lets her dress slip up her thigh or lets her hair down or doesn’t keep track of her breasts as she flutters like an earth angel through town and this upsets the dumpy wives already makers of gangs of kids and then the husbands have to unjustly endure their wrath though the husbands are completely innocent against such temptations of the devil who has been known to use a woman’s charms to lure and snare men who have suffered marriages that turned out to be quite uneventful with work and the occasional hoofing it with the boys the only relief so that when the diabolical soul with her boobs hair thigh and sandaled feet arrives on the scene the men are naturally and hopelessly entranced by the possibility of driving their devil-rod into the cave of all beginnings and even though nothing is free in life there’s always a few bucks to squirrel away for part of an evening living beyond the imagination even if you’re finished in a New York minute just to take her and hold her tight like you would hold the railing of a spaceship you were ordered to exit and this is what inspires all the rock throwing and all the insults and the kids getting in on the act and so first Jesus tried his holiest to explain to this professional seducer of men and unhinged women without ever acknowledging the very charming attributes at the heart of the debaucheries what the local scene looked like before he got around to the famous scolding of the rock throwers who felt themselves sinned against with a little riddle like you might find in a fortune cookie to help with digestion

13

if somebody like a woman gets on the trolley and you see right away by the shape of her feet in her sandals in spite of the candy red lacquer to throw the world off that she has a problem with them and can only have a problem with them since they don’t look anything like your classic Greek and Roman foot with toes as distinctive as fingers poised to take a grip of the earth and not just waddle over it like a duck changing the scenery and you can imagine all too easily and with enough accuracy how she starts her day choosing which shoes of the many to wear depending on the weather and the activity she has planned and trying to match them with her dress or slacks and blouse and there’s absolutely nothing in the closet or on the rack or behind the door or in the bureau during any season that makes any kind of presentation sense for anything she wants to do or feels like expressing but that’s all there is and she should just get over it since the clock is winding down and always ticking and always right on the brink so just pick whatever you have because who in their right mind would care what anyone else thinks or has to say about your personal world and never mind about the world at large casting its withering looks or ignoring you altogether because who the fuck cares and so in a fit of defiance and pushback against her own paranoia and insecurities and relative poverty and general impotence to effect any positive change in her life she grabs her leather sandals even though her two feet are not the type she’d ever find attractive were any of her friends to possess them nor would she ever be inclined to encourage them to wear said sandals without socks to somewhat help disguise the shape of the feet and the odd inconsistency of the chubby toes but only with occasional success and then desperately shod she enters our world of eyes and minds and the world of quality controlled objects and things and somewhere out there among all those people and things there’s someone sitting nearby given permission by the rules of consciousness and subjectivity to treat her unsettling feet as if they belonged to both of them

 14

as of now two pheasants are bopping around the yard and I fear they’ll come to harm since there’s a falcon that lives nearby that I’ve seen with my own eyes cut between the trees and take a black bird down on impact in mid-air like you might see up close in one of those nature shows showing how the animal kingdom goes about its day without any regrets or promises except for these two pheasants that are about to make a promise with the male dressed up in Bavarian hunting attire as if a decoy for the female who wears a dress indistinguishable from last year’s tall and yellow grass on the look-out for a good nesting spot and it’s like being at a giant flea market with so many options and possibilities that they simply wander all day from one end of the property to the other grazing on insects between my trips to the window to take a break from shaving my wife’s head before her hair just falls out in clumps because no one wants to see human hair fall out in clumps and certainly not a fifteen year old and even if I say that she’s still beautiful no matter what it probably doesn’t mean anything when it’s your hair and it’s coming out by the clump and your skin is grayer than it was and you have to get used to the injections and chapped lips and eye mucus at least until they finish their work and let you settle back into a routine with the future either lurking or blank with a fifteen year old in tow and one can only hope the pheasants find a place out of reach of the martins and foxes and hawks and feral cats and that all their eggs hatch on time

by Richard Chetwynd