The Twilight of the Bums (14 page)

These are some of the slogans the two bums shouted during their revolutionary days:

Ah did they shout slogans against those who piously those who copiously those who critically those who tricolor those who bumper-sticker those who inaugurate those who hit you on the head those who believe they believe those who trucify & armisticize those who love it or leave it those who think they think those who croak croak & those who quack quack those who caca & pipi those who have feathers & panaches those who sing in tune those who mumble in their chin those who chew slowly sideways those who screw in the brains those who deliberate those who fuck in the dark those who spitshine those who eat too much those who close their eyes those who thumb their noses those who fix bayonet those who are too white those who never blush those who plug holes those who bury the living those who statue liberty those who float & never sink those who can you hear those who ask too many questions those who have all the answers those who club contusively those who dig graves for children those who fuck flies in the ass those who jerk off with gloves on those who never cry those who have their daily meals six times a day while others have their daily bread approximately once a week or less …

… and this is only a partial list.

Bum One is alone in his room sitting in a chair facing the wall talking to himself very softly.

Bum Two walks into the room. What are, asks he, here you yourself to again talking?

I wonder if one particular aspect of what we share, of the movement you and I share, is an aspect of this phenomenon? asked Old Friend One. Namely that for long periods of time I literally lose the language -- for weeks, months, I stammer, I mumble, become absent from my own speech. Do you know what I mean? I cannot write even a simple letter to a friend, find a simple response to the dumbest question difficult to articulate. I growl all the time at my dog, my cat, my lovely daughter. Growl at my poor wife for asking the most innocent questions:
Why are you saving this empty shoe box in your closet?
And I bark at her:
Don't touch it! I need it for something
, though I have forgotten what that something was. Shout at her when she suggests, oh so gently, trying to drag me out of the house:
How about a movie this afternoon?
And me I grumble:
Bah, what's the point, there's nothing good playing, it's all crap these days!
If I do manage a few miserable words they are apt to be received language:
What time is it? What's for dinner? What's on TV?
Months go by before I begin to feel the return of words. Very strange. I wonder if it is at all familiar to you too, this phenomenon? I suspect it is.

Damn right it is, Old Friend two replied.

Gentlemen:

Concerning
The Woman of Great Resistance
what do you mean by
great resistance?
Does it mean that the lady is strong, robust, tall, muscular, that she can endure the worst, that she is hard as nails? And when you say that it was a
gloomy day
, should one understand that it was raining that day, or snowing, or thundering, I mean, you could have been more specific, after all it was an important day for history?

I do not wish to sound too nit-picky, but in the second paragraph (if one can call paragraphs those curious blocks of words in which you enclose your meaning) does
nameless
mean that the two protagonists in question do not have a name, or have forgotten it, or do not wish to reveal it, or else shall one assume from the deliberate vagueness implied here that the authors are afraid to reveal the names of those two poor souls who are about to be extinguished?

And that's not all. No, that's not all. In the same paragraph,
thieving trash-hackers fucking worthless
, do you really think it is necessary to accumulate adjectives to such a degree in order to indicate the character of the two bums? Wouldn't one or two of these adjectives suffice? After all the situation in which the two bums find themselves calls for a touch of restraint and decorum.

I hope you do not find these comments impertinent, and that you will accept my questioning of this piece as a gesture of genuine interest in your work. Speaking of which, in the next paragraph, I get the sense of
olive trees
, it's obvious, but frankly I cannot make heads or tails of what you are trying to suggest with
skulls
.

Need I go on? It's a pity that you could not control your language, you are working with such a splendid subject, and it gets worse on the second page. There the ambiguities are so flagrant that, to tell you the truth Gentlemen, I had great difficulty forcing myself to read on to the end of the piece, though I must admit that the final two lines moved me to quiet reflection.

There is a certain something in these lines in spite of the obscene last word, a kind of roundness, a symmetry of syntax, an equality of terms which I personally greatly appreciated.

Well, I hope these few critical remarks will be accepted with grace. I could not prevent myself from expressing them.

Yours truly

The above letter was received by the authors of THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUMS on October 1st of this year. It was not signed, and no return address given on the envelope, although we suspect from the handwriting (yes the letter was handwritten with lots of elegant swirls) that a woman wrote it. We are reproducing it here
verbatim
, that is to say exactly like the original. The words in
bold
are, of course, from THE WOMAN OF GREAT RESISTANCE which can be found on page 29 of this volume. We feel that it is important for us to make our readers aware of such goings-on.

Somewhere in this collection
you will find or have already
found
Holocaust Theme Park
and you are perhaps as disturbed
by it as we are, perhaps even shocked.

But know that the old bums are too.

Know that after the pathetic carnavalesque
demonstration in front of the museum
they went back to their seedy hotel room
and sat there long into the night
in humiliated silence, passing
a big green bottle of
Thunderbird
back and forth.

[Here we break off the poem mode and shift to mother prose, the figure which the Muse always invokes when she is in trouble].
First, dear readers, know that the bums are not about to present their credentials, their bona fides as it were, to speak about this matter. After much passing of the
Bird
what became clear to the bums was that it takes more than a museum to create
one weasel of tear
for the memory of the humiliated and slaughtered millions who have met their Fate, and even for those who are still alive to forestall that eventuality, although the bums are not sanguine about that. And so, from their point of view, the only memorial suitable, the only Museum of the Holocaust, is the evening news on television, any network will be just fine, preferably in color, although black and white will do just fine as well. The strong cheap wine did not allay the angry bitterness of the old men, nor should that have been expected.