The confessions of Artie Schops

Death was always a father thing. I go out better that way. When suicide’s a bad look and I’m much too hooked on the glee. When Dali takes the head and shits out the roots. When I read out my will and find Hegel’s murdered spirit in there. All empty like I decomposed the ghoul of all his thinking. Because it’s true I reviled the man that much. Because every joke should have a punchline and end, even when the joke is a man. Even when the world is so many knives bending in water, and I see those knives laid out in a cross. And my flexings cringe just as well. Because I was worn out at the start. It’s why I powder-puff the ugly stuff. Why when I saw the ugliest of ugly men I saw behind him, I imagined, some other man uglier still. Why I imagined that the man out front was a front man, and could speak for the man behind him. And as it turned out, I was short of the worth of the template I adored. But what I mean is: my chronic indigestion employed a philosophic nomenclature. When a burp, I think, would have killed me sooner. Because everything I’ve done was wrong in being done. And to think I did it and was not even there. Because forgetting allowed me to remember. And I will be called a throwback and a mental illness. Which seem to me like compliments that I’ll take that way and keep. Like I gave you people ways to die that made a difference, like I got through and falling men got new places to land. And I set my nerves in a jelly mould. But thinking back, Julius Bahnsen was the hardest fucker on my block: could torture himself to death without dying. And me? I was a man of art. The arts were children I dug up, all eyes. This philosophy’s a dog-ugly corpse. I tried for the world but it pissed in my ear. I’m kinda Kant’s bitch. I’m kinda Buddha’s bitch. I do good graffiti on masterpieces, I guess. Death will be the wettest dream I never wake from. And this is how I’ll find myself alive. This is how the sigh ends. Without ending. If this thing-in-itself-thing wants something it’s already mine. My death that happens to no one just as no one happened to me. And when it comes I’ll make smell of it. Unknowing is the grace of my absence.

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