Our
protagonist
Willie told most everyone he
lived under the bridge. He lined up for his evening meal at Siloam
Mission peppered with that sting of hell fire and he munched his
lunch at Winnipeg Harvest where he volunteered almost every day
enraptured by that sanctity of retribution. That freed up his
spending cash from CPP Disability to add to his Rent Assist to
procure a modest pad in a building where the front door had a lock
although he sometimes let a homeless one in to sleep in the warm
hallway when it was freezing outside. An eye to the skies, he would
meld into the side streets making a round about way home.
A fribbling ambiance lit
Willie's numbness after his red headed wife had been vanquished to
live in the fancy lodge with the beloved matrons where he entertained
her every afternoon as the guy who came by bringing merriment from
beyond. Although bethought they seldom spoke of their past
thirty-some years together, wedded by their time on the street, given
the upset it would bestir in her fragmented memory. Many days he'd
bring her a lark to chuckle their world.
Y'all
hearken to the fortunes of a man named Will
Poor
old cadger, found his tummy hard to fill
Then
one fine day he was turnin' sixty-five
And
up come the postlady with somethin' make him jive
Cash
that is; Canada Pension, Supplement and all
His dear wife had been panelled
after he had struggled as a mollifying caregiver. Overwhelmed with
heartache and a butcher knife he had attacked a tree stump, craftily
hauled in in the dead of winter, unleashing an hornswoggle. It sat
in the centre of his maintenance-free new pad usurping his coffee
table and really set off the battered walls and door frames. The
aura of it's workmanship shook the pillars of his universe till it
enthralled his every waking moment.
In the evenings Willie would
walk past the Golden Boy along the river to The Forks where the
mighty River Red met with the lesser but equally naughty Assinibione.
They had built that ziggurat here with the spire that stuck up high
into the night sky. Phantasm abounded behind those long sod ramparts
leading to the monstrous museum's parapet under that half hazard acre
of canopy fallen from the spoils of some alien craft.
A sorceress
“Oh you contemptuous
Winterpegers, behold your goddess Missy Musey! You are bad people
ignoring me. Your media criers don't give a rat's behind about the
magnanimity I bestowed upon you when I came to your mosquito ravaged
megalopolis to install my red headed radiance in your newfangled
ziggurat.
I don't trust the underpinnings
of this monolith of rock and steel though. Building a monument to
last for millennia on the mud of uncountable floods? You guys got
lots to learn. You think that the little ditch that Duff built is
going to save your fancy chancy architecture from those yearly once
in a millennium floods come the great warming and all?
You build it we will come
though, we immortals. I chanced to be cruising about with the
emanation of Justin the Bieber listening to some girly tunes when low
and behold we happened upon your ziggurat, pinnacle in the heavens.
Well gracious me, a goddess cannot pass up an opportunity like this,
a ziggurat in the 21st century CE what a coy surprise, a
sweet home in mosquito heaven. So I clutched my pouch
and joined a group of artisans to steal in and slap the claims on
your neat establishment as a goddessly eminence, to flit about in
it's colossal atrium playing flicks on these super screens. And my
magic lipstick wand makes a real swell remote.
Oh
cultured man the celestial beings laugh at your pompousness. You
have begat impishness in the hearts of us more wanton types. We do
not blush from stares but our minds may give you the finger, and
though our caricatures are deemed dishonourable our insides are yet
beautiful. Now these humane rights you have chiselled in your
noggins here: “Everyone
is entitled to live once they are created and everyone is entitled to
do anything they want to so long as it doesn't conflict with the
above.” Ya right,
bestow that on us immortals and suck it up.
People! Please! Do you not
know that goddesses must be honoured, cajoled, appeased, humoured?
Your culture must be enlightened. If you wish to build a ziggurat
you will attract one of us and you must provide her with unwavering
adoration and lewd lascivious dance or there will be trouble! Your
science knows twat about the intricacies of the etherverse.
Your
cleverness is only in diapers with it's quantum pairings. The souls
of all things are at one with each other no matter how far apart your
cognitive matter spaces them. Your brains are but quantum
clouds of uncertainty housing your souls, the random firings
influenced by boundless patterns that extend far beyond your
spacetime. Every ethereal idea is
embedded in the eternal reaches and the human soul is well aware of
it. Thoughts influence every material thing as much as the goose
bumps do on your gonads. And we gods are a part of your and your
mother earth's complexion, we extol our discarnate selves when we are
savvied in our splendour all of which you forsook when that snake led
you to the tree of knowledge.
When I am imbued with the
terrifying splendour of royalty, your goddess Missy Musey shining
with my lunar passion, when I am allowed to perfectly wield my august
divine powers, my egregious enchanting powers, when I am cloaked as
with Aphrodite's smoking hot girdle in the great awesomeness of
royalty, then I will come forth in my red headed radiancy beaming
like the full moon soliciting on your behalf the Bart of Heaven for
protection from the yearly floods and hoards of ensuing mosquitoes.
Till you honour me with your
thoughts and oblations and above all the lewd dance, oh peoples of
Winterpeg, be very, very afraid. Pestilence from every storm and
spring flood will ravage your lives until you come crawling up the
ramparts of my ziggurat prostrating yourselves before my
resplendency. Have fear, have great fear.”
The art of insurgency
A time of political upheaval had
prevailed in these regions of the Manitou, a period of austerity was
ensuing and the Ministry of Rehabilitory Finance was enlisting the
help of the legions of upwardly challenged to ease the burden placed
on the wheelers and dealers of capital. Poor Willie was at his wits
end, he was going to have to forfeit his Rent Assist for the sake of
snowbird sun worshippers who practised the esoteric concept of the
perfected man.
Standing
over those legislators' Solomon's Temple, shrewdly designed to secret
the source of all knowledge and colloquially known as The Leg, the
Golden Boy Hermes son of Zeus, a trickster quick and cunning,
moved freely between the worlds of the mortal and divine guiding our
ingenuous politicians in the odds of creating gold from earth wind
water and fire. Manitoba certainly had the four elements and the
political parties battled relentlessly over who could make the most
coin out of it all, at least that was Willie's perception. But to
create gold by leaving the inner city masses dumpster diving, what
was to be done?
Willie on his walk that evening
came to the ziggurat and strayed onto one of it's ramparts. He felt
this urge to dance. Soon his shirt was off and he was flinging it
around his head in beat to the ripples on the River Red. Exhausted
finally he dropped upon the unkempt sod and there in a moment of
ecstasy he had a vision: a mass of straggling humanity, with canes,
in wheelchairs, pushing walkers, encircling the entire Legislature
going round and round, in total silence. And from a window far above
a red headed woman was watching him.
It was a clear blue Saturday
afternoon. Posters had been made at Harvest with donated realms of
paper which had been fixed to every power pole in every back lane in
the North End, the West End, and even across the Assinibione down
Osborne way. It had gone kind of viral too.
Silent Protest
This Saturday at 2 p.m.
Walk around the Legislature
Bring a friend
They came. In wheelchairs,
pushing walkers, with canes, arm in arm with companions, thousands.
A slow thronged mass of humanity at it's finest, round and round The
Leg they traipsed, in total silence. Seven times they made it
around, some more, some less, and then in a fulminating frenzy of
sublimation to the self-restraint they let out one scream. En masse.
Ear shattering. The traffic came to a halt on Main Street. And
from a belfry far above a red headed woman was watching.
Then from the east, over the
Forks, over that ziggurat with the ramparts, a black cloud loomed.
Slowly it drifted spewing forth volumes of hail and rain approaching
The Leg. The sky was black and sinister as doomsday, wind like a
hurricane, the street lights blinked on and off. There was one earth
shattering thunderbolt. It was later recorded in the annals of
alchemy that all that was left of the Golden Boy was a wee small
puddle of pure gold dripping down on the black star of Ishtar stories
below.
The masses had dispersed with
the approaching storm. A few stragglers were huddled in the bus
shack by the street, Willie among them. Out The Leg's massive doors
people were emerging, coughing, some blackened with soot. Appearing
with them was a red headed woman looking adorably lost and
bewildered. Willie went over to her with his jacket, she needed a
hug and some composure. Immaterialness confounded him, but she
whispered softly in his ear “I love you Willie” in a voice he
knew so well. Slowly comprehending he teared back “I love you too,
my dearest emanation.”
The fire trucks came, and left,
politicians stood around and gazed up in amazement discussing how to
keep this metaphysical subversion at bay whilst hoodwinking the
masses. It was agreed that keeping Police Force One in the skies
24/7 would add a spot of intimidation. Austerity continued and
Willie's Rent Assist was cut off but he lucked out though, Musey
would flit along beside him and between her uncanny tin cup and his
CPP they they kept the hornswoggle a work in progress, dining out at
any convenient soup kitchen.
And they would walk arm in arm
every evening past that ziggurat, and sometimes they would dance on a
rampart and she would sneak in and flit about awhile.
