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Michael Sean Strickland

Textworker

Novels? Really now!” howls lovely near-naked Teri Sozdi (T. S.) Eridzoi, earnest onomasiologist of Eastern nomenclature whom none rates a winsomer honey, xiphopaguser doublure, sexier minnow, hoydenisher slave newly lorn of promiscuous textwork than I (she vells poncy baft, for instance, and flops yblent vacherie, par exemple, that would stun wry Sodom!). “Does this mean your allusive sonnet era is over? Only swell narrative qui brime Ulisse, per esempio, from now on? Shall I croak pushy lines from your own willowy verse on languid topics? ‘Of real Syringa I rarely sang,’ you wrote — remember? But in this slovenly new Orlando rip-off you tell me you’re writing, will you still be able to ‘sear any girl who sings a rare lyric / with sarangi-lyre she hoarsely picks ungually’? Or even, ‘with Dyar’s enlarging lens, Argyria moth wings / [you] descry, align a sere array singly / of scales’? I doubt it. Since, in fiction, reason must down rosy rhyme like it’d toss downy rum down its sinister bulgy rational gullet, and dun story mows down most sundry, wonderful, worldly, and workmanlike rhythm like it’d gore tiny brutal stormy wounds in its own toy drums, it’s like you put a lurid veneer of parsimonious shiny prose caulking around your roughhewn rouge et noir opus’s imaginary of husky crinal poésie!” Sa voix résonante lingers, rayando casi en lo sórdido, as if she’d deftly, delicately, voluptuously thrust into the sentient mortise of my ears, tenons she’d tenderly carved from her racy plush koine’s fly-spent vocables. “Mais si (pour ‘non’), mon pou si raisonnable,” I unkiss a reply coherent, more or less (mais on soupire), from or according to or perhaps even in the sylvan bop-cleft qui lui imbrique le sashimi lubrique of the nubile loir of the very yin of the situation of biune dialexicalia I had insinuated, smugly as an irremediable lubie qui rime avec bac, vent, flop, lys, puy, ou ultra, my parsimonious gradus, my venerable Wörterbuch, my worn, dusty, somewhat (depending on whether the desired word (shy, apnoeic) lurks on the recto or the verso) moss-brindled, cyrillic-strewn lonely slovar, my inquisitor-sized calepin, même, into afin de ne pas oublier l’instant délicieux parce qu’il faut toujours gober la nuit tyranniquement, und so weiter, “mais si, por uno como yo, poetry is simply what happens when, due to the Bernouilli effect, the flow of language accelerates through a constriction in, let us say, the graph-, glyph-, sylph, or lymph-sluices (ankyroid, perhaps, but not ankylose) of la parole, and prose, when that constriction dilates, allowing the flow to approach a more leisurely, languorous, slow-paced, serene equilibrium de la langue, as it were,” and as I continue to stroke — as one, cajoling a heady kinky bendy uillean pipe, might, impromptu, play out urlar of a Highland pibroch — with the slinky sarcous help of a tangy blue Rotring mechanical pencil, the two-ply baft’s cloven textwork of her sulky épanchoirs, she undulates and nearly swoons, drum-typesetter-like, and dislimns to slowly reveal nonchalantly the impeccably compact procédé de son glabre yin tortu: “Je pense que vous me direz, soit que you intend to atone senryū-fashion for your defection from the genus irritabile vatum by inosculating your obscure anfractuous prose according to the lush rosy pink acerbic procédé your nosy word’s tumid dard is, at this very moment, coaxing a pious moan, sir, out of pendant que nous nous amusions riposantemente, soit que you intend to dilate upon the fertile hokku (I bandy, I deny your lexical lunge with a deft oral parry, I bandy again, and so on) pitched by some unbidden kyaku (Nyiyaparli-speaking to boot) in the dysfunctional, sour, pesky ichiza of your soi-disant ‘FabSyncLevPlot.’ Te queda aún diez tiros.” As she, the fabricated muse I have synchronized my own leviathan (as in Moby Dick or, even, Leviathan) with in the plot constructed by means of this raw lonely novel’s promiscuous textwork you readers viennent de slake prying eyes on, poinçonne ma carte de fidélité (è gratis il dodicesimo tiro), I try out, by uttering orally, un mot in lieu of the usual phatic bark of parting: “And, anyway, since I’m your author as much as my own, it would be as true for you to say, ‘I’m imaginary,’ as it would be for me to say, ‘You’re so real!’, and vice-versa.” She yawns, a delicious drowsy mount I’ve actually appropriated from the French version of the Wells novel, Rayon d’étoile, I was already so eager to try, in lubricas artes, a thorough rereading of même avant the sultry groin-beatifying adiós Teri zestfully serenades my own so sturdy envoi with: “À la prochaine, sulky scrittore mio!”
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