No More War Pigs Have the Power

The empty newspaper box and historical consciousness have yet to join forces.

Those who made history in this period of decline have lacked, tragically, any acute awareness that the empty newspaper box thrusts us inevitably to a future yet to be constructed -- toward a smaller sky, a splended bone, restless and varnished.

I slept in the empty newspaper box, the radiator clacking its strange, quarrelsome vacancies.

Something shrivelled, my nose twitching. What is that smell? A blue flame, a suffocating odor. A yellow rhombic crystalline solid.

Sulfur! It was Rumsfeld, the Great Despiser of Life. He shuffled slump-shouldered and penitent into the bedroom.

"I need a job, Shimmy."

"Raoul Vanegeim says that all you can do is mitigate the passion for life," I said, "stunting it to the point where it turns against itself and changes into a passion for destruction and self-destruction."

Rumsfeld patted the head of his "familiar," the Zuni Doll from Trilogy of Terror. It perched like a heckler on the the ex-Secretary of Defense's right shoulder.

"But I'm accomplishment-oriented," Rumsfeld said. He fell to his knees. His lips were smeared with blood. They always are.

He added, "My team-oriented transferable skills can be implemented in a wide variety of markets and utilization strategies. I'm a highly organized, detail-oriented people-person able to prioritize and complete multiple tasks and follow through to achieve project goals and impact positive relationships with colleagues and clients at all organizational levels."

"You're a paratrooper of abjection, a stubborn and maladjusted animal preoccupied by your own diminishment."

"Can I at least squat here for the night, Shimmy? With my Zuni Doll? I have nowhere else to go."

"Listen to the Great Despiser of Life! He kisses God's sinewy hand and begs him to guarantee that there will definitely be a star. He swears he won't be able to stand that starless ordeal."