by Robert Kloss
Before she became king the new king wrote a book. She wrote a book by coupling her long established love of the written word with a dozen writers chained to typewriters. The new king wrote a book in two weeks because the market demanded and Oprah called. The new king wrote a book in two weeks by dunking unpaid writers in vats of iced water and beating them until they typed vast amounts of fairly coherent prose about mountains and eagles and wildlife viscera. The new king wrote a book in two weeks by replacing those writers who died with those who answered her ad: WRITERS NEEDED FAST AND EAZY $.
…..The new king paid her writers with bullets, quick and painless, through the back of their skulls. The skull shattered corpses of writers, limp and strewn, and the new king, digging mass graves by moonlight.
…..The new king wrote a book about her life as a patriot in the wild, her love of the written word, her almost supernatural affinity with the values of our country, her appreciation of wildlife especially when cut open, their warm viscera rotting and gathering flies, and how she thought of the blood of patriots as she smeared her cheeks and breasts with the hot remains of wolves and antelope. ‘Reminds me of my girlhood,’ the new king wrote, ‘of history lessons and the mouth of our teacher, of beautiful words and how they burst open the air, oh the words and how they formed, ‘patriot’ and ‘bloodshed’, ‘revolution’ and ‘regicide’, of the intense pleasure I felt, all throughout, how I assaulted my body the while, the hair brush I used.’
…..The new king read at the burning husks of bookstores. What eyes has the new king in the cindered night.
…..The new king drove from town to town selling books out the back of a flatbed truck. The new king drove from town to town burning bookstores. Ashes everywhere of books nobody reads, finally, the flame and coiling smoke of books about things that ‘never even happened’ or could have happened. Finally, in every town, the incineration of books nobody reads or wants to read.
…..“Other than English,” the new king often expressed, “History and social studies were my favorite subjects.”
…..The new king drove from town to town burning bookstores, libraries, the set of Oprah. Her wild eyed followers and their hands, blistered and raw from gasoline. Their soot faces and white smiles. And upon the rubble of incinerated institutions the new king read from her favorite sections. There her chest pulsed with the memories of composition, the screams and spattering blood. ‘Finally,’ said our mothers as they listened, ‘a book about why not to murder my children’ and our fathers admired the leadership qualities of her calves, of her lips as they formed the words ‘viscera’ and ‘eliminate’, ‘bloodshed’ and ‘patriotism.’
…..We nodded to her delicate prose assaults. We throbbed under her use of the language.
…..The new king wrote a book, a spatter of blood and screams. The new king wrote a book and, under this fog of ash, we listened.
–
–
Robert Kloss collects his writings online at Birds of Prey.