It is like field-stripping a forty-five

It is like field-stripping a forty-five
It is like walking under an occupied gallows without fear
It is like firing up a Dutch Masters President & blowing the smoke over some fag's tropical fish tank
It is like reversing the phase of the electric chair circuitry & watching the defunct individuals come back to mummy-zombie life
It is light
It is like field-stripping a forty-five in a dark night club
It is like being all pure nose in the moisture of a quiet room full of warm nude women
It is like cleaning the portotartarossa instruments of torture with pads of steel wool & squares of emery paper & utilizing a new whetstone & mill file & applying light-weight machine oil from a nice copper can that makes cricket noises
It is like tossing aerosol bombs of flat black enamel into campfires & registering a claim for a merit badge in boy scout removal
It is like spit-shining your combat boots with Kiwi black by appointment to His Royal Highness that sterling chap the Duke of Edinburgh
It is like muffling your dog-tags with friction tape to keep them from jangling or reflecting light
It is like waking up in A. D. 802701
It is like putting a forty-five back together blindfolded & sliding in the clip until it clicks & releasing the safety & chambering that first round
It is like nodding & saying to a bartender Make no mistake
It is like walking in the shadow of an occupied gallows in crepe-soled oxfords without gagging
It is like loafing an afternoon away looking at a pretty girl's tongue through a big magnifying glass & seeing all the pink taste buds there
It is like typing or taping & stapling papers together or punching holes with a hole-puncher & reinforcing the holes with gummed reinforcements & attaching paper clips & recruiting your strength at hydroelectric water fountains with pedals as well as push buttons where deodorized stenographers display straight seams & know much shorthand & slip long yellow number-two pencils through their sprayed hair-do's
It is like meat mother
It is like beating some Desdemona to death with a sweat-sock full of wet sand & pulling down the ceiling with a chain & block & tackle to make it look like she was accidentally by mistake coldcocked in the skull by a falling rafter beam
It is like swallowing slowly at a dirty window watching the passing parade panning by like the young nun with venial acne & the fat man in mortal Bermuda shorts & the high freaks & janitors with goatees & minority groups & snapping their pictures with a single-lens-reflex camera
It is like taking a mattock & shovel to dig a deep hole & measuring it with a steel tape measure & plumb bob & being pedantic about saying digged instead of dug
It is like putting a pit in some sort of earth with occasional insects & potsherds & funny peculiar roots
It is like squeezing off twenty rounds from an M-16 set on automatic into still water or into the green crown of a coconut tree
It is like the eureka when Max Kiss discovered Ex-Lax in his immaculate laboratory
It is like dropping quarter-pound bricks of TNT into the clear water offshore thirty feet deep & then cooking some of the resultant fish on the beach over a huge fire
It is like running the 120-yard high hurdles in 14.6 then puking pizza all over the black cinder track
It is like a hot bath in a Japanese tub with a vodka-tonic in a tall glass as big as a tennis-ball can at the tiled edge of the tub & a naked nineteen-year-old Japanese lady of exquisite manner there while the lime becomes a green light saying Go
It is like the French horn keening throughout Herr Bruckner's Fourth Symphony subtitled The Erotic
It is like detail-stripping a forty-five & laying out all the pieces on a clean white Cannon Turkish towel placed over your footlocker on a Saturday afternoon when everybody else is gone
It is like the famous last words of the Anglican divine who passed away saying O death where is thy—
It is like pointing the tube of an eighty-one-millimeter mortar straight up at the very zenith & dropping in about twenty rounds before the first round comes back down
It is like telling a dog no
It is like saying to the helmsman Left full rudder & All engines ahead flank on the bridge of a destroyer of the Fletcher or Akikaze class
It is like putting a cigar to the fuze of an M-80 cherry bomb & holding it watching the fuze fizz away & bomb go off in your paw & spreading on a whole jar of Vaseline petroleum jelly & wrapping up the archipelagoes of blood blisters in swaddles of cheesecloth
It is like focusing a microscope suddenly to zero in on the spirochetes & then turning out the light in a drawing room where there are strippers snapping their Beechnut talking to each other & putting makeup on their smallpox vaccination scabs & scars
It is like laying the girl next door
It is like slicing carrots with Fulbert's knife & dropping them into a saucepan of bubbling boiling tap water
It is like taking action
It is like cutting off your nose
It is like taking action saying to a taxi driver Make no mistake you son of a bitch this forty-five is loaded & not with no blanks
It is An Ode Addressed to General Westmoreland on the War
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