James Joyce

This is a site for ReJoycing. For all things Joycean.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Fader's Boot

Breakfast: Quaker’s-cruet, seedcake and cobbler (caraway is good for the digestion-n-bowel) potassium sorbet helps with the backache (does away with cursed jimmy-leg) dill for the whooping and shingles; gobbler’s cockscomb for wont of neckwringing and catheter; me mom said I was a beastly boy, a knockabout with unruly manners, the kitchen floor trounced with me fader’s boot-scuff, yellow-linoleum scuffed to tacking.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Tuberculosis

The racking chest is surely a symptom. A symptom of the dreadful pursuing illness. It means that we can rub sore backs with items such as oils and tinctures.

Molly came back to me and looked after the back. She wasted every moment she had looking at the tiny moles that had developed there too. She was so tender. So joyous in lying next to me. Her head, oh her tiny breath on my shoulder. Sometimes her hand just lay softly on my neck, just breathing quietly.

Once here, she is mine again. Just for a moment in the March air. She rolls and talks, in her sweet way. What a joy to have her here all to myself as the sun watches. We only greet in that hello way, the Ritz elevator way. Pass me a cherry with a stick and I'll make you a cocktail, she called to me across the morning room.

Talking, just being alone, wandering the friendly aisles of forgotten alleys. Where the ladies and dresses line the streets.

Breath.
Tuberculosis.
Thickening chest.
Possibly much worse.
Possibly the chest that will bring my end.

I wonder where her hands learn the ways of healing. She is here again. Turning. Softly, softly.

The sound of the breath now is crackly.
I know it is there, the disease.
The sound of the breath is lonely, looking for a way out.
The sound of death is rising, bubbling. Froth and filth.

Bed linen lines the moist trapped aureoles of air. Cleanliness in sin. The lungs, the terrible lungs. They do hurt me so much Molly. Come let me hold you once more, whilst you are still here. Still. Stillness, still.

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Poor Bastard Welshman

Nora Barnacle no Blazes Boylan’s gobspit, Guinness-brown between her raw naked legs. Finnegan crowning, perhaps, birth-sculled head smarting from a Scorpion’s sting to the nethermostmouth, a pleasing encounter nonetheless, Nora my dear, dearest Nora Barnacle. Head-thruster, Aloysius, you smarting smart man. That, this was composed on a torn shred of newspaper culled from a wire-cage display in the lobby of a medical tower before my needle-in the eye follow-up. Doctor Macdonald has no farm to speak of. Johannesburg’s runaways have no interest in agrarian things. Waif wafer-thin, the ghostbody of Christ, sumptuousness best enjoyed on the sliver of one’s tongue. Christ wine, deep, arterial scorpions and licescales slaking a persistent thirst, thirsty for more of this sumptuousness, sweet, treacle sweetness, more. I await God’s smiting-hand, tremulous. Little devils dancing like Cossacks all. A bitterness best savored on the Buddenbrooks of one’s tongue-meat. Brings to mind, as it always does, poor besotted Dylan’s liver, fresh meat excised for the gourmand’s table de haut; salty, salt aftertaste besmirching the gorehole as it does. Poor bastard Welshman bastard. Better off, you’d be, with Finnegan’s head torn to shreds on the lemony-scented rocks of the Liffey. Snotgreensea dogsbodies, corpsegases, dancing like devilish Cossacks under a crazed jealous moon kicked to splinters.