It was Xmastime forever, for seasons at a time, at first deep into a month once known as January, a duplicitous, twofaced month named after that ancient Roman deity Janus, King of Latium, the God of beginnings, the God of endings, of gates like those to Developments and of doors like those set with knockers and bells, buzzers and intercoms and etched glass to a house since fallen, the patron of the bridge between the primitive and the civilized, between youth and maturity, too — a God whom no one thinks to worship anymore, a forsaken, spurned God, omnipotent and yet abandoned, omniscient and yet ignored; allpowerful, all alone: without Him no one knows which way to face, whether to the past or the future, or else just to stand forever upon the threshold searching this way and that, to waste an only life waiting for their very own end, however it would arrive and never too soon. It was anxious, depressing, it was Xmas into some say the next year, God, has it been that long, as the sun became split into suns, the freeze giving way to the humid and heat, the ice given notice, evicted, absorbed, poisoned with soot, snow melted to smog, though others hold it was Xmas deep into the year after that — who would swear to it, we all know how reliable the authorities can be, how much they’re to be trusted, how honest they are — the days’ debts to the world ingathering fatal interest, with no hope of paying memory off, and so the banks all went bankrupt then the market crashed and burned, valueadding no appreciable warmth to the scorch of the day; the looted metropolises leveled by bulldozers whose shovels had been emblazoned with the faces of fathers set sharp with the flaming teeth of their fathers before them…the world entire that was Siburbia razed to its very foundations of basement whether finished or maybe or not, which were cinderblock and brick and their cinders themselves leveled with palms become clammy with greed, demolished, reduced to vacancies of the earth, emptied lots marked for nothing, inhabited only by that that was no longer human: as no one worked anymore, as work had become life, had become mere survival. Kestenbaums roasting on an open fire…dairy products expiring, turned, were sold way past useby; cars became metal; teevees screened only snow in the unseasonable heat; shoes went thin then holed and then earth; clothes turned to rags then air and so everyone went naked at night, sweltering under the glare of an oleo moon. If you wanted to tell the difference between men and women and why would you; after all, they’re all goyim: the men were the ones with the nails of sharpened flint, who’d kill the other men with their nails of flint less sharpened against the curbs and the rust of the cars and the smash of the glass and the knife of the heat; they’d relieve themselves at the edges of ruined properties poorer of fence (impaled on the posts, their victims laidout across hedges grown wild); they’d attempt to sate themselves slovenly on what substances nosed out, snouted, raw or salted, and then, never full, never being able to differentiate appetites they’d smash in the strength that’s occasioned by rage the faces of others flat with the scuff of their hooves that they’d grown only to slip and slide to four legs on upon the asphalt and the glass and the metal; flatfaced women with the cancer cankering the puffs of their navels would whore themselves out for anything not so raw and not so salted, and when they were raped, and they were raped hard and raped often, and so had nothing at all to eat or drink whether it be raw or salted or anything else, they would sustain themselves by licking the stains of smoke from stray scraps of trash, glittery, littery wrappingpaper — that is, when they weren’t attempting survival through the suckling of shvitz from the hairs of their distended lips, though women raped into becoming mothers would occasionally maintain themselves, too, on their own offspring, pickled sweet in twindeckered sandwiches stacked high atop wonder white with the crusts cut, spread thick with lard, lashes of butter, fat dollops of mayonnaise without brand, snacking on their kin drooling saliva to shine their mammæ, which were headlights, twelvenippled, barebulbed. Their brilliantly pleasureless clitorides were shaped like the Popes…
