WHAT IS WON IS LOST AND VISA VERSA

They are all hanging-around at Lew's. Blindman sits in one corner --- a crumpled heap. He is so depressed that it is all he can do to cast a somber shadow and chuck an occasional downer into his inanimate carcass. Lew is spinning like a whirling dervish, trying to incorporate Blindman's stuff from the Egg, into the apartment's decorative motif. Things are flying and the post-rummage ambience of Lew's carefully ordered environ, shifts and reorders itself with hectic frequency. Objects determined unfit for the new-look are pitched out a window or shoved into the hallway. Adolph is talking in slow, caressing tones to Constantine, Lew’s next door neighbor, and a couple of Creamcups from the Grace School of Nursing. Everybody is sort of half listening to him as the words drop off like buckeyes in the dry season. There is no flow. Only a steady clunk, clunk. A dripping faucet of disassociated thoughts held together by the affective quality of their rhythm. Constantine is sitting cross-legged, very attentive. He would like to throw a question or two at Adolph, but every time he tries, his words get swallowed up. The stream flounders by without even so much as a flexuous gurgle. Adolph is being a wee bit pompous. Something he would never do if he weren't stoned to the gills. He leans back in the derelict’s throne with his feet up on the coffee table, His eyes half closed, and begins to toy with the idea of lost causes. If the cause is lost can the effect be far behind? The banners seethe self-righteous, but what causes great hope? Success? Faith? The gnawed bone of trial after trial? What's heroic? The face without teeth, the bloodied boot, the shapeless heart-thump of urge? A tear of light leaks ineluctably in and we find the room empty, the water shallow and cold, the air polluted with lies and yet we climb blindly up in the direction of the stars, stars that can not be held or eaten, stars that can not even be comprehended without faith, hopeful of eventual success. The stars are wrong. Whores laid bare to transcendental sodomy. It's not purpose we imagine on the mount, the scaffolding erect, the ropes dangling, the smell of mothersheartache that mortifies the flesh, but ritual flagellation. The skin, whipped a lovely red, does not wear well in the world. Yet we, Indians and whales and Irishmen and Basks and eagles, all unrequited loves, rush headlong on pure faith into the stone cold wall of failure. Bravo, me lads! Good Show! Take a taste before the final lost cause breaks you back into your constituent parts. Meaningless little borons, hankering for purpose. Bank clerks, housewives, the kings of tomorrow, every corner tart, all getting older and uglier, all wearing thin. Free you say? No my friends, you are not free to choose anything but the moment of your death and only that if you can beat the grim reaper.

The phone is an obscene mechanical hook on the minds 'of Adolph's fish. Eeering, it bleats. Eeering! Lew is nailing the North Star in her bedroom closet. Eeering! And again Eeering! Finally she tears herself loose from the obsessional gathering and regathering of her washed-up flotsam and answers the call of life reaching in.

"Yes?" Lew queries stiffly.

"Hi. My names Lance. I'm wearing a dress."

"Huh " says she

"Hi. I'm Lance and I'm wearing a dress," says the quavery other side of the telephone connection.

Lew hugs up into her knees and tries not to hear Adolph's tailing-down, the escaping gas like a whistle in the nose, or Blindman's narcotized mutters.

"Oh why?" asks Lew

"I feel sooo sexy in green corduroy," comes the reply.

"Green corduroy makes you feel sexy? You're cracked."

"Sooo sexy!"

"Green corduroy is about as sexy as a diaper on a duck."

"What are you wearing?" asks Lance.

"Black lace panties and my monkey-jade earrings.

"Pretty kinky. Heh! This is an obscene phone call, whines Lance.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be obscene. You asked what I was wearing."

"No!" shrieks Lance." A green - corduroy - dress!"

"That is obscene. Wanna borrow my yellow satin sundress? They'll stand for you in that."

The phone call, after Lew tells about it, lightens the group’s mood (except Blindman who is blathering something about the dirty rim-dipper fags whose very existence is an insult to the sweet doubloon of womanhood) and gives Constantine, trying to impress the Creamcups, a chance to interject a point counter to Adolph's heavy dose of fatalism.

"Why don't you go get a gun and make the ultimate philosophical statement?"

Cheshire Puss Camus materializes on a nick knack shelf, filled with tiny lead farm animals and then, blinks out without even giving a toothy, ear to ear, after skewer of a grin.

"I'll tell you why you don't---it's not the cause that's lost---it's you. You can't kill yourself and you can't take life for what it's worth. A little of that ole time paradoxical despair."

Adolph seems to be drifting into the twilight of sleep. For a moment, his jaw even falls slack and a bubble forms a smooth cap over his silent blowhole. And then, suddenly, he is awake and talking as if he never stopped.

"Not despair. Failure! In the moment of failure! It's like this Crooked River Poetry thing that we're going to Friday. Year after year I enter a manuscript. It's a big deal. Good money. Maybe even the path to the Norton's Hall of Fame. Everyday I'd go to the mailbox. Nothing. I got used to failure. It was a comfort. I could do anything I wanted. It made life simple. The T.V. Guide predicted the future. Mutiny on the Bounty, Tuesday at eight. Mr. Chips, Thursday at four. Bowel movements by the number. Snack foods. Bourbon in bed. Now this prize. A waste of talent, not living up to my potential, too much booze, blank pages. I'm a success? Arrgh! A hemorrhoid flare-up. My stomach hurts. I need another downer."

Lew's getting a migraine from Adolph's bellyaching-bullshit.

"How do you do it Adolph?" Lew wants to know.

"Do what?"

"Convert pleasure in any size, shape or form into pain. Here you are, finally getting recognition and all you can talk about is your intestinal agonizing. We should celebrate."

Adolph is starting to fall off again, but from out of his downer-daze, he mumbles sarcastically, "celebrate what?" Then he falls into a deep sleep, making all further communication an exercise in futility.

Farther up the river, His successes,

His father, His brother etc.

are fierce swimmers

with red, soughing bellys rubbed raw.

They grate their own skins

and He laughs Ha Ha

at their swollen uninseminated, fecundity.

Oh my, how cruel this jellied crap of a goal

fills full the empty soul.