"Loathe, despise, hate passionately as he did that congeries of pestilence he called the Great City, still Edward Hennings was the first to point out it contained within its corrupt maw all things, a kaleidoscope of all the horrors, failures and egregious successes of the Beast that has no Name but incalculable power, and whose final apotheosis is the Pest itself."

- James Purdy, Garments the Living Wear

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by Luke Edwards

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Other names and occupations? There were two pretty odd  mentors to Rimbaud, both older than he, both drinking buddies, one in Charleville, another in Paris. Seek Emile Cabaner and Auguste Bretagne.

Greetings from the slaughterhouse of the best minds.¹

I live in the alleys and gutters of Spokane, Wash.

I know what to do with a knife or scissors (or both).

I don't and won't explain what makes me a pest.

I am. I use scissors. Bernard Cendrars is the whole horse.

Walking groceries one mile home, passed by cars, SUVs and pickup trucks, I wonder

How many meals a day did Leo Johnson get when Windham Earl held him captive?

I have been called Loki in another time and place. Loki here!

I've made a mess of these electronic files, tres inconsistent. (If you're reading anything but the e-version of this, you're missing occasional differently-colored screen backgrounds and similar "mistakes" [inconsistencies]....I am Loki.) I've messed up the files of Lucas Edwards who is Edward Lacie.

___

I remember the hallow day,

it had such holes,

one, only one, hollow hulled man

and maybe half-helled. He might

have made me cry on any other night.

I remember the latent lover later who was best being used boozed drugged drug through the tiny town where we are nice and friendly means we don't mind your secret if you don't mind.

___

I try to be cute so as to have my evil accepted.

I am cute. This is my secret diary full of blood

and sweat. Tears are reserved for the other "Other."

I'm the head Hacker. I despise life's intolerability.²

Half of my mistakes are on purpose; no: three-quarters!

I laugh in this three-year season of secrecy and loss.²

But it's all meaningless, the same whore's hell.

I remain a decade of your worst nightmares.

I hate order and leave disorder wherever I shit. 

I shit wherever I want on this Piss Yellow Road.

I smear disorder in Emerald City grafitto: Merde!

___

The story Phyliss works at the hotel next door to the restaurant and comes in a few times a night. She has a son I've never met. She's been in the restaurant lately and commenting on the radio station we have playing.

"They give more local news on KTOM than KNYT," she informed me. I started playing each for a half hour and noticed they wanted my ear.

___

The Hacker resolves to erase web pages with mention of many things.

There shall me no mention of what these things are by court order.

Include this page on the list then, and consider it gone.

I am the Hacker of the gutters. I wrote poems in several decades. I wrote poems in several centuries. I wrote poems in several lodges. I wrote poems in several colors. I wrote poems in several languages. I wrote Jimmy Breslin a letter. I called the FBI. I am an agent of dis-information. I hate myself as much as I hate life and this is my outlet. I wrote a bridge of poems and jumped from it. I wrote poems with knives and scissors and overdoses. Just ask Dylan Thomas. I wrote at least one poem for Emily Dickinson. I am the Hacker of the gutters and can't help but write. I lived in Sylvia's oven. I've been waiting eons for writer's void.

My name is Leland Palmer. I write poetry. I write court orders. I write death notices. I write forgeries of all shape and sizes. I forge web pages. I re-write history.

My name is "Tiny Alice"'s Tiny Alice's Tiny Alice.

Libel? Apple pie. Extortion? I could give lessons. 

(Hacker's note: read "previous episodes" of "Harar" to find a different ending.) I shall instruct Edward Lacie in the ways of a better murder than hit and run. He should know better.

"One of the biggest prison breaks in Texas history," Court TV is talking. I'll write a poem about a prison break! I'll sign it Blaise Cendrars. It will be set in 1914, the year of great Cubism.

The poem will be a newspaper (as I type this, Court TV shows a newspaper account of the story they're relating) account and nothing more! No commentary. A "found" poem, an experiment.

Back to working out a Cendrars poem.... A title? "Deadline Hour". It refers to newspapers and death, a double entendré. I like the idea.

I can begin with the concept expressed in the line from "Moonstruck," "There comes a day in a man's life when you realize your life has been nothing."

I stop this writing to "write" that forgery.