"Beauty is mine, perhaps some day you shall find it."

- John Wieners, "Goodbye"

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by Lucas Edwards

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Fourteen

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The mutilations began in 1968, according to the UFO program Jim Post is watching. Animal mutilations are being discussed. Photos. This animal was not torn open by another animal but by a strange sort of scissors.

(John Weiners is pretty unconventional-looking.)

The scientist is saying that maybe aliens are overseeing our environment and we're better for the animal testing the aliens are doing on our behalf.

As Rimbaud lay one-legged and dying

he renounced literature as evil,

according to his pure white sister.

Steinmetz says, "in his eyes, literature

was only 'evil' because of its inefficacy[.]"¹

He was taking strong drugs at the time

and soon asked to be given no more "truth beverages."

I believe it was about then that I moved on.

My hardcover copy of The Ultimate Evil contains passages removed from later editions concerning the OTO (Ordo Templis Orientis), a German occult society and/or The Process, a California-based new age church.

"The OTO accused master black magician Alistair Crowley of revealing "one of its most secret precepts": that sex could be "employed for the purposes of magic."

Which version of these leaves to believe? The judge?

Is the first-printed book only a misleading "plant"?

My copy of "Slaughterhouse Five" is a twenty-ninth printing.

Should I start over and find a first edition?

And, of course, all Calvino titles are suspect.

I'm waiting for Pierre Menard to finish Don Quixote.

I am the head Hacker and all who smoke cigarettes know me.

The Prozac of the masses (TV) entertains me. Or is it

the generic version of Prozac which gives me a glow

that is more "matte" than the "glossy" I'm used to?

It's time to hit the escape key when the metaphors

become so mixed as to become cake, not eggs and salt.

Jim Post is sleeping and learning his lines.

Edward Lacie is sleeping and learning how to kill.

Poet X is dead and Greg Baysans has been kidnapped.

The head Hacker is busy hacking Luke's files

while Luke is busy hacking the files of Edward Lacie.

Edward is busy hacking Baysans's website and others,

inventing page after poem about Blaise Cendrars.

Jim Post is sleeping and learning his lines 

for later when he wakes and.... I need a nap.

I've forgotten my lines for later this evening

when I go on stage and play the part of a preacher.

The irony is lost on half of the audience.

The explanation of the animal mutilations is, according to the next scientist being interviewed, closer to this earth.

"It's amazing the cruelties man is capable of."

This isn't a program about animal mutilations.

This isn't a program about UFOs and aliens.

This isn't a program about Satanists and Son of Sam.

This isn't a program about Arthur Rimbaud.

I've forgotten when this was written.

This isn't a program about unemployment in Oregon after the turn of the twenty-first century.

This isn't a program about hacking and forgeries.

Rabo Karbekian never lived, and neither did Terry Kitchen. A man named "Fish," a farmer on the half shell!²

("Farmer on the half shell" is my term for something that mixes the fictional and the actual, ala Borges or Calvino in If on a summer night, a traveler. Vonnegut, though he bases some of his fiction in his own personal history, is not a "Farmer on the half shell." A new novel by a discredited former journalist named Stephen Glass about a discredited former journalist named Stephen Glass, The Fabulist, Simon and Schuster, 2003.)

Others may have been expecting Rimbaud to read a poem.

Essay. I say. Sweet essay, s, a,

sweet sweet sweet sweet ("Swing, Swing") tea or tease

us I as I do and do you do. S, a, t, tea

on the coffee as I essay, Assailed and sung

in D minor. An essay and I say and she copied it.

Thou shalt not. Tell the truth. An essay.

It got a D minus. Ed wrote it for Teri. Philosophy.

Everyone lies, telling the truth is a form of lying.

Ed's essay on lying is about telling the truth.

Teri got a D minus on it. The teacher liked it a lot.

On the rewrite I've taken the essay out; it was of zero value or interest to the content and topics of this poem or Ed's narrative. The following from the Gnome notebook is interesting, however:

___

I'm doing whatever I can to keep myself from burning

in the youthful deaths of martyrs and criminals both.

Son of Sam has been discovered here in Spokane and

appears daily on the front page of the newspaper.

Anyone with information is being asked to call the FBI.

I want to know if it will be safe for me to move.

___

The previous is an entry from before Dean disappeared.

After a trip to Seattle. After talking a first time to Sheriff Gardner. Before Halloween night. Before hostages were taken in Iran. Before Thanksgiving.

When the second (or later) printing of any book is different than the first because of a court order, it's more than an invisible theft.³ Call Hercule Poirot!

The diary of a false prophet is never easy to convey or reassemble. The diary of a false prophet is even harder to forge.

What if I didn't know that The Ultimate Evil has been ordered changed by the courts? Could I use my first printing version as a reference if I wish to reference the part(s) deleted? Can I use it as a reference if I don't reference that part of the book?

I should reference more "poetry" by "the Son of Sam" but I don't know if it was removed from the tenth printing of the book by order of the courts.

Name here: PQ Edition.

Five hundred and twenty-one long days means about three hundred and eighty-nine versions - not as many as I'd thought. (Q30)