I KNEW YOUR SECRET MILK GOD

You can't talk to me - I'm the same man. I have liquor and I work and to feed my secret family milk from the vacuum rays of our inner planet.  I came from shimmering mountain people, whose time was neither now nor whenever. Now, we're doing just fine - like the orbiting celestial prison our minds have envisioned. With you or without you, I have chosen the Old Man Sick Tribbet wedding dress to wear, and creating the Crimes of our god - unified and alone. For he who has collected dew at the hour just before dawn, I have saved an equinox. We will live - my secret family and I - in our own trousered, unremembered, human hearts. On this night, the wet grass will sway heavily; we will appraoch the dawn on a quiet woman's trousers - living to be.

THE RED HORSEY OF THE WHISPERING KING

The Whispering King sufficently wet his smooth dark head and spoke, "Happy thoughts have bundled more gifts than any oppresive night ever could." Nancy listened lamely, like a poorly illustrated cow. "The pencils from the Chronicle," he continued, queerly lisping, "have been scribbling the rattlers of my princess story once again. Now every cow puncher in Nueces country wants a presumptuous outfit and matrimonial blood." She couldn't contain herself, "With all your loyal vassals," Nancy said, screaming her rolled cigarettes off the bar, "Why would you twitch in the riverbed? You've never burdened your ego's pony with song before." The Whispering King heard. He fell silent. The silence was sudden - tentative - looking humorously for the fattest lambs. Finally, he replied, "An old rascal with a bulging tomato once told me that I would be king; I laughed at him, like a magnimitious Red Horse, willfully ignoring the olives of impending night. That has been my deepest regret."

PRESENT INFORMATION AGAINST THE POOR

She separated forms, marriages and sheafs of counterfoils a short distance from the new telegraph office, who were not very busy. "What clock was it?" she asked. Her hands were like whipped egg whites and extremely bland. I looked down but had no answer. "Because, I don't even remember what we were talking about." She acted as if she had recently used marijuana. "Perhaps I should relieve my mind, confidentially?" She said that would be fine. "We haven't even bothered yet but surely you can imagine a run-down telephone booth and the old person to go with it." She nodded, so I continued, this time investigating my own disappearance. "Well, I have an interest in someone else's racehorse but not the impossible ransom to be concocted. That being said, I presently have not begun to make sense to you, me or anyone else."

STANLEY AND THE INKWELL OF NOT-TIME

"No, Stanley. You don't understand, " he said. "If I take off these glasses, I lose all contact with the past." What he meant was that the synthesis would be impossible to achieve if it were not in the mode of an original being. Certain instantaneous consequences, concerning the Erlebnis, would characterize a hypothetical discovery, granted, but at what cost? "I am, of course, implying presupposition." He hastened to add that the duration of the extensions equaled the problem inherent in dimensional memory but could not explain the engram of extra-temporal refusals, regardless of spurious ideas. I tried to console him, "Dead time is an observable magnetization, like a piece of soft zinc in a phenomenal procession." He nodded, internally and inadequately, then said, "Grant a past to something atomically heavier than the Final Opposite and you've got an ontological dilemma." I hadn't the heart.

CONSCIOUS OF THE PYTHIAN TRIPOD THRONE

I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be near those broken-down, unnecessary hills, lamely rocky and uncommunicated. The whole place clinged together like an avalanche and bad sportsmanship. The lawlessly splintered capitals of an illegitimate mountain, again to retire, thoughtless and peering outward. Yet I would suffer again, carelessly, for a minute of bereaved creature dreams...terse dreams, cowering under the indignant Oracle.

FAKE TIGER CROWN OF THE PINE BARRENS

Now that they have gone, I can tell you: I was once the highest sun of Cape Clorox, bristling on Saturday beaches and equally white afternoons. The patterns of days were mine obliquely, by segregated lonliness and my carriers were the simple Gauchos of the North. Many confused visions tamed my elemental roar until the outrage of both friends and outsiders rained obtuse bullets of not-love. I had no assailants in the manner of victims, though one might have guessed. Even through snowstorms, effete and perpendicular, shadows loomed in cordial whenevers, cold and mindless. I tell you, it's uncomfortable to inoculate such a hang-out-the-future system, bent on its own mute survival.

THE TICHLORNE BLOOD REPLICA HAND

Steve and Ned were born to nervous rivalry but somehow managed to endure like two crimson peas, vibrating...pitched highly, and in two distinct pods, far apart. It may have been Steve's Tichlorne Blood Replica Hand - "The Perfectly Blurred Light Hand", as it had been marketed. The T.B.R.H. had always given him an unfair advantage - or so thought Ned. It seemed Steve could absorb the pangs of voluntary suffocation when the pair played games under water or earth. Ned dominated merely in rope-skinning and chemical senses. Ned presumed to lose the rivalry in between university lectures and the fertilization of marine life. "I could squish squid," Steve said of his hand. "But you have no chemicals nor ropes," Ned eagerly produced, "and squid don't breath!" That wasn't a victory or a rescue - it infuriated Steve. The T.B.R.H. was under warranty forever. Steve's heart, in bitterness, began to sing the song of no chemicals. Years later, both died...not the Hand.

THOU HAST MERELY THE SHAKES

A pint of Morning's Milk constituted Goody's business catechism. The time he had spent in the Celestial City was German by birth and terrible by choice - no higher vanities for Pope nor Pagan. "Beatrice!" he poisoned, "There is an awful doom - I breathe a loathsome fragrance." The flowering odors grew torpid as she wondered how to join her lips in a spider's death prayer. To this day, her existence was a lost, black illusion. "Why slay the eyes of my heart with shallow blight, like some vibrating chamber in a gem-like haze - devoid of Father Light?" She asked like she would ask to borrow a rake. "I don't care." His recollections were gray, marbled and many. The Mental Nothing - indefinable and uncreated - extended their infancy beyond the little silver cord's science and Goody and Beatrice then only lived to grieve.

AN EMBARRASSMENT OF FREEDOM COMPULSIONS

Ineffectual attempts aside, Barry's resemblence was never regularly christened. His steel and presently glass car portended believably, all light and reckoning. He bore the hasty Self tolerably in San Jose, California but for that certainty, to apply at random. "You are very good; very tolerable," often mistaken, his parting words would be pleasanlty addressed to the Self. Here, compulsion could raise sudden houses of mortal agony. "Strange to pardon my consequences," it would generally add - yet all things accept and please the Self. Barry, being informed of the engagement, characterized a somewhat assignable location - liquid-steel car, notwithstanding. But, the essential part of the narrative is hesitancy. The needless indifference bearing down, inexorably, upon the ordinary hearts of Barry and the Self.