Having my way with Ulysses

Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows.

Flatterers and slanderers are of the same school. These are the two sirens that we find in books of kinds of beasts. For it is an apparition of the sea that we call sirens. They have bodies of women and tails of fish. And claws of eagles. And sing sweet songs that make sailors sleep, and afterward they devour them. That's the flatterer. It is a fair, beautiful, elegant song that makes the people sleep. And in fair sin. We.  The two roaring worlds without and within: beingless beings.  And I.  Shatter them and myself in one blow.  Am I bitterer against others or against myself?  Me, we.  They, two women no longer young carry home from the sea a midwife’s bag with trailing navel cord containing eleven cockles.  Dilly, wants to speak French and visit the Paris I created.  Is it any good?  The shadows of my mind.  I see her mirror me.  Who do others see when they see me?  Do they see me timedulled and dusty?  Dreaming worlds words.  Dilly, lying in bed with her imitation gold bracelet seeing herself as Dan Kelly sees her.  Se el yilo she can say, nebrakada masculinum! Amor me solo! Sanktus! Amen.  Nebrakada.  A mashup of words.  What does it mean?  Neb: because, brak: lack, braka: crashing, ne: not, rakad: shave, rak: linear, kada: when.  Da.  I see it now.  Yes.  Woo me with Stephano Dedalo, alumno optimo, palmam ferenti: words of my longing.  Father Conmee longing for the hours, murmurs vespers five hours early.   Dutch, Swedish, Czech, Portuguese, Polish, French, Croatian, Russian.  An American word.  What are you doing here?   Who has passed here before me?  You?  Are you we?  Tell me the secret of all secrets.  Amor me solo!  Your world behind the glass, and my world within the glass, and between them we swirl.  Smash your way into me, my misery.  We will be we.  Together we will drown our agenbite of inwit.  We will be the darkness shining in brightness.  We will coil our inwit in our seaweed hair and sing it to sleep.  Fair beautiful sleep.  Then we will bite!  We will chew!  We will drown it in a salt green death.  We shall be misery standing from everlasting to everlasting.

Do you know what you look like?

Of what Adam predating paradise, of what inscrutable divinity are all of us a broken mirror-image?Barang!

I had been waiting all day, watching the pawn shop. Instructive. Then he came round the corner, half drunk. The look of him. An embarrassment. On whose shoulder will I rest my head, coming from a situation like this? He had money.
Melancholy God, how long had she been standing there looking like her uncle with her head on her shoulder. She’ll get curvature of the spine if she doesn’t watch out. An embarrassment standing there. Wants money.

whewe ewerg moey goig ewerg awayg ombogy oo pick ig up.

I smelled he had been drinking now, but I learned from him how to get what we need. Wait awhile, I thought, and I talk something out of him.  Just wait awhile. He gave me $5.00.  It was short shrift for a long day, watching the pawn shop for hours.  He’ll leave us first chance he gets. He says so, but we are still stuck with him.  We are worse off for him but if he died?  Even worse.  Watching all day.  He said he got ten bucks but I know he has more.  Can’t he look money somewhere? Well, he is funny, my dad.
I was not drinking, then.  Who taught her to talk like that? Insolent pack of bitches. They’ll get short shrift and a long day from me.  I’ll leave them. They’d be happy to see me dead, curse their souls.  She should watch that pawn shop, learn something. Told her I got $10.00 from Jack Power.  Where am I going to look for money? It’s not like it’s just lying around in the gutters waiting to be picked up. She got three more quarters out of me.  Skinny thing needs to eat something. I’ll be home with her soon. My girl.

A series of stretch suv’s (one bearing flags) enters a highway cleared of cars.

Random crumbs

Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and luke-warm water substituted. Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger.Burned myself.  Not bad though, I won’t say anything.  I don’t want to add to their troubles.  That’s if I could.  All they feel all they see all they are is hungry.  There’s nothing else.  Hunger is eating us and we are becoming hunger.  Katey and Boody will be here any second and they’ll want to eat.  It’s a mistake to want food when you are hungry.  Better not to think of it and feel blessed when it comes.  Thank God for Sister Mary Patrick.  Viperous temptations.  And fasting.  Don’t eat of the fruit.  Don’t eat of anything.  Nothing into the mouth.  We can feel human without curtains, but lack of food reduces us to rag dolls.  Barang!  Limp and weak.  It took all I had to walk to Sister Mary Peter.  If I could take a vow of poverty too, I’d be better off.  We all would be, I could save us eventually, but I worry about the start of it.  Are you saved?  Elijah is coming! All are washed in the blood of the lamb. The vow of chastity I’ve already taken.  I am mother and wife with no husband.  I sent Dilly to find father before he drinks everything we have.  She has her shoulders in her ears and Stephen in her eyes.  Wants to see Paris and write poetry.  She’s hungry for it: another mistake.  It breaks her heart when we sell the books, but McGuinness’s wouldn’t give anything for them today.  Try again somewhere else and stave off feeling our salvation sailing away.