from Rodak's Writings

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Clichés de la Boue

Le travail

Buck naked in our billboard rags, we squat in the gleaming rubble of cathedrals and malls, toiling to construct malls and cathedrals using shards of detritus and lopsided pots of library paste.

L’environnement

The natives stare, they pinch our women, for we are strangers here. They take strong drink and teach our little sons things of which we must not speak. Others speak for us. We call them prophets. We call them dead men walking. We bank on our deafness and continue to delve, for the labor is many and the time is few.

La hauteur

Even as we slave we convert the sweet rain into dark salty urine. With alchemical pride we transmute the tender bled flesh of throat-cut kids into elegant feces, which we shape with our hands into sun-dried briquettes. As the sky goes opaque, we light anxious fires.

Les divertissements

Banging and rattling our rude tambourines, we dance for a spell, then we hunker down moistened, enthralled by such narrative tableaux—such crackling distractions from the toxic frost of the angry stars—as we imagine we see woven throughout that leaping light.

L’amour

We huddle and stink, giving off gasses like a low-water swamp. We moan at the horror of our own looming shadows, as the strobe-like eyes of circling pariahs pierce the illusory stockade of shimmering flame. We roll and we crawl, we snatch and we clutch, tumescent with throbbing, redundant, desire.

L’effroi

We passively shiver in our dissipating heat as though need alone would ward off the stalking jaws of growling darkness.

L’espoir

And we pray for the sun to return.
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