TWENTY-THREE: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF HOTEL SCRUNCHYFACE

Bellboys and ringtones in the lobby carry your clarinet to bed. Deskclerks and soda jerks stand tall as wall in the lobby to assign you a number and guest cred. Elevator curfew in the lobby - they take the floors and they open to you doors. See all the people in the lobby. Some have their hair and some are shaved of heads.

“Message for Cyclops,” said a bellboy, and Cyclops raised his hand like a schoolboy. A slip of paper slides into his Cyclops hand. He must read it to understand.

In his hand of lobby is a note. The note is rocking in the lobby boat. It is all tied up in paper like a clue in a scissors caper. Cyclops see his/her name on it, like a memory of a house, and when the paper opens up, he drinks its words like a cup.

“Cyclops,” says the paper, says the note, says the flapping in the elevator breeze, “the party is on the 40^th floor, and if you are late, you are never late.”

Cyclops doesn’t know whether to keep or throw. He wonders if he should crumple or save note for archives. He just puts it in his pocket, where the laundry can eventually do the dirty work.

There are numbers to take you high, there are numbers to take you low, and that is how the elevator works. I think you know. There are buttons to press for arrow up and buttons for arrow down, and the ascension and declension can take your mouth from a grin to a frown. Your stomach stays in one place as your feet learn elevation, and if the light comes on for you, you reach your destination.

Cyclops had fingers that surgery war kept on his hands and his fingers reached for the buttons. He could see there was a button for thirty-seven and another for forty-one but of forty there was nuttins. He could go up to thirty-nine, he could go so much further, but getting to forty was hard to take, it was kind of a burther.

He gets into one ella and out of another, but none that he gets in has a button for floor number forty, not a single one of the two or three that he can try by waiting.

The bellboys and ring-girls have some good advice, so you must reward them with a coin. “Not every elevator may be capable of taking you where you’re goin.” That’s what they tell Cyclops, whether he asks them or not, and it’s really something that he already knows from recent experience.

If you are a Cyclops, you must travel the elevators up and down. You must get off one and get on another and find the one that is that has the button for the floor that he is looking and searching for.

Get off at third floor, get off at fifth, tenth is no good or twenty-two and sixteenth isn’t thith. It is only travel thru travel and error and trial of shut and open doors that the floor with the elevator he needs it is there on number four. That was the floor, number four. That was the floor with the elevator door, a new elevator, golder than the rest, and colder once inside it.

Floor number four takes the elevator door has the elevator floor with the four and the zero. Get in the room, push the button and go zoom, for the button you were huntin is the one that turned maroon.

Cyclops found that one elevator. It has the button for forty to push. He is the only one, the rider insider. It takes him up, the elevator does that, it takes him up, a tall pull slider. He goes up there followed by his stomach, and if it’s not too much to ask it follows shortly after.

But where is his house, in this land of up and down? Where is his living room and the glowing TV that he can hunt the channels and track the light and up put the fight to find the great star and wonder, Dingy Bahsome?

TWENTY-TWO: HOTEL SCRUNCHYFACE

There once was a small little hovel house on Montague Street in Pome Town. There once was a small little hovel house where Cyclops and Scrunchyface called it home.

There once was a house and there once was a street, but if there’s a street there are signs and there are sidewalks, and then there are signs, and then there were streets, and small hovel homes there were few as there were none.

There once was a small little – no, there wasn’t. There now is a tall scraping hotel where there was. Cyclops sees it as stare as his thirty-eight eyes. He sees it and he sees the clouds. Cyclops sees it in all directmas of up and down. He sees the windows he sees the walls he sees them rising he sees the talls. He sees the towers and wowers and zowers, he sees the talls and all the rows, he sees the no’s and the many windows, and he could never see over it, even standing on too many toes.

There is in fact a tall hotel on Montague Street, and it has a sign on the door, on the awning far over and above the door is a sign written in letters, written in words and names and sounds and rounds, and the awning said, “Hotel Scrunchyface,” and this meant that Cyclops certainly must investigate, he must look, must listen and drink and intestine-ate.

He used the spy methods, he drank into shadows. He used the spy-way and walked all the byway. He tried like a spy and he lied like a spy, and if you might walk by, he might ask you why.

And who would walk by but Rack and Zack who are back for attack from the second wink track. And they are the Orange Drink Brain Trust of the Amalgamated Fifty-Seven Counties, but they don’t have time to brain too much, in fact and in ract they are driving in the dust.

“Rack and Zack,” said Cyclops to stop them.

“Cyclops and Cyclops,” said Zack and Rack in tandem.

“Who is this hotel, and why does it have a certain name. Where is my house where I once used to drowse. Where is the room where I used to stay hoom.”

And Cyclops points to them, to Rack and Zack, he points them to the name and the sign, the name on the sign, and it sure is a sign, and there sure is a name, and the name is up there, but it’s not on the air.

They read the name they read the name they read the name but who is to blame. “Who is to blame?” they crack, Rack and Zack, and Cyclops, our Cylops, feels under attack.

Not even a brain trust of two trust a man with carrot stew. Not even a stack named with Zack want a snowman’s nose back.

They shrug their shoulders like carrying boulders and they would say more, but they are on the way to the store.

“We cannot tell a lie. There are things we must buy, and your carrot reminds us why” and so they toodle-oo, and so Rack and Zack do.

If there is nobody on the outside, Cyclops thinks with his thirty-eight eyes, then I must maybe go inside. And that’s no surprise.

TWENTY-ONE: THE SECOND ROAD HOME FROM SURGERY WAR

The second road home from surgery war will strike you as odd and land you of nod. The second road home from surgery war will cut you like scissors and flat you like flithers. The second road home from surgery war will bury your head and take you half dead. The second road home from surgery war will record that meaning, but is also demeaning. The second road home from surgery war is twice as is long, but has its own song.

The second road home from surgery war

The second road home will take you how

The second road home will get you there

And surgery war is far away

The second road home will take your feet

Your tummy will rumble, no spuds to eat

The second road home will get you a place

It runs by and around all outer space

When Cyclops walks the second road home from surgery way, he has to consult his second war road home map. And after some mapping, he takes a nap. And when it is over, he calls it a wrap. And if he won’t tell you, you’ll call him a sap. And if it’s a dead end, you’ll say you are trapped.

And his eyes still flash from the light and explosions of surgery war, of surgery war, of surgery war, the second time thru. And he has been thru it, the ether and explosions and the sticks and the stones and the operating phones and he did see the scalpel and had to wear flannel and felt like an animal. He saw the big scissors, the threat and the thread, and if he survived it, he wouldn’t be dead.

And he wouldn’t be a woman either, for the surgery war surgeons did their best to reduce his chest and in between his knees they leaned down and sneezed.

They had to make him back a man, they had to do it if they can, they had to make his hips look right and that’s why there’s battle, and that’s why you fight.

The surgeons had to fight him back, they had to fight and right and might him back. They had to make him a someone, a nineman, a new man, they had to make him so, if only they can.

And if you saw him only on his face, you would see that his nose was nosewhere and his eyes were down to thirty-eight.

They didn’t have his swinger so they found it on his face. They surgically switched his nose down to a different nostril place, they moved it on a flatbed truck, they moved it on some wheels, they did their surgeon’s steals, and made it swing for reals.

They moved his nose from north to south and so there was a hole right over his mouth. They put a carrot there, for one of the surgeons had one in his lunch, and it looks like orange pointy nose, if you can take the hunch.

And two eyes of forty could be moved very smartly, and if you move two you just have to find nice pirate eye patches to hide the holes where the eyes used to roll, and that still leaves a Cyclops with thirty-eight eyes moving and seeing in all directions, and that is a lot of corrections, and that is still a lot of indiscretions.

His nose was now his swinger, and two eyes became his balls, and you can say he is a man in fact, a man down in the leg hip place, but some would say with some excitement that there was a face down on his groin.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever had a proper face, with two eyes and one nose and a fissure for noise,” thought Cyclops. “But I guess I have to keep it concealed in my trousers.”

And so he had a head face and in addition he had a groin face, and so he walked the road home from surgery war, and oh, if there were more we might have heard about it by now.

SECOND INTERMISSION

Please join now with the good people of Pome Town, and all their people, in singing a verse of “The Song of What is Something Going On, other than Lower Prices.”

There is something going on

We know it in our guts

But despite it going on

We’re sitting on our butts

We just like to do our jobs

And then we get our check

We don’t care if what we do

Is sending us to heck

We just like to live our lives

In the standard way

That’s what we did all last week

And what we’ll do today

If we want to know the truth

We’ll turn on the TV

There we’ll hear the life to lead

And see places to be

If our lives do not equal

The ones we see on screen

We will have to compensate

To change how we are seen

Mostly we stay satisfied

Going to the store

That keeps us from suicide

And all-consuming bore

Seeing all the things to buy

Will put down that gun

Who could pass up such savings

And all of this fun

Intermission B

The writer is out again and he’s turning back the clocks and he’s burning down the docks and he’s busting all the blocks. He’s changing all the locks and he’s ticking all the tocks and he’s spreading deadly pox but his singing just don’t rocks.

He’s shooting down some flocks and he’s spraying things with flox and he’s called the nurses docs and he’s cooking some with woks.

Here’s some more that he’s scribbled and scrabble and babelled and bibled and mingled and mangled and tingled and tangled and betty sue grabled together.

And you mighty just think that it isn’t enough that it’s all so much guff that it’s far too and rough that with one look it goes puff that it is not the write stuff that he’s calling your bluff and you’ll leave in a huff. If that is so you just might want to know that all things end and so but there’s half way to go.

NINETEEN: WILLIE THE LIZARD AND BOTH OF HIS SPIES AGAIN

Willie the Lizard and both of his Spies are wearing disguise. They’re that kind of guys. Cyclops can see them and spot them and get them because she has eyes, she has forty eyes.

The Spies and the Lizard, they know things by watching. They know things by looking, and not by a wizard, the Spies and the Lizard. They do observation, they see around corners, they watch and they wait there, but they do not hate there. They look at the buildings, the hair and destruction, and draw some conclusions, the size of contusions.

“Do you know the flow and the go and the what and the from and the who and how true and the that and the fat and the leave it under your hat that is going on around town, around our Pome Town?” Cyclops asked them, Spies and Lizard, as if they could answer, as if they were blizzard.

“She-Cyclops, we know that you were a he but now you are she, but about town we won’t guess, I have to confess,” said Lizard the Willie (not his real name), in pain and completely.

“We know you, and we know your switcheroo, but about the wrecking and the drecking and the building and the kuilding, we don’t have a clue,” said both of his Spies (not their real names either), in and out of their disguise.

“We can say what we heard, and it might be absurd, but we don’t have the word,” said Willie the Lizord.

“But we might make a start by telling you of your heart,” said the Spies, those two guys.

“Don’t I make a delightful lady,” said She-Cyclops, showing off her skirts and her squirts and her lurts of hair and there.

“Um, hm,” said the Lizard and the Spies, and they are not so convinced, tho they no words they mince.

“You are so right,” said Cyclops, She-Cyclops, who isn’t so pleased. Cyclops has nice hair and a dress and perfume, but she is no Louise.

“What do you think?” said Willie, and as so many spies know, this is a good way to get to the heart of the heart of the matter of the matter. It’s the old question trick, and it very often works.

“I think,” said Cyclops, “that now that I am a woman, I no longer have anything in common with myself.”

“I could not have said it better,” said Willie the Lizard, and then he does say it better, with some mustache and leather.

“I guess this means surgery war,” said Cyclops, She-Cyclops, concerned and confused. She smells and she looks but she also feels used.

“I think you are thinking so right for the fight,” said both of the Spies, and they think they have it right.

Cyclops, She-Cyclops bids them now good-bye, for it is back to the road, low and high, low and high. It is back to the road to the surgery war, and the sun sets and rises, and with it come more crises.

EIGHTEEN: LU AND SUE

Lu and Sue run the construction crew. They don’t look, they don’t watch, they don’t wait, but they do. Oh, the many so many parking lots and buildings they grew. They start with the ground and they build to the sky and you can watch it with your eye or you can watch it with all forty.

They’ll build a wood shed or a tower of lead, or a factory of bread, or whatever you said. Somedays and Smatterdays they’ll build anything that would be filled by humans or drilled for the living or killed for the hills, alive and kicking.

They’ll line the street with new garages, one for Jull and done for Roges. They’ll build them out of wood and stone; outside and inside a wall you’ll feel alone.

They build towers of glass and they put them up fast. They erect houses of steel and they make them for real. They build them in the park or the day all dark. They build in the street with their hands and their feet.

The towers come roaring from midday to morning. The buildings come hither from far and from thither. The buildings are towers and it’s very surprising. It’s just what you do if you are Lu or you are Sue.

Cyclops, she-Cyclops, has to get out of the way. A building might be rising from that spot and on this day. The latest development might be big as an elephant. And what do you do if all you want to be is in somebody’s shoe.

“Make way for Cyclops,” said the hard hats on the soft construction buddies. And then come the wolf whistles, form the construction worker women and young women and old women and middle women on the down line. They are eating their lunches with faces in scrunches. If you ask them how you look and smell, they‘ll just say, “Mighty fine.”

Cyclops might just ask them, so they might just have to answer.

“Woo woo woo, Cyclops. How do you do?” said Lu.

“Lu Lu Lu said Cyclops, and I say it too,” said Sue.

“What here is going, is going is going on here?” said Cyclops. “Do I have to ask a question or do I have to sing a song?”

“Sing us a song, you can’t go wrong if you sing us a song,” sing out all the gals of the whole construction crew cotillion. They want a new song to go with the rivets and the concrete and the beat of the pile driver and the two stories and the fiver.

Cyclops has a little song, has a new one, and she sings it in the construction site of webs and needles.

Let us go to Cyclops morning

Like the fogs of Innisfree

Where each boy and girl exactly

Knows inside the one to be

Let us go to Cyclops morning

Where the sun runs out of gas

Boys and girls exchange their darlings

Then they kick them in the ass

The construction crew isn’t quite sure what to do. Do they cheer or do they beer or do they headlights in the deer. Do they sing along, or do they say that sometimes a song can go wrong. But they don’t tell Cyclops why they are doing what they are doing.

“Not even a song gets me an answer?” said Cyclops like a lancer.

“How can we tell you?” said Lu.

“If we never knew,” said Sue.

And the construction crew made of many and few has to get back to work for they haven’t time to shirk. More parking lots and buildings must rise out of the ruins of Pome Town. More big boxes for shopping and foxes. More flat walls to answer all shopping calls. More new streets to get run over by the new hordes of traffic.

And if Cyclops knows nothing, she knows that she must pose a question to the best one, to Willie the Lizard.

SEVENTEEN: SOOM AND GILLOOM

Soom and Gilloom own the Room of Perfume. As you can tell, they will sell you a smell. Soom and Gilloom spray to banish all gloom. Their odors in jarlets will soon cast a spell.

Theirs the perfume filled with store. Theirs the odors and much more. Theirs the fragrances to use, to seduce, vamp and confuse.

Spray some on your handy back hand, take a sniff to understand, if you aren’t female enough, they’ve got bottles filled with the stuff.

Soom and Gilloom will spray the whole room. If you don’t like, you had best move and soon. Soom and Gilloom will sell you to consume. If you don’t like it, you will like it soon.

“Cylcops, try a little mist.”

“Cyclops, you will be surely kissed.”

“Cyclops try a whiff – if you don’t, it’s forever if.”

Cyclops gets the advice from Soom and Gilloom, and the advice is so nice, so pleasant and nice, to try out the smells in some jars shaped like bells. She gets it in her ears, the words about here, place and time and smell and crime, the words about odors that move men like motors.

“Will these perfumes make me feel more like the woman that I am? Will I be more woman than a woman named Sam? Will I be more woman or will I be flim flam? Will I be more woman or must I say goddamn?” Cyclops asks it and she gets back nods. The heads are telling her so much yes, and she tries a little spray on the front of her dress. She tries a little spritz in her fancy hair-do, she tries a little bit from that bottle, and why wouldn’t she do, and why wouldn’t you.

It is wet but then it’s dry. You can smell it some all day. It is mist but then the air. Just the odor makes you care.

Soom and Gilloom are as loud as the tomb. What they might tell you could lead to your doom. Soom and Gilloom hardly ever assume. If you are finished, they’ll sweep you like broom.

Their odors can be hard to see. Their odors can be memory. Their odors can make the garage turn into a castle thru smell mirage.

Their odors give you slender legs, their odors produce better eggs, their smells can clothe you in the spring, their smells imagine everything.

“Did you find the fragrance that will suit you best?” said Soom.

“Did you feel the impact, or must you make a test?” said Gilloom.

“Is your nose delighted?” said Soom in day and knighted.

“Will you get the man you want?” said Gilloom, her stomach taut.

Cyclops was spraying like a springer, but then she had to put the bottle down. She had to take it down and put it down and put it on the table. She had to put it on the counter, the bottle and the spray and the smell that lasts all day.

Was the smelling for a manning, or was it for something down the other path of pathing. Was it for a guy, or was it just for the apple of her eye. Was it for some tom dick or tom’s son, or was it for the special star Dingy Bahsome.

“Do you have anything a girl would like?” thought Cyclops to ask, but Soom and Gilloom just think she’s a dyke.

“Can’t help you there,” said Soom or Gilloom.

“Guess I’m too square,” said Gilloom or Soom.

And they don’t really understand the Cyclops and her quest, and the Cyclops doesn’t even know what’s best, what’s best for her, what is the cure, which way to go or high or low.

SIXTEEN: DEMOLITION DORA AND THE RUBBLE ROUSING CLEAN UP GALS

Demolition Dora and the Rubble Rousing Clean Up Gals get a building in their hair and they take it down to air. They take hammers and screwdrivers and a saw to batter walls, they charge at windows. roofs and dentils, they eliminate all halls. They use wrecking balls, suggestions, and a little derring do, until the building that was standing there will make you ask them, “Who?”

They smash the ceilings and the floors, they crash down stories one and two, they dig a tower to a hole, that’s what they do, the whole damn fewmale crew.

Watch out which they’re tearing down, it might be fun to watch the work. Watch out what they’re tearing down, there might be rubble you can sieve, watch out what they’re tearing down, it could just be a sight to see, watch out what they’re tearing down, it might just be the place you live.

The sound is harsh, the sound is tall, the sound of a crash, the sound of a fall, the sound of a town that is going to the hole, the sound of the you that feels the shoe in your sole.

Cyclops has forty eyes but only two ears, and that’s a good thing, for it is easy with two hands to cover up two ears but if the sight of the site were so much worse, she couldn’t stop seeing her fears. She covers her ears, but still she has to look at the veins and the explains and the open sores and the gores of this smash and that one as the old town of Pome Town is brutalized into the face of a wrecking ball.

“What is this, and what goes on?” said Cyclops with her single mouth.

“We are doing our job, we are tearing it down, we are tearing it down, and I like your nice gown,” said Demolition Dora in her work clothes which are a bit dusty from all the tearing and swearing and blaring and scaring.

And the Rubble Rousing Clean Up Gals, who could stand a little cleaning themselves, said, “Nice gown and nice hair, and you well them so wear.”

Cyclops is a little flattered, and she would turn red if she could turn blue if she could so see so with forty eyes taking up so much face real estate, and all that hair leading from her head to the air.

“I think you and I think so and I thank you for the complement, I thank you for your words so meant, I thank you for the dusty day, but what are you doing anyway?” and this says the She-Cyclops in just a little more feminine of a manner than she had her last thing of saying said. It just the power to implement the complement of the hardhat crew.

“We are doing our job,” said Demolition Dora with that swagger of somebody ripping out steel and pulverizing concrete. “It’s a messy job, and it isn’t neat, but somebody has to do it, and that is where we feet.”

Cyclops sees the Pome Town falling. She sees the old places go away under the heavy ball of the wrecking tall. She remembers a thing, and then it is dust. She looks at that once-place and now it looks rust.

“Where am I anyway, and who is this place?” said Cyclops, she-Cyclops, with forty eyes on her face.

Dust smells like dust, and lust tastes like lust. Maybe if she concentrated more on her sense of smell, thinks Cyclops, and she must if she must.

FIFTEEN: LESSESS AND TESSESS

Lessess and Tessess will bless us with dresses. Lessess and Tessess will accessorize. Lessess and Tessess will jeeze us with shoeses, Lessess and Tessess will dazzle the eyes. They have the dress shop down the hall, they have the dress shop in the mall, they have the dress shop in Pome Town, they’ll find for you the perfect gown. They’ll fit your every curve and curl, they’ll fit for woman and for girl, they’ll fit you if you’re wide as school, they’ll fit you if you’re narrow as drool. They’ll fit you in the perfect dresses, their names are Lessess and also Tessess.

“We’ve got to burn the man out of you, and the best way is with style,” said Lessess.

“Weve got to burn the man out of you with experiences and smile,” said Tessess.

”We’ll make you into womanhood, we’ll find you the right bag,” said Lessess, short and hollow.

“Well make your outside beautiful, your inside ought to follow.”

They pull out their string measures, they pull out miles of cloth, they needle every inch of stitch, and cover up her swath. They show and lead her to the dressing room, they pull the curtain tight, they push on her so many gowns, to find the one that’s right.

Cyclops has to squeeze a little. Cyclops has to squeeze some more. Cyclops wears one set of clothes, she wears the whole dress store.

First she tries the wrong one. Then she tries the right. Forty eyes and forty mirrors enforce the sense of sight.

“I don’t like the way this looks at me or looks on me,” said Cyclops from her heart.

“I think you’re wrong as lawn and we are right as flight,” said Lessess acting smart.

“I don’t think this dress really selects me and reflects me,” said Cyclops with her mouth.

“I think it’s perfect as can be, as perfect as the sea” said Tessess North and South.

Cyclops is humming and hawing while Lessess and Tessess are oohing and awing. Cyclops is second guessing while Lessess and Tessess require only their own opinions. Cyclops is so unsure while the two dress goddesses show off their fabulous fashion confidence.

“You used to be a guy. How should you really know,” said Lessess or said Tessess, and this is enough to make Cyclops a little less so.

“If you say so, if you tell me, if you say so in this city. If you really do think it makes me look pretty,” said Cyclops in a dress of flower garden, in a dress of beg your pardon, in a dress of does it works, in a dress of a thousand quirks, in a dress of sunny weather, in a dress of false cow leather, in a dress of pleats and splashes, in a dress that bats your lashes, in a dress of length and windy, in a dress you might call cindy, in a dress of colors many, in a dress for a day that’s rainy, in a dress for a day any, in a dress for marge or annie.

She wears a dress from the big dress shop and watch the eyes turn, and watch the jaws drop, and watch the nostrils sniff, and watch the ears wiggle, and watch the arms reach, and watch the mouths eat a peach.

Cyclops does leave the dress shop after spending her surgery war pension, and look at her, you would never guess that she was a he, but she is sure walking in some shoes.

And what would Dingy Bahsome think of her in such a dress of color and of cloth?

FOURTEEN: LON LONSON AND SQUIRTS

Lon Lonson was the Mayor and his assistant went by Squirts. They were losing air in City Hall with stacks of permits piling up. Permits for a bigger this and a louder that. Permits for a better so and a less soft of more. Permits for beasts of steel, and how many how many for househows and whos. And so swinglash of more, and so many extra papers of permits of this so’s and able, and all they had to do was stamp them all, apparently that is all that was asked of them to do. To get the permits and stamp them approved.

The permits came from everywhorl, the mail and the snail and the ships and the drips and the walls and the calls and out of the woodwork just as usual, and they got all the permits and they stamped them all OK.

They stamped them and they stamped them and they stamped them all approved. They didn’t take the time to read them, they just stamped them all approved, and there was enough too much work for them anyway, so that is all that was certainly expected.

They ran out of ink but then a permit came with extra ink. They stamped their rubber stamps down to a nub and then a new permit came with an extra rubber stamp. Their four arms got tired of stamping and then a permit arrived packed with extra arms already pumping. The ink squirted up into their eyes and a new permit came with eye cleaning fluids and eye cleaning cloth so they could see to stamp, so they could do their daily City Hall duty.

They stamped so much that they stamped everything else in their life and in their day. They stamped their breakfast lunch and dinner and stamped their loved ones once at home. They stamped the journey to work and back, they stamped during happy hour and at some funerals too. They stamped and they stamped like they didn’t know what else to do.

When Cyclops came into City Hall to file a permit to change for official from he to she, they stamped her on the forehead just as ink as they could be.

“What can we do for you, She-Cyclops,” said Lon Lonson the Mayor with ink on his breath and a stamp at the end of each arm.

“I am now a woman and not a man and not a no-man or an also-ran or a sam I am or a knight of spam. I am not a he but now a she and I must file the proper paperwork, or so I hear, of this I fear,” said Cyclops with her eyes and face and amazing product hair.

Lon Lonson made a stamp or three. Squirts made the stamping two through four. They stamped the walls and windows, floor. They stamped their shirts and stamped the door. They stamped the papers as they came; that’s how they played the permit game.

“You just provide us with the permit and we will stamp it approved,” Lon Lonson, the Mayor, said.

“We will stamp it with our ink and stamps,” said Squirts, and he meant it because he sent it.

“We know how to stamp because we’ve been doing it all our lives. We can stamp out ants and we can stamp bee hives,” said Mayor stamper, the man with the ink.

“We do it best from morn to night, we stamp and then we take a bite,” said Squirts, even tho such stamping sometimes hurts.

Cyclops watched them stamp, but he didn’t have the form to fill out, he hadn’t a clue what he should do about the paperwork.

“Where do I get the form to fill out, where do I get it? Do I have to shout? Is it hereabout?” Cyclops said and his forty eyes blinked.

“How should we know,” said the mayor Lon Lonson, who came from Wisconsin. “All we know is how to approve them.”

And when he took a closer look at She-Cyclops he added,” and did you also file the proper paperwork for having as many as forty eyes, when two is the standard and requires no permit but forty is a little ostentatious, and may be subject to such laws as may be written concerning so many eyes, and you shouldn’t be surprised.”

It was at times like this that Cyclops really thought that, yes, the best of all possible you is in somebody else’s shoes. She got out while she could, before she had to fill out permits and hermits and squirmits all day.

THIRTEEN: STELLA AND BELLA

Stella and Bella, the stylists of dandy, can make war hair and bore hair and gore hair and tore hair and sore hair and roar hair and your hair and more hair and ignore hair and explore hair, and make it cotton candy. Stella and Bella, with scissors and with heat, can make bad hair and sad hair and fad hair and too glad hair and mad hair and rad hair and foo-dad hair and zoozad hair and make it very neat.

They clip and they nip and they tuck and they yuck and they cluck and unluck and they cost you a buck. They curl and unfurl and they purl and they yurl and they spurl and they squirrel and they call you a girl. They smell and they gell and they tell and they yell and they bell and they sell and they work fast as hell. They taste and they waste and they do it post haste and they of head lay waste, and they faste and they saste and they do it unmaced.

Ring the bell if you want to get a sell. Call the line if you want to look so fine. Drop the door if you are getting off the floor. Take a peak if it is hair style that you seek.

“Why why why shy fly try no guy, hello Cyclops,” said Stella.

“You you you you flew true goo sue screw and aren’t you, helloo Cyclops,” said Bella, greeting him over the flying heads and chairs and clipping sounds.

Cyclops tells them hi too and she doesn’t know the story for telling, she doesn’t have to say a soul, for Bella and Stella can guess it from the rat of her Cyclops girl hair, they can read the stories in the strands and the knots and the grease and the gusto and split ends and lack of conditioning in the Cyclops hair, once a guy’s and now a gal’s.

Bella comes ova to take a closa look. She has her scissors to help her look and she uses the handholds like spyglasses, she uses the clippers like a mustache. “I think we can help you, but you have to be satisfied.”

“Yes, the smile makes the hairdo too,” says Stella as she turns one more head from gravy into something victorious of gravity for a change.

“We can snip and we can clip and we can trip and we can dip and we can do, but some of it has to come from you,” says Bella as she wields the iron.

“We can curl and we can surl and we can girl and we can unfurl and we can talk as low as Burl, but it has to come from you too, from you and your hair, you have to stick together like glue,” says the Stella as she raises high the bottle of do or the bottle of die.

“You should be happy with who you are,” says Bella, “even if you’re not exactly who you are.”

And they team up twice in magic, and they pour out their hair talent and they make some bees of busyness and surround the head of Cyclops. They make the hairs all stand on end, with all that participation, with all that anticipation, with their clips and perspiration. They wave their magic wands of curl, they fire their guns of molten air, they take a cut and bring it back, they turn a mountain into hair.

When they are done with her, the new she-Cyclops has a hair of head like no other, she is stunning in the top of the drop department, her all forty eyes can’t stop from seeing herself in the forty mirrors that Bella and Stella have ready for just this occasion, and it is as amazing as war is deadly, and Cyclops, feeling so much more a she now, feels a little bit better to be herself and in this place to be now.

Wouldn’t Dingy Bahsome like hair so fine as mine, and that’s what Cyclops thinks, but this hair is mine all mine.

TWELVE: SCRUNCHYFACE THE ECONORAPTER

When Cyclops returned from surgery war it was revealed that he was now a she, and instead of one simple eye above her nose, she now had forty eyes scattered over all facets and curves of her head.

There was the home door, and that was the first door, and that was the first place, and that was the end of the race. That was the place of return and of rest and of arms and hands and welcome.

In the house of Cyclops there were doors and windows and there was a dark room and there were empty bags of potato chips, many of them in the darkness, in their wrinkles, and also a person, and also the only person there.

The only person was Scrunchyface. He hadn’t shaved for years, and you could barely see his ears.

Scrunchyface was listening in the talking TV turn-on room, but in the light of listening there was some light for seeing too, and in the light for seeing too he could see over the wrinkles of discarded potato chip bags that Cyclops was now very different.

In between the TV and the whiskers and the wrinkle of plastic bags, Scrunchyface could see things about Cyclops, he could see things about his roommate in between all the other distracts. Scrunchyface could see that Cyclops was a changed man. He could see that Cyclops was a no man. He could almost tell that Cyclops was a woman.

His hair was curly his dress was long his eyes were lashes her voice was song. Cyclops was no longer a his, he was a her. Scrunchyface’s mind, well-conditioned by decades of serious TV viewing, could take swell trips, could wander like a wonder, and it wondered if in fact, if it was true, that if there was now a hair forest where once was a swingeroo.

“You are a woman,” said Scrunchyface, so obvious and true.

“And also surprising is that you have forty eyesings,” he said with his face, scrunchy as ever, and never was it said that these words won’t stick to her like glue.

“I have been to surgery war,” said Cyclops. “I have seen the terror at the darkest deep base center of humankind, and maybe I lost some human, and maybe I lost some mind. I am changed, yes, but that is what happens when you serve in surgery war, you can’t help but scar, you must carry them far.”

"I've been changed a little too, just like you, but not quite so whew," said Scrunchyface, washed in the flush of the TV screen, and if you were there you would find it so true that of these two old friends, who was even looking or listening to who.

“Your clothes aren’t very stylish for a girl’s stylish clothes,” Scrunchyface said, and he had so much to compare her to, he had so much TV to make the pictures for him, of comparisons bright and dim. “Your hair still looks like a guy’s hair.”

Cyclops knew that, in fact, her military surgery issue gown was not exactly striking, but she also thought that her own natural complements would come out thru the sundress camouflage, but she realizes it isn’t so, but she thinks it isn’t so.

“How are things on TV, are they good enough for ye?” Cyclops thinks to ask, and asks to think, and he really means it too, but Scrunchyface sure is watching.

“Like I said, when you were a guy like a Fred,” said Scrunchyface with his whole man face, “I have been changed too. I have been changed by TV. I am no longer Scrunchyface the Philosorapter. I am now Scrunchyface the Econorapter.”

“That is good, as good as wood, as good as it could,” Cyclops says, because change is good, even if he doesn’t really believe so.

She leans slightly toward the TV as if in leaning she could see a Dingy, could see a Dingy who would remember he, who would remember she from the TV. But she doesn’t see one, and she doesn’t open her mouth.

Cyclops doesn’t even want to ask Scrunchyface about the exploits of Dingy Bahsome, even tho the Econorapter should really know his share, as much time as he has spent in front of the screen with bright and blare. Cyclops wants to know, she wants the inside to and fro, but she doesn’t want to ask that guy. It’s probably best to just creep out and get her hair done.

ELEVEN: RETURN FROM SURGERY WAR

The road to go home from surgery war is stitched with time, will burn you like lime. The road to go home from surgery war will practice forgetting, and all offs are betting. The road to go home from surgery war is hard as a boulder and makes you grow older. The road to go home from surgery war is long but is under and no short of thunder.

And as you walk home, you see all the billboards and mindsigns that remind you of your time, of that time to remember, that time to remember surgery war, because you have just experienced it, you have just experienced surgery war, and it has made a mark on you as clear as landscrape.

And so someone who has served in surgery war, someone like a Cyclops someone, that someone might just talk out loud about the surgery war experience. Such a someone must talk about it, whether there are any others to hear or to care.

“I served my company in surgery war, I served the sign of the red and blue, I saw the logo-draped coffins, and that made me cry like mother’s milk. I saw bodies mangled by steel and disease, I saw them mangled by surgeon’s skill, I saw augmentation, and reversal of features, and other wonders and shifting of shapes.”

The flash of straight lightning. The corners of crooked night. The lash of your memory forgetory. A strainage kitchen of landscape. That man of mountain walking back and forth like he wonders what you are doing in his cookhouse of geography. If he only had a map, so he could know how much further he had to go and how he was never going to make it.

When Cyclops came to a fork, which tine should Cyclops trust. When Cylcops comes to a trust, which fork should Cyclops tine. When Cyclops comes to a tine, which trust should Cyclops fork. If only there were signs, like a speckled turtle, or a lady frog walking with her cane.

“Maybe I should take all the good advice and turn back the clock and just return to wicker furniture making and TV expectating. Maybe I should be happy in a certain set of shows and not walk so much to other pain of who’s.”

Cyclops says this on such a road, and who wouldn’t, really, say it out loud when there was no reason to say it out loud, or louder. He can say it out loud as if Dingy Bahsome could hear it, but there is no way that she can hear it. He can talk to himself or to no others. Or is it better to sing it when it is such a song, such a song of go home, such a song of never being there.

Home could be where you roam

But mostly home is just plain home

I do not have a home

If I am only roaming

Unless my home is Rome

And I would be a Roman

And if a Cyclops does get home after the trauma and drama and slama and wrongma of surgery war, then how does a town of rhymers greet such a return of tall post-trauma post-treama post-dreama Cyclops. Are they there with minds and doors open, with flowers and howars and towers with wowers, or are they there with windows and sindows and flindows and grindows and other awfuls closed sad and shut and tut tut ta-rut. Cyclops doesn’t know a guess, Cyclops can’t for the life of him expect to know, he just has to go, he just has to go, and get set for the show, and prepare high and low.

FIRST INTERMISSION

The residents of Pome Town, along with all their agents, invite you to join them in a chorus or two of “The Song of the Importance of Individuality for the Creation of Collective Wealth.”

I am exactly who I am

And you are the same too

And he is she and she is he

And we are we, the whole damn crew

You are the only one of you

And I am just the same

That’s how we market everyone

So no one takes the blame

I am real good at being me

And you are good at you

Create a phrase for a billboard

Or better, make up two

Let us develop marketing

To sell your holy soul

And when the cameras turn to you

Enact your one true role

Here is the sales pitch that you are

I’m sure you know it well

Your body odor was replaced

With that sweet success smell

I am exactly who I am

And you are the same too

And he is she and she is he

And we are we, the whole damn crew

Intermission part B

Oops! Somebody left the door open and the writer got out

And now he’s up and talking to the noman and the woman and the going to and fro man and the got a seed to sowman and the snowman and the flowman. He’s talking to the one man and the twoman and the sixman and the got to pick up sticks man and the flicks man and the tricks man. He’s talking to the plowman and the wowman and the owman and the put out every eyeman and the tryman and the fryman. He’s talking to the youman and the booman and the Truman and the go to watch the zooman and the flewman and the glueman. He’s talking to the urksman and the turksman and the gurksman and the has to bling a blurks man and the worksman and the murksman. He’s talking the swooshman and the gooshman and the blooshman and the take a tip from rooshman and the tooshman and the slooshman.

And he’s telling them to give him a break, to try to stay awake, to not make so big earthquake. He’s telling them to wait and to not so cogitate. He’s telling them he’s sorry and he’s worry and a little twirly. He’s asking their forgiveness and their tivness and smortivness. After all, he says, this is pretty much like a first draft. After all, there’s not a lot of second thought. After all, this is just a lark, isn’t it, just some sturm and some drang and some flash in the pang, just something to do with some morning brain. So give him a break, give me a stake, take a heaven’s sake, sheesh!

NINE: THE ROAD TO SURGERY WAR

To find the road to surgery war, you follow the surgery war road signs. To find the signs to surgery war road, you follow the signs that point to the signs. To find the signs that point to the signs you follow the signs that point to the pointing. To find the signs that point to the pointing, the best way to find them is just ask the question, just ask someone, just ask someone, just ask someone or some two or too.

Cyclops asks a little bit, Cyclops asks a lot in fact. He asks the audience every time, should I go left, should I go right, should I go back or strain in forward, but the audience doesn’t care or comment, it just want to watch the smash up.

The road is the road to surgery war, the road is the road both straight and curving, the road has its whiskers and even its face, and when you forget it, there still is a trace.

The road has an ode that is all about road, and if you plant seeds there, you say you have sowed, and if it is bended, it might just be bowed, and if you must carry, you call it a load, and if one is pushing, you call it a goad, and if you are jumping you might be a toad, so take this here road, you follow the road.

Cyclops with his name for code, his feet for mode, his body for load, he takes to the road, and sings it its ode. He sings the road song, and he sings sight and wrong.

How many roads

Must I walk to walk this road

How many roads

Could there be

The answer my friend

Is far too many roads

The answer is far too many roads.

And the road was bad, and the road was many, and the road was twists, and the road was other old-fashioned dances, and the road was dinner, but there was no sustenance, and the road was quite itself, as far away as the furthest dream of middle night.

And he thought so much of Dingy Bahsome, and he thought of the she who was guiding him to flee, and he thought of the her who made him want so pure, and he thought of the image that made him want to go to surgery war.

She was light the light in the road night and he danced in his mind, and he danced with her picture, and they were brain partners and she took him by the Cyclops hand down this road.

It got darker and much worse, and then he heard the bombing, and then he heard the scalpels, and he wanted to go back, he wanted to just turn and turn around, he wanted to turn turn turn for he could smell the burn burn burn, the small the big the loud the stench the rumble the bumble the bee the scree of burning flesh, and cut and blood, and he wanted to walk backwards, but he told himself forwards, and it was Dingy Bahsome that kept him in the war direction, the thought of her, the bought of her, the shape of her, the inside ape of her, and he stayed his course, he kept to the road.

It was dark, it was mangy, it was dungy it was tony, but still he slogged his walk walk walk, and to keep himself aroused and impressed, he made a brain inside talk talk talk. And to keep his spirits, and to keep it up, and to keep his brain in tact, he made a dinner commencement speech. And the thing that he repeated, and the story that he told, was the advice he got from Scrunchyface, no matter if it was young or old. And this advice, which he said to himself on the road and in his brain, was as simple as a simple, was just words but just enough, and he said it to himself, and he said it over and over again like marching footsteps, “The best of all possible you is in somebody else’s shoes.”

EIGHT: WILLIE THE LIZARD AND BOTH OF HIS SPIES

Willie the Lizard and both of his spies had plenty of eyes, had plenty of eyes. Tho Willie was eager, the other spies meager, this did not tarnish their silver surprise, I won’t say it twice. They figured in culverts, they drew lines on horseshoes, they cowered in buckets from laundry and items, they watched and took notebooks, they talked to recordings, they watched for the usual and also the un.

Tho spying was hardly, it made for the daytime. They watched in the night when the moon was on fire. They had little stories they told to their snail brains, they kept their heads moving, the songs small as thimbles.

The spies must be quiet, their shoes must be squeakless, they must take good notes if they take anything. They use their eyeglasses to note dates and numbers, they use their ears quickly for smallest directions.

Cyclops had to spy his way to find the spies. Cyclops had to lizard a route to find the Lizard on that sqinty day. He had to look, he had to listen, he had to lie in wait in the belly of the surveillance state. He had to close circuit torture, he had to make a ring around the orchard, he had to stop and wait for the next to die, he simply had no idea what he would have to do.

The thing about spies is that you do not find them, they find you. They can follow your nose, they can follow your woes. They can see which way your eye is, they share laundry with your brain and you never know if they had lunch for they do not leave a stain.

He could follow their crumbs but they left no crumbs. He could follow their thumbs but they did not show their thumbs. He could follow their steps but they left behind no steps. He could follow the backs of their jackets, and this worked when you saw their jackets. They said in big letters, “Spies.”

“I found you,” Cyclops said.

“No, on the contrary, on the counter-terror contrary. We found you,” said Willie the Lizard. Both of his spies nodded in surmise.

“Well, we found each other,” Cyclops said, slightly nervous even tho he was so much bigger than the tiny rat spies who scurried around his invisible footstool.

“We always find you, and that is your clue,” said Willie the Lizard, in a scurrying tone, in a scudding and creepy voice of ghost.

“Well, I have a question for you,” said Cyclops, and Willie said he knew it. He knew that Cyclops was going to ask something, and he knew exactly what he was going to ask. He said it and he meant it, and to back it up, he snapped some fingers.

When Willie the Lizard snapped his fingers, both of his spies pulled out a sheaf of documents. All were stamped with a big red logo that said, “Confidential,” like a perfume, like the perfect running shoe slogan. Willie the Lizard looked thru the perfume, the shoes and the sheaf and he nodded as he read, and he looked up with his two to the one of Cyclops, and he knew, he just knew, he just knew and knew and knew.

Cyclops didn’t know. He just looked and watched the show. He just watched the spy show novel, and he didn’t at all know.

“They say you should stay, and yet you want to go. You want to go them to show them, to show Dingy Bahsome. You want to show her and be her and see her and free her. You want to free yourself to be her, and that is your moral,” said Willie the Lizard in a large sheaf thought, and Cyclops just had to blink because he felt too far to think.

Willie the Lizard slammed the documents shut with a flick of his safe, and he walked some more in slither, and he surrounded Cyclops at the feet.

“Have you ever considered Surgery War?” asked Willie the Lizard, and Cyclops didn’t know a thing, so Willie and the Spies filled him in on all the latest surveillance.

“Should I drive a car to surgery war?” Cyclops asked.

Willie the Lizard said, “Your best bet is to walk. Only potatoes driver to surgery war, or any other war, for that matter.”

SEVEN: SCRUNCHYFACE IS STILL PHILOSORAPTER, BUT BARELY

The T and the V and the V.T. in its corner. Pilosorapter Scrunchyface is scrunched and rapt and next to, watching. He will tell you, if you ask him, that he is doing something more than watching. He lives to study tiny diny dots. His way is to eggsmamine them.

While Cyclops has been about the Pome of Town collecting and reflecting all the same opinions in multiple iterations, Scrunchyface has been seen seeing the screening and noting and building his philosophy from dots and their illusions. He has been busy busy in building his philosophy, and also his economics. He has struck up his own towers of suggestion, explanation, and he keeps it cabbaged inside his squishy squirty body for his own health and stealth and economic wealth.

Scrunchyface has a slogan, or is it a mission, or is it a religion, or is it his ultimate glory goal in life. He wants to be, he wants to be, he wants to be invisible but deadly. He sings it in his inside way, he sings it in his whole one head, invisible but deadly. These full three words are all about, and he thinks them like cyanide, his way, he’s on the couch but has three words to guide him from one cushion to another, invisible but deadly.

When Cyclops comes back from his first great advice tour, Scrunchyface asks him about all the great one stops on the world of Pome Town walking tour, and all the gigs he played for the townspeople and their comments, and the flavor of their response, and the color of the wisdome and the wasdom and the relevance and elephants and meaning monkey screaming.

“I don’t know a thing that I didn’t know before I left the couch, so I say ouch. Not one of them could tell my anything, not just a thing, not two or three, not just a part or less than that. Not one of them could tell me a thing, could tell me a thing I wanted to hear,” said Cyclops with his one mouth and his one eye winking and blinking and making some nods.

“Such information is helpful to me in making my own adjustments to my town life and Philosophy,” said Scrunchyface, who couldn’t help but play follow the leader with the bright dots of TV screen. He told Cyclops a little about what he TV missed when he was non-TV walking, about how Dingy Bahsome moved from one channel to another, about the stores and the condos and the parking lots of new and distant lands, and Cylclops listens, but he only cares about the words about the Dingy who is his dream, the Dingy who is Bahsome who he seeks to see and be.

“That is a nice report about the land of TV that we seek and we peek,” said Cyclops. “But I am wondering about all that bad advice I got without paying about town from clown and frown and living room, and what I should do about that.

“What should I do anyway for advice and reference? What should I do anyway to get some comments and questions? What should I do to become the me that I seek to be? I could watch more TV and hope for a TV sign, or I could ask some more townspeople and get their opinion, or I could follow my dreams and my screams and my pulling, or I could sit back and sleep until I could never remember.”

“Did you talk to Willie the Lizard?”

Cyclops listens and he thickens and he seems just like he didn’t.

SIX: MICHAEL THE UNWISE AND RACHEL THE EASY

Michael the Unwise and Rachel the Easy had a ten and tale at the Toe to Flow Book Show. There were volumes of steel, there were vibraries of no, and they stopped for the looks, and they would for to go. Feet were in fusion and scratch was in session, and if you were nightly you would have noticed them all day. Michael said Rachel and Rachel said doggy, but that didn’t stop them, it only expanded.

They moved their bodies as twice as too many, they danced for pleasure like pumping for oil. They trolled the waters with big teeth and eyeballs, and then they took respite, the best way to linger.

The show itself was a pool’s paradise of tattered covers and waylaid assorties. If you wanted to find a speeding, you had to be a general. If you were a corporal, you better try the old assault manual. Michael and Rachel, as unwise and as easy, had the best grasp on their groping, as they could surely book show.

“Do you need a book?” said Rachel, as easy as a bookfinder might say it when she was feeling book-lucky.

“Not exactly,” said Cyclops, but he was scanning the titles on all the spines of the spiney volumes.

“Can I help you find anything?” said Michael the Unwise just as wise as someone who might have a bit of it but also is quite epitheticly modest.

“The wisdom I seek is not found in books, is not bound in covers,” and Cyclops says this, but he still scans some crusty old pages between one cardboard cover or another.

“But what wisdom isn’t?” says Rachel, still easy, but with a bit of a mean on her mouth and her lean.

“But what is worth knowing that isn’t to be found upon the printed page, in any time, in any age?” and Michael says this, showing much more wisdom than his usual name gives him credit for.

Michael and Rachel and Rachel and Michael shove books at his one eye, they open the pages and show him the wisdom, they show him the words that hold locked in their meanings, they flurry the pages so he can grab them with gleanings, they show him the covers so he can glance at all the others. There is so much to see, there is so much to read, and with only one eye, no matter how huge and hideous, he can’t quite go fast enough, he can’t quite get there.

“I don’t see it in these pages, I don’t see it at this speed, I don’t see it bound by covers, I don’t have the time to read.”

Rachel and Michael get ready to go to the next Toe to Flow Book Show customer, but Cyclops stops them with more words, “But you two have read so many, while I have read so few, so you have all that wisdom, and I don’t have a clue. So many I could ask you, and maybe you could tell, the things I seek in knowledge, so that I would know them well.”

This, of course, appeals to their Michael and Rachel, and Rachel and Michael start talking about how many books they do read every week, be it two or three or five or ten, depending on the size and level of complexity, and Cyclops thinks for once in all this wandering that he does have a good set of brains to ask to get the answer he is seeking and wanting and asking for.

So he tells them about Dingy, and he has to fill in details, for Michael and Rachel have no TV, actually they do have one, but they long ago hollowed it out and made a bookshelf. He describes to them her dirty golden hair, he describes to them her style, he tells them so much about Dingy that you have to squirt a smile. He tells them that he likes her, that he really likes to see her, but I guess he also startles them when he says he wants to be her.

“You want to be her?” Michael asks for clarification, and Rachel repeats the exact same question, but I won’t.

“That is true,” says the Cyclops. “So what do the books tell me I must do?”

And I won’t quote them directly, but I will tell you that they basically say what everybody else has told Cyclops up to this time. They tell him that they like him just the way he is, so don’t change a thing, don’t even think about surgery. They tell him that he should be happy with who he is and just stay that way, and they cite many book sources to reinforce the advice that they think is so very good, but which Cyclops would just like to bury under a pile of useless pages, somewhere inside that heavy textbook that could kill a head, he wishes they would stop their talking, he wishes their words were dead.

Cyclops looks at all the books and thinks about the matchbook he stuffed in his pocket, but he never does strike it.

FIVE: BETTIE AND PAIGE AND THE STAR-BURNED TURKEY KING

Bettie came with Paige and the star-burned turkey king. They didn’t wear their shoes when they opened for the postal office.

Hi is how they said he, and how was how they said who. They said them with the warm and with their underwear for butter.

Their shoes were on another tour, a twenty days, a trip of the rip of Nebraska, or some such. When the donkey didn’t know their way, they found it quite in mining.

There were trials for their nails and there were doors for all fours. You know that they knew it, and they fixed the odds in a peculiar sense.

Bettie was the bigger and Paige was more particular. You can tell that in the way they made you sign for the packages.

“Do I have a package or a letter or a postcard?” and Cyclops asked at their tall desk, as tall as it was taller. “Do I have something sent to me from far across the planetverse?”

Bettie looked in boxes and Paige looked down to pages. They sped their hands thru folders and they munched their toes thru foot-packets. “Were you expected?” Paige asked with her short haircut, and Bettie looked up from her bangs, as long as a museum.

Cyclops had no hair over his eye, he had eyelashes, so long and so true. He nodded his one head and thus his one eye, and this was because he simply did not know, he hadn’t a clow, he hadn’t a clue.

“We can look and we can look and we can ask the star-burned Turkey King to help,” Bettie said, “Or we can just give up and tell you all of no.”

Paige said, “We could put on a searching show, or we could tell you no.”

They decide to tell him no. If Cyclops hates them, he won’t show.

He doesn’t hate them, he does not know them, but he knows they know the world thru its letters. He knows they know the place thru its packages. He knows they know where one address or another, where one number turns into an island, where a word turns into a continent, and how to get there if you are paper.

He knows they knows this knowing, and it may be practical knowledge, so maybe they can tell him a thing or three, so maybe they have advice for he.

“I was wondering,” said Cyclops with his one eye and his one mouth. “You know so many places, from the north and from the south, and you see so many packages, and each one has its own insides, and so I was wondering if sometimes the inside disagrees with the outside, of a package, that is, and it is not good that the inside and the outside do so disagree, and so the outside must be adjusted to meet the change in the inside and maybe that must be done sometimes because it is just for the better.”

Bettie and Paige look at Bettie and Paige. They have been asked, but the answer isn’t zip code, but the answer isn’t Arizona, but the answer isn’t Winnipeg or Austin, isn’t Bozeman or Minneapolis. The answer isn’t First Street, isn’t Second, isn’t Fourth. The Answer isn’t Avenue, isn’t Unit Number, isn’t North.

“Are you making a fuss, or are you talking to us?” Bettie asks, or is it Paige, or is it the star-burned Turkey King back in the sorting station.

“I am talking to you, I am talking to you, I am asking your advice for advice is always nice. I am asking your help in making a decision, a big decision as decisions always go. You see, I am fixated, I am fanatic, I am discontent. I see on TV Dingy Bahsome, and she is so someone, I wish I were she.”

There are letters to be sorted, there are packages in need of stampages, and so Bettie and Paige hand deliver the question, they lick it like a stamp, they sort it by the numbers.

“Send her a letter,” says Bettie.

“Send her a package,” says Paige.

“And maybe she will send you one back,” says the star-burned Turkey King in his own giblet way.

“But don’t send yourself to her for good and expect anything but undeliverable,” they all three say in their own three words.

And Cyclops doesn’t want their mail, he doesn’t want it delivered if it is so disagreeable. He refuses to accept the delivery, he sends it back with his own laugh nostrils, and then he is off, and the post office is face to face with his backside, now getting smaller in perspective.

FOUR: CRAZY THE NICK AND HIS FIRST MATE MARLEEN

Crazy the Nick and his first mate Marleen had an arms collection they kept under their arms, which were under their oars. Only when it got hairy, as in bushy beard hairy, would they take out a pumping action revolver and point it at no special. Sky said so to them with its clouds and filth but they give it back their own tell-to, they shout out a loud enough answer.

When the boats rocked their socks off, when the sails drooped for Wednesday, when the time came to wave movement and they had to roll up the window screens. They took a sip and then a nap, they wore a vest of each two cups.

Blast if it wasn’t a blister on the rock. Blow it up if it wasn’t that wrinkle that bothered them. But they were up for an atom or a smirk, but they were waiting for just such an entertainment tidal wave.

“How about another ale,” she said, with that underwater way. “How about another spit,” and did so, right on target.

“I don’t know,” was all that Nick could do, and never was so true, and never was so true.

When Cyclops came to their boat in the puddle, he wore his galoshes so socks would not soggy. He saw how they handled the wind in their air, he saw how they combed it quite fast in their hair, he saw how they had just a small drink for tea, but they didn’t invite he, they just looked down at his knee.

“It’s a fine tea afternoon,” said Cyclops.

“It’s an ale of a day,” said Marlene.

“It’s a nice spit to be in,” said Crazy the Nick, but he wasn’t so crazy, it just was his name. In fact he had some common sense, and Marlene too was common, and it was just this grasp of basic facts that Cyclops wanted to dig in.

Cyclops did his social, just some nodding and some smiling, and he sat his time in oarboats and he rowed his way to see them.

This time he wanted to take the right road there, this time in his asking he wished for a proper entrance ramp. He did not want to rock the boat with his first fast words, he did not want to ocean from some good advice that might be there.

“Dingy Bahsome?” he asked the question, but they didn’t know the answer. Marlene thought he might have been talking about a kind of sea bird, but Cyclops said he wasn’t.

So Cyclops did describe her, of the fair hair and the dresses, of her quiet ways with cameras, and her roaming of the channels. He painted pictures of her, on the rocking puddle afternoon, he made them see her just as if she came on their TV.

“She sounds so worldly wonderful,” Marlene said so and perhaps meant it.

“She sounds as fine as a doorbell rung by a true doormaster.” And it was Nick the Crazy who said so, with his crazy eyes and talking points.

“If there was somebody,” and this is Cyclops going on,” who was so perfect as she is, don’t you think you wouldn’t want to be, wouldn’t care to be, not just a little, not just a bittle, but a lot and a bought and an always be just her?”

Marlene and Nick had to think about this one, and they thought by going boating, whether water or whether not. They couldn’t come up with an answer, but they twiddled with their main sails, they didn’t say a single thing at all, but you can tell by their tacking that they think someone is wacking.

“I don’t need you, not this time,” said Cyclops, now that leaving. “I don’t need your help in all this case, I’ll find it by my own true self.”

And as they watched him wander, as they watched his one with all their twos, they couldn’t help but wish him best, wish him all the best in his two shoes. But they also thought about that pumping action revolver they had, too, just in case Cyclops went a bit quite much gunshot far.

THREE: BRUCE JENNER AND JACK OF THE WEEDS

Both Bruce Jenner and Jack of the Weeds just happen to wear cellophane seventies jogging shorts to the fancy dress ball on their living room carpet. They zoom some crazy looking, each in his own corner, but that is not enough to stop them from a stunning social living room success.

The race tracks know things and the weeds know Jack. He came from their sidewalk places with a big chocolate key wrapped in golden tin foil and has stood there in the street some days looking for the single strong thing for that chocolate to unlockolate. There are no others in his home office today, there are no holes on this day of holy empties. And so Jack must settle into recreation, and so he must socialize with the fancy disease, and the tuxedos, and with Bruce.

Bruce was there for five other reasons. It had something to do with the daily double special.

“I am no daily double, so I please do not mistake me,” said the Cyclops to Bruce Jenner, said he to Jack of the Weeds.

Not that they even meant him to be, it was all in a mind, it was all in a belly eye mind of a Cyclops and not at all intended by the Bruce or the Jack.

“And what brings you,” Bruce Jenner says as he runs in his place. His cellophane shorts make such riot of light that you think it is fireworks all down in his groin.

Jack of the Weeds would ask this as well, if there were time in the world to ask it, if there was a moment before Cyclops talked out of his own mouth, big and hot and yellow as sun.

“I admire Dingy Bahsome, some would say that I do love her, and I love her not in wanting but in planning and design. I do not quite want to meet her, tho to meet her would be precious, what I mostly want of all in town is to be just like her.”

Cyclops says and the other two listen to his says. They have their own says and they have their own ways and they have their own notions and they stand still like a thing or five or two.

Jack of the Weeds knows for sure that he is of and not exactly. Bruce Jenner knows his place in every football field: the edges. They know where they all should be, and they think they know where everybody should stay, and they wear their shorts like astronomy, and they answer when they’re asked.

They don’t take the time to think it out, they don’t need to plan out all their words, they only need to say their two, their two daily double, the cause of some mistakes.

“This,” Bruce Jenner.

“That,” said Jack in his own start.

“Is madness,” was Bruce Jenner.

“Is so crazy,” was the Jack’s own weedy words.

They each gave a short opinion, and they were unique but they were similar and they were quite the same, but said not so, and this is how it was.

Cyclops would have said, but he wondered if it was even necessary. He would have taken their advice, taken it to the trash can, that is what he would be doing.

He moved on down the street and those two theezers ate chocolate key for lunch.

TWO: RACK AND ZACK

The Orange Drink Brain Trust of the Standard Fifty-seven Counties is really not so many, as a matter of fact, it’s two. They put their heads together in their put-their-heads-together jar to think a way out of the paper bag they had slowly drifted into when they were not loitering, when they had plainly forgotten to wait. Rack and Zack were the first two and the only, they were the brains of the brains of the Trust of the trust, tho they did not trust the other, once together they were something, something larger than a cactus. The tricycles and the fivecycles were parked outside in the grassy meadow of parking, and they, each one of the two, wore yellow hats, so each to each would know that the other was not lying.

They put their heads together with tape, they put them together with parking string, and if one of them thought, the other carried that thought like a rescue blanket, onwards, onwards, onwards and further. There was so much to think and so much to drink, but now they were together, and then they noticed the band conductor.

“I am not a band conductor,” says the one and truly Cyclops. He stands by their small assembly for he must ask them a question.

“I have questions and one story, and I have to tell it to you,” and he stands there still as Cyclops, still as earthquake, slow as glue.

“I see starlet Dingy Bahsome, I see each and every evening, I see her televised migration from one number to another. I see her altogether, I see each part of her in close up, but what I want especially is to be, to be myself, myself to be, is to be all of her.”

Rack and Zack rack and zack their Orange Drink Brain Trust brains for two, for fifty-seven standard counties, and for all the others without boundaries.

They think like a polecat they think like a spine, they think like reflection, they think like slow wine. They think like a small hat, they think like a big, they think like a skylark, and like porky pig. They think like a neuron, they think like a head, they think with their grayness, they think what you said. They think right on target, they think like a piss, they tell it to Cyclops - don’t mess with a miss.

“We like you like you are today, we like you in your Cyclops way, we like you just the way you are – if you like us, you won’t go far.”

Rack and Zack tell Cyclops so, but Cyclops can see more with his one eye than they with all their four, and he doesn’t really trust them, and so he goes to the next house, and who there, while Rack and Zack ride the fivecycle away. They are going back to exactly where they came from, which is here, which is this place.

ONE: CYCLOPS AND SCRUNCHYFACE

Cyclops liked his hair to curl. Cyclops dressed up like a girl. When he wore a high heel shoe he knew what he was going to do.

Cyclops had an erection of nose and a single eye like a belly to see the tears, to see the seals. Cyclops used his big belly eye to watch television. Television was a box or a bin or a thing in the corner that glowed like a groan and filled with its pictures.

Cyclops watched the television, which he casually called the T and V. He watched it with that one big eye. Mostly, he used his eye to watch the shimmery shape of Dingy Bahsome, famous starlet. She of the had to be, she of the “You better buy it for me.” She of the shopping and laughing and not really singing, and almost really not one at all, not one bit, not a twitch, not a twiggy.

Cyclops had one eye, and I realize that this goes without saying, and yet I have said it, for that is the way of Pome Town, where saying is seeing and seeing is rhyming and rhyming is home town and home town is wanting and wanting is having and having is holy, and holy is wholly and wholly is holly and golly is greedy and needy is notty and notted is rotten and written in ink, and that’s what I think.

Cyclops wandered from channel to channel like a monk walking dessert. He looked from this station to that one, always in search of the shimmering shapering of the girl of his remote day dreaming, of his dreaming of the channel and the waiting for Dingy Bahsome. She was like that. She moved from channel to channel, as if she could not decide on a home, as if she were a breeze bikini. Cyclops had to follow her with his one big eye. His one big belly eye had to watch her like a shadow on vacation, like a sticky bit of smoke.

Cyclops shared the couch, and a big couch that it was. On one side sat Cyclops, on the other side sat Scrunchyface the Philosorapter. Scrunchyface was not bothered by the channel changes, by the migration from screen to screen to follow the fewmale footsteps. He sat there as in study, as in studying the landscape, as in learning of the lay of the day of the screens, of the blurs and the clears and the faces and their squares.

When Cyclops wasn’t television, then he was gone to walking. This was Cyclops on the stillness streets of the town that was his town, of the town that was your town, of the town that was Pome Town. He was walking the streets and singing the streetlight songs, you may know them. He was walking and singing and sometimes Scrunchyface watched him from the window by the curtain like a neighbor, like a spy.

When Cyclops sang he sang this song. Here it is:

The lights are bright in Pome Town

That’s for we pay our electric bills

And you can walk most day and night

And have a bite, get in a fight

The streets are black in Pome Town

That’s for we pave them with our skids

And you can see thru our windows

In Pome Town, everybody knows

We have no secrets, we are us

We tell our inside hearts to each

And if we do not know a few

Our spies will tell us what is new

And when he wasn’t walking Pome Town, when he wasn’t walking streets or sidewalks or songs or verses, he was sat inside with the set of TV. He was watching of the channels, he was looking for the one true one. He was searching with his looking, he was blinking with his thinking, he was watching for the Dingy, for the Dingy who is Bahsome.

When Cyclops told Scrunchyface the Philosorapter that he loved so much to see Dingy Bahsome, “That I love too much to see her because I really want to be her,” and he told this tale to Scrunchyface, and Scrunchyface heard it louder than all the commercials put together.

“There’s a reason for this, Cyclops,” said Scrunchyface when he was talking. “There is a reason and it is in my philosophy,” said the Philosorapter, for that was his way of saying. “I have told you before, and I will say it before again, that there is a best of all possible you in somebody else’s shoes.”

Cyclops knew this for he had heard it, and Scrunchyface so often delivered. He said it and he heard it, tho the one he was not the other he in that first part of this sentence right here.