Monday, March 26, 2007

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.

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