And it could be the fight of the century. It’s giant cardboard cutout with loudspeaker Scrunchyface the Megalorapter versus giant flesh baseball bat Cyclops. It’s the voice of command vibrated from high atop the billboards versus a slightly confused wand of flesh with less than ten eyes now. It is the cardboard metropolis who developed all that you see, from shining parking lot to shining parking lot, versus a sad sack veteran of too many surgery wars.
And cardboard can give you a paper cut, but flesh can give you a knuckle sandwich.
That’s how they faced off, a little shy at first from old friends made new enemies. That little dance of cardboard and flesh when they first make known that intense opposition. One two three and they do that fist on open palm and who knows what a punch could do across this kind of landscrape. And then and there until they’re black and blue from looking and waiting and punch anticipation.
A baseball bat of flesh takes a first wind up of spring, but then doesn’t anything, doesn’t follow thru with swing. A big cardboard fist can’t make a cardboard hand but it doesn’t swing it far, doesn’t even try to land. The baseball bat. The cardboard arm. It was far too flat and it didn’t understand.
Crowd of town gathered around and then they sat down and settled for the evening. The sun and the moon came into the room to share the sense of doom with all the human be-ins.
And some sold tickets and some sold lunch, and some took bets and some had a hunch, and then there was quiet in the gravelly afterswoon, and then it was noisy, but that was from some ice cream truck music.
The people pingponged all their eyes, and tried to feign surprise, and some got up to rise, and watching were the Spies, and they looked thru binoculars. And I have to be clear with you, that there wasn’t much yet to see thru this blindness of words.
They faced off, cardboard cutout and flesh baseball bat. They looked from eye to eye, they took up some of part of the sky. But I cannot tell a lie, they threw no punches as the crowd ate its lunches.
There was a face off in this day out, and the buildings didn’t shake with the struggle, and the parking lots didn’t scrape the knees of the faller and the get back uppers.
The old friends just faced, and then they breathed out. Someone in the audience yawned and somebody else make a shout.
This went on for some time. The carnival surrounding the fight was more struggling than the fight itself. The reporters made headlines like “The Great Face Off,” and somebody made a chuckle.
Here was the great demolition dance, but not too soon and sometime in the afternoon it was over.
Cardboard Scrunchyface the Megalorapter was the first one to cave in, a little self bend on the corrugation line and he caved and he saved himself from punches and he cried on his Spies.
“I didn’t mean anything,” cried out all right Scrunchyface the damp cardboard poke of himself. “I just wanted all those good thing I saw on TV for the place where I live. I just wanted to give.”
“I guess it all got a little out of control, when I started the roll patrol, when I ordered all those mortgage foreclosures.”
And the people of the town boo for a while but then they get tired of booing for what is done is done and even tho they are living in the streets and instead of their houses are vast plains of parking lots and empty condos in towers too expensive for them to buy, they can live and let live and plus there’s now a lot more cardboard to make spare poverty houses out of now that giant cardboard Scrunchyface the Megalorapter is now vanquished.
Scrunchyface collapses into a cardboard couch, or is it a real couch, made out of plastic bubble packaging and he relaxes enough to see that the TV isn‘t trying to be anything other than its own fantasy of itself. It isn’t here, it isn’t now, it isn’t the town of TV, a town of round edges that sometimes comes as sharp as a hard cut, and Scruncyhface can just watch it with his face glowing only in reflection.
And from such viewing comes a new line of back and an old line of meaning, of name, of identity, of calling out, of Philosorapter, the old one that is a new one, which you have to say by practice.
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