Fly in the ointment

Have pirates ever been children? I think not. I am convinced that curious memories of little songs in my head are merely transpersonal linkages into the collective unconscious, a storehouse out of which I regularly steal.

Lately a couple of tunes have been buzzing about there. I find an old woman who swallowed a fly. I don't know why. But I can imagine. And that quickly I am swallowing, too, and swallowed. I have a weird molasses sweetness filling the organs of taste on my feet. The four thousand light sensors in my eyes revel.

Am I not pretty? Am I not pretty impressive? Otherworldly chants of "shoo, shoo" surround me, filling me with ecstasy. I, fly, into them so iridescent. But, no, these are nightmarish winds, striking storms filled with hate and derision.

Wait. I do not see myself as fourth plague. I am not mythic agent of death and decay. I am not Beelzebub or madness or disease. I have mixed my life with the life of homo sapiens from the very beginnings. I have been with you on the hunt, through your discovery of fire and farming, into your urban settlements. I have dined on your leavings. I have loved you well.

When I saw my first PETA Katcha I thought it was some sort of New Age dildo. I thought I was being invited into a pyramid of love and Dionysian ritual. After all, you know that the average span of my sexual embrace is a firm 80 minutes. When I saw your films, made and remade, starring us, together, mixed body parts and genetics, I felt I belonged. I felt loved.

And I sang out, with a voice so clear and and crystalline: "Shoo, Shoo: It don't bother me. I belong to somebody. I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star…"

But when the camera pans down (want to film that?), I feel like a mourning star.

Then I see that in Madame Tussaud's central London wax museum the figure of the new agent of change, the Supreme Leader of the Free Human World, holds a swatter. Will you allow this to go on? Must I remain crushed? Is my only utility being a fish hook in drag? Must I vanish, flying from the scene?

No, I fly in the face of derision. I fly in the teeth of injustice. I fly high, no aerophobia in my winged body.

For I am cool and sexy. You have even named your zippers after me. I am pretty fly, for a diptera guy.

Look at my roots.

I come from segmented maggot, headless, legless, eyeless. From this humble beginning I radically metamorphose. I am transformer. I go trans, beyond, the form, the essential nature of a thing that is not merely its substantive stuff. I am this traveling beyond, into the essential beauty that is form. I go; I go beyond; I go beyond the beyond.

Therefore I belong in your ointment, in your salves, in your unguents. I deserve to be part of royal and religious anointings. Let me live in your perfumed oils, in milk, in water, in butters, all poured on in extravagance, wastefully.

Let me be for all of you a ubiquitous reminder of your own beauty. Let me be taken into mind, held, a brilliant, extreme, flagrant example of endless swarthy possibility. Let me be a living Baudelaire poem, giving voice to the poignancy of holes and carrion flowers, the wilderness, the sour, the unexpected and uncontrolled. Let me help you love the dead and the damaged, the orphan idea, the ones left behind.

I point behind and beyond the distressing disguise of your impoverished judgment. I set you free for all time.

Let me be new, the changing buzz, one with that toward which anointing points. I desire to be this sign of the entering of the divine. I desire to be sign of your healing, your hope, your generativity unabated. I desire to be perceived as sensate presence of your yet merely nascent inner heart. I desire to waken your best part. Where I appear, may there be a knowing of the vastness of your ever transforming possibility.

May there be no exclusion, no conclusion, ever intrusion and profusion, no illusion of less. May I offer this version of vision in the little beatings of my buzzings. May I cheer you, bring you joy even in the midst of the insufferable. May maggots be as lovely as marble deities. May death be door to liberation. May the dregs of the dregs bring you euphoria untellable.

And I feel, I feel, I feel mourning and morning, mixed up with you. It's all good. Come, come and fly with me.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who

hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all

those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be

wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but

emanating fr om within this shado w is

hope that readers will feel free to respond.

Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the

muse. Make contact if you dare.