Gallons of Tea and the Candy Cart by Anthony Brenton

Given 17 hours a day free reign to observe… I’m Argus Zool the monster with

many eyes           peeping

magnetic dope hands for writing

window gridded over / bed / desk / chair / closet

clap stepping          reaching over desks and looking behind doors for

red letter word of the lord

but by ranting and blackening the walls / smoking and slapping the brick halls

they reduce my things to pillow, frame, mattress without springs.

arenas filled with paper without a mark

and I saw my physician once a week        mondays during lunch

I’m absent for my tray each meeting

and the man who put together my tray one day noting    blended milk dinner rolls  / diet ginger ale / sugar pudding

finds it untouched with a wad of Vedee’s meaty salt-beef gum stuck to the bottom / exam gloves / glasses.

and as I pine for lunch and walk to my meeting I find a dark man in highest fashion

of kingly robes

he introduces himself as Atles Phd

‘you may write your ticket out,’ he says ‘you’ll want at least 4 voices; men /women no matter, 3 standing aside / following along jangled

whilst warming and thickening your vocals

a lead track of various sections of scrambled whatnot’s introduced to headphones for listeners of unknown positions…hear and scrutinize bowing / plucking played unsure, dissonant and      shatter-sectioned   alto saxophone  drums and cymbals

orchestral / downhome blues (a simple band) strings like woodspider / woodwind

fluttering in a syrupy web                       maybe rhyming hieroglyphics sung as a newfie jig

laying out historical development of a diagnostic searcher of                             psychoses  his intellectual paramount long past gone.’

I see Phd’s eyes closed, recanting to dictaphone,  tongue opened for half teaspoon sugar

in coffee’s aggressive mug,

says ‘alight stomach and loosen your pencil with beer / medication withdraw / a merry christmas cigarette …dictate after meeting him / recognize and learn the addictions and methods of this Dr.’s  strange past…fresh lasserations and bad stomachs of young baymen / the hag dreams and drunken guilt of retirement looming:

shave the lip of his teen mustache with the cold hand of burning cocaine

/

dazzle inspecting eyes at his wrinkles glistening

talking of     scalding lovers turned coffindodgers

once under the strap and commanding eye of razor schooling…

recall the grotesque prose of love’s pen. Take this Dr’s notes. Ramshackle his files

Here is what we know…’

While Atles penned these haphazard plans for his research I had

all the while

been sitting at a pew in my holding cell praying. Jesus, what calling? rambled through dreamstate. I’ll learn to appease you, use that to meet my friendly holiness. I do not expect to be rewarded for my faith, but lord, how to serve you? Wisdom has to be chanted to children, recited by grizzled men, and grunted through ripe women / with vast instrumental alphabets unscrambled giving name and surname / through centennial and lifetimes / the scattered and math-texted child rant with an old bible limerick, found in fragments, inside cig packs, the clothespins spelling holy holy holy, found in bed sheets of mesmerized combinations / these have to be opened to me. Amen.

I study Phd’s files on a doctor named You Sir, with tubelighting humming and bright and white after each day has lost it’s light. Five generations singing as a demonic choir, I read of You Sir. I was told the Hand represents his Family / the Fingers individuals, all mulling about in a dark club listening: thrashing piano, varying paces from pocket trumpet and plastic alto sax, drums cymbals sticks. The pedigree totally polluted by years of incest and cross breeding undesirable traits. I have been schooled on You Sir’s linage: Ebenezer Sodom begot Cial who married Atta, and Marten who married Tara. Tara and Marten begot Thomas, Alexandra, Noah and Christ. All of whom took to the church at various levels of service. Cial begot duplicates; Uncle Tone & Aunt Alexandra who married and supported the surname Sir, a hard cast who conceived and birthed a grizzled boy called Staggar, who married a girl of thirteen who bore for him You…the horror of class, pulled from his womb by the gnarled and leathern hand of Atta Sodom; nails as thunderous slate split the wooden egg spilt meaty boy to plow blindly with his mind, blessed with such patience into a never ending search for mental anomalies and figuring the means by which to harvest them. A patient of his, Anee Smit, this wizened and appleface lady, lurked up to Atles Phd standing as a beacon, a dark strength on the pale skinned boarders of this island, she gets to his ear while he sits atop a theater as a king draped in soot armor, gets real close to the dark king so as he can feel the heat of her words, wet breath breezy on his fierce beard. Her words hold the timber of a soul with dire wisdom, she says, ‘I have seen an escape of sea lice all scaly and swimming amongst my pee. Like salty sirens beating thin clear chests in ripples, crying at me, hollering with airless voice to help them up where they will no longer breathe brine.’ At her last draw into the ear of Phd a sniper nips his triggerfinger and she is silenced.

I scribe notes on borrowed paper with my pencil

and the wind howls like infant coyotes out the meticulous  windows of that old newfoundland bughouse (m.h).,

with the kandy kart 3 or 4 / 5!times a day handing us various shapes we swallow

with water from duckpond alongside.

After the bullet hit Anee Smit having heaved her dying breath into Altels’s ear he

grew obsessed with the meaning

her words

+ what Sir’s treason meant     (there is no doubt she was conditioned

a drone

for You Sir’s    final purpose)   after the bullet was pulled from her carcass, in its

own time, I was propositioned

research  this harvester of mind fires, collector of liquid from hypodermic fangs, marksman for heat and flesh of disease  A man who dictated control to dumb minions

baffled by their addiction to his word.

and I close my eyes

with my face to the clouded heavens

pondering freedom as an image.  Pondering Reverend Dr. Phd’s offer.

When I agreed to play stool pigeon he made the lock I pined under fall flaccid

laid Sir out for me: I’m a  voyeur, script-obligated lover and marksman.

So by mental hand I waltz out of m.h. doors with long velvet tails dangling from my coat held off the ground by nurses who sewed pills in secret pockets for me to maintain script. The crisp air rips at my institutionalized throat. The non-meshed sunlight boroughs. So too I fall upon my knees at the vastness of un-medical space. No time had I to frolic, nor scribble in my book poetry / no scratching metal quells doused with

ink come alive.

No,

just investigation and observations.

Without folly or waste of time I enter You Sir’s clinic and offer my illness to him to fish out his prodding methods . No need for lies, I thinks ‘n says

“Even through all the sickness    the quivering and rolling intestines corroded with wine   and bile    the taste of a chewed medicine encircling the uvula    fingertips fascinated by a cube of cotton    legs prickling dumb from fleeting postures  with social control   with life lessons disguised as truth      the imagination of a fiend gone mad    the New Testament II (the next veneration)      /    son of a bitch…even through all this, the weight of you, God, crushes at me, stretches my throat    static stomach/  mouth run amuck / babble     / Gibberish Popular  /pinched arsehole, teeth ground down to sand  / the eyes close in the follies of drugs    and they see you  God! the yearning for your ecstasy    throbbing  /bliss/  throbbing  the death-by-hanging reminder    cruelty

every cell a milkless child.                Strive for simplicity / an un-uniformed mind  relaxing to hollowness

feet cold in unheated meditation    stomach grumbling without hard bread and tea

tooth gravity                                                                                                tense jaw muscles Oh, too maddened as a devil fearing youth for any legendary gatherings of / mind’s art

too greedy as a man to stop from sleeping through seething rants of learned minds at their           best…I fear that I have bawled out too many mournful laments / too many doomed yells and hopeless remarks…fear that I have spent too much time looking to my fingernails for inspiration…drink…too much jabbering and confessing or convincing doctors about clear thought…introspection and pondering about the mind-frame of the population                in the horrific space where memories die stillborn, coming down me like slow shock / like a woman’s soothing hand   or the graceful hoofing of an imp upon my crawling back. Then greatgrandmother pipes up to me ‘don’t get the alcohol in your blood ‘cause once you gets it in your blood it’s hard to get clear of…’ later her  furnace
gave out in a three day storm,

something         tripped out

and men with

fourwheel

trucks and high on sneaky sneakies fix it right up with fuses, drinking DM

gargling

cough

guttural urge/moan but not before she caught her death in the hours between . So they scrambled themselves into a hodgepodge collage with funny colors in specific places, boards falling from all angles like decks of unfurling playingcards, noose teases with the bizzt tooth of a final solution, thinking always of puss puss freeze as still-life of cracked thin whisker mustache and lips hauled barred fangs, growing nails and slit trench, yet open eyes, a chill of plucked turkey skin tightens at DM body and quivers as they stare into demented loathing, a cramp squeezing the nest of worms behind their swollen bellies swaying and swirling and whirling and crooked and bent and popping float screeching and rattling the food not caught between their cool teeth.

After that, Dr. Sir, I chuckle at misery, chuckle and hiccup, snort and choke, heehaw and squeal

I dance about like a fisherman on shore with a silverpiece moon and a drunken dame on me       arm…I’ve seen blood on the ice    from scalp    slain by hearty men in drink-inflated frenzy   tapping fingers to the thunder it makes    the squealing and crunching, rattling hum / a prayer scolded to a blackened eye of coagulated ice

a rhythm beaten like tooth to tooth, bodies to floor, blood to floor   .     An eerie perspective   and a blessing.”

I find Sir’s eyes and crooked fence teeth side grinning behind his deep wooden desk

In the Office of Confinement

where he’d spent a life throwing his learned diagnoses

I offer my fears to him

and he listens for a while     haloed by stacks of medico-biblical scripts

to order any procedure

where he surveyed sookybums in their black land     with no resource of memory

only a horror of past time                  run on his clock    giving over continuous control

and when I’m done babbling, he pipes up and explains illness through trees, through land through trees. He lectures at struggling madness just outside or behind key in mental hospital lockups. He is a ticket-taker at the gates of chemical pilgrimage. A doctor, a poetical-prophetic daily severing the vocal cords with which he swore the Hippocratic, as if a drunken tell all accompanied by gutbass and piano, saxophones, harps. His strong message often is lectured out of a stunning and equine girl under his inspection, she sings

“Two minutes with no air, two weeks without water and two months of no food and you            are without chance,

but for two dollars, two beer, or a double, with any man I’ll dance.”

She huffs and puffs all night with You Sir behind the huge oaken desk writing everything in a clear, actual language which has become for many a guide by which to reckon their existence. I found that there were those who wrote in his office pamphlets, offering translation to those without strength in words and images Because of my stature I should, by all accounts, make weapons of anything with potential. Use them with seamless muscular churning. Make fire of the  attacker’s  skin. Make stone of his dexterity. Drink him under the floorboards, lick the glass clean and pay the tab as I  walk out.

Sir says to me “Describe the strongest influence to me. Be precise, please.”

“The men with power over    abnormality

-Call those minds the chessboard’s-

and in your bog is where the chessmen lay, embalmed with medication

from mental hospital Candy Cart

stomachs rolling with gallons of tea

with sundried millers and blue arsed flies  guarding the windows

it takes the chessboards  months to burn thru

but the minders of the ill are patient

and they kick about the chars with deckshoes in a unison blink

like commanders of   soot or dust

Where the chessmen lay in your bog      is from where they sing their  drugged laments

hear them bawling and ranting like trash caught in the wind

they got me in here with silken hands and tied me off with rubberbands

to palpate the thought / and message the pus-larged glands

With precious metal proboscis    you’ve introduced king M.

Now with the crook of my elbow under latex gloves    I have mistaken bloodletting for love

With rooms of sickypoos chattering teeth / crying pleads to heaven above

and with many eyes Saint Peter of Medicine judges so we try to cleave his heart with hymns

we failed and so we fell

where we landed we lay still / with horrid and hysterical soul   we fell upon this

sorry hill               from up here lay no path to bliss

introduce king M. ”

you, Dr. You Sir, line us up as a string of ugly pearls   regardless of our songs

with your bulbous optical glass    dangling precise

looking for error     thinking your textbooks are correct with scientifically produced maps

of unpolluted mental states

well doctor   I have looked into your eyes and seen swelled waves of

thick nfld ponies / herds thrashing     upon which ride        bone knights   with yellowed  crumbling egg mouths / shocked monocles

swords drawn / wet and inky in the darkening sky

!battle  behind you professional hawkeye!

you are at war with your own mind”

the doctor reaches over his desk calm and beeps a red button

six orderlies breeze into the room with needles poised like cigarettes (thumbs plugging filters) stick me, thus the command of my body waxes

and I am pulled from his office

to a holding cell             with no blankets / nothing up above where a noose could be hung, a

lukewarm sink, bed, desk, chair closet   and grids over the windows

—–

a room not unlike my old haunt, before  Atles Phd   sent me on my hopeless mission / failed report       I’m without notebook, or even any shocking memories

of the whole ordeal  I sit chomping on Vedee’s meaty salt-beef gum/ I see a note scribbled in my holding cell of new trials scratched in the corner by the bed reads:

“The office of confinement   removed her teeth tooth by tooth from the bottom of the jaw        to the last one on             the roof         the office  did this above the law and cordially after she bit one (or two) orderlies

surgeries were scheduled for her as one

of a mass of patients with the Thought Flu. An ivory-handled scalpel is wielded by the haunted hand of

Reverend Doctor Sew & Sew.      We flood his office like a choir. Surgically slow down the able sections of the body (motto ‘any other method is down right shoddy.’)  And old toothless, at once  infant girl and sequin Elvis, hair and head soaked in m.h. sweat

with no hope of escape or release          ways too set    too much doom and elation   gummy language over-Abstract

and nothing but age between hell.                           !Revelation was not joking.”

What weight I give to this psalm!     Then again,  alongside in different and poorly aged ink reads

‘!My body is Santa’s head chopped off’

Anthony Brenton is the author of Near Death, Maccles; Daybreak Saint City; and A Book. He has completed 2 new novels in the past year and a slew of poetry and text. He is a Father and lives in Newfoundland where he loves and writes.

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