This is not a not a novel. This is a rhapsody. I rhapsodize, I bubble, I ferment, I fount. The amassing of word-shaped sounds have become rhapsodies, digressions, solos within spheres and platforms of soul-sounding species and choruses, the every and none blown through the broken boughs of a child’s wild wolfish shrieking in the woods, in the dark, primacy knows only vowels, the voice being the voyage itself, and to make stone soup to satisfy the bulge-bellied appetites of hungry ghosts, you need a whole lot of sticks and bones … the sounds in my head amounting to a concert heard by no one, ever, regularly.

Let us now begin. Every one of my stand-up routines begins, Let us now begin. From there, I improvise. I drool like a sundoped imbecile. This is and has been my stand-up routine for as long as I can remember. Performed in a vacant nightclub, a condemned speakeasy from someone else’s past. There are many somebody else’s with many fictitious pasts. Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mae West. Choose your blues and wander.

I need something to do. Somewhere to go. You can only fondle and fiddle yourself for so long. Somebody, in somebody else’s past, once said, It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. I pocketed that nugget as mantra. I’ve got a few, yet too few to mention.

In moving through the dark, you find yourself clothed in the dark, wearing its stitches, and dark naturally flowers from your voice and yield, your stymied yet seeking being, the dark has many tones and rhythms. It is a reciprocal arrangement: You the agent, the dark your agency. It is hell, but good hell, fun tromboney hell, like drowning yourself in a festive slather of soap bubbles.

Not novels, not a novel, a rhapsody and slack rope dreaming of high melodramatic noon, and I, or rather it-through-me, ferments, seethes, founts, drools and accrues accordingly into a stand-up routine and plotless mass of word-shaped sounds.