Sailing Down Shit River in the Cloaca Maxima

Dog Poet Transmitting…….

The Trumpathon continues. Now he wants to punch protesters in the face. He laments the days of old when this practice was in place. The irony here is that this practice never went away. Violence against people who are vocal about their oppositional perspective is still alive and well.

I keep waiting for the public to wake up, not only to the disparity between what politicians say and what politicians do but the whole Circus Cloaca Maxima. They are sitting on the banks of the River of Shit, feeding the rats that scamper about, with the processed food in their pockets and with themselves, once death has claimed them. In between their births and deaths comes the dream, poisoned by the redolent fumes of the coursing River of Shit. Flow on big river, flow on. Once cannot tell when night falls or day breaks in a place like that but there are moments and periods where the shine of romance glimmers off of the waters of The River of Shit, as if some hidden moon, as by osmosis penetrated the rebarred concrete ceiling of the cloaca with its light and brings an ambergris like luminescence to the surface of the clotted waters. It’s not butter or tofu that is the product of the churning waves. Portions of it ride up on the moss slick, tiny beach at their feet and are washed up beyond the lapping excrescence where they form feeding mounds for Lilliputians so disposed..

The atmosphere produces vivid hallucinations of elephants and clowns in kayaks; hippos and crocodiles in wet suits swim by. On the further bank is a replicating bandstand that seems to extend for the length of the channel and sad lugubrious music wafts across the water. It’s the kind of music that would cause Mahler to commit suicide. Chopin would say, “Ah… now that is melancholy. I used to write as if rivers and streams were flowing from my mind into my fingers and thence upon the keys but I never imagined a river or stream such as this.”

Is the music really sad? Of course not. It is rousing and anything but enervating. It is a strange combination of Sousa and Hendricks but that is simply the result of the quality of the air. It is, in reality, as I first said it is but it sounds to the intoxicated like the latter and you can see them rise here and there and go marching into the sewage as if Hannibal were calling them from the alps that are spray painted on the walls behind the bandstand. Carthage is burning somewhere out of sight while Asian entrepreneurs talk about all the soy sauce that can be made from the salted landscape, once the festival of fire ends. Tamari may be the desire of some but it won’t be coming to a Chinese restaurant near you soon.

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Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk