The Twilight of the Bums Read Online Free PDF

are known to us English speaking folks.
    The blind man puts out his hand, the other knowing to guide it toward a blossom. The blind man feels the blossom, the tender stalk, the fragile hardy insistence of the plant.

    Close your eyes too, and feel, he says to his friend. But already his friend is groping with the palm of his hand into a cool bed of peat moss.

    My mother had no place for bedding plants in the little courtyard in front of our house, says the blind man, but I’ll bet she imagined flowers like these … strange they are called step-mothers.
    Why, wonders the other man, equally absorbed, do I think we had a blind gardener?
    Everything died with her when she was … all her beds of flowers, her forsythia, her roses, her tulips, her iris, her gladioli …
    Then the first blind man says, remember, we were in Kyoto, trying to find this place we had heard of where you could get a good whole body massage, a delicious massage, better than a fuck, we were in Kyoto, we were the occupying forces, you know, and we were stumbling about the place looking for this special massage parlor, when we entered a part of the city, a restricted zone, a zone of blind folk, all wearing white cotton kimonos, a zone of survivors who had been blinded by the radiation blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a zone of blind people stumbling along trying to make their way through the narrow streets of their ghetto. So many sightless folk in those flowing white cotton kimonos …
    Why am I telling you this? We didn’t want a massage anymore. We went back to the base.

    Yes, I remember. And soon after that you lost your mother, says the other bum.
    Thus relocated in such a steep absence, the old men open their eyes, and for an instant the light and the bright colors of the pansies make their eyes water, and now they are ready to bid farewell to another city they will probably never see again.

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
    So the boys are now in Krakow trying desperately to find the reclusive poetess Wislawa Szymborska to ring her up and announce to her that two of her greatest fans have shuffled all the way from Bumsville, as it were, and wish to chat with her, to take her to lunch and a ride on the ferry (if there is one in Krakow).
    The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations , is the bums’ favorite line, a line we find them chanting aloud over and over again at the Café Milo_z Szcze_liwa while eating boiled potatoes and drinking vodka, and where the other patrons look at them as their own future, as what they will become when they too are rich American fuddy-duds, as their beloved homeland becomes yet another anonymous market economy.
    What, inquires Boy 1 of Boy 2, does the rattle-snake approve? Then they both chant the answer to the question, which we now invite you also, dear reader, to sing along with them: The rattlesnake approves of himself without any reservations .
    Where is this literary effort going, where is Wislawa Szymborska? Why doesn’t she answer her telephone? Where are you Wislawa, dear? Why won’t you reveal yourself and come dine with the old rattlers, whose tails knock so hollowly in such unreserved approval.
    What to do, where to go, how to proceed, what surface other than the poem to inhabit. The boys order more boiled potatoes and another round of vodka (yes, beloved reader, yes indeed) and start chanting another Wislawa line: We see here an instance of bad proportions, we see here an instance of bad proportions .

REPROBATION
    Bum One[alias Um]:
    Is it clear to you my dear Laut that our friendship is the only light & joy in this miserable life of mine? That the rest is gloom, despair, anguish, rejection, silence, repulse, disgust, hammering anger, wretched shunning, unchecked desperation, aggressive paranoia, psychotic anxiety, reactive depression; that except for our friendship, I am lost in the hills and valleys of neurotic anguish which I helplessly manage by mirroring; that I am