Saturday, December 13, 2008

American Idioms from le Fin de Terre

Jump down my throat.

Vault down my neck. Remove my neck--with it open, it looks like a knee--and throw it across a canal. The canal has eel in it--times, we fish for them. Times, we push the unsuspecting into the canal. These unsuspecting then put their heels or toes in bad hollows and get bit by eels. The eels have locking mechs in their jaws. Hurry down my throat because, if you do so, you will get down to my bowels where all the output from the glitter factory is. This man owned a glitter factory. Jerk yourself toward my neck. I would like to see that.

*They clothed me and gave me money. **We shot horses because they were wild and sold their hair to the makers of hats. The hat guild. The guild of hatters that met in a house with boarded windows. The windows were not boarded up. They were boarded--but by whom? Why, by a man who had a small tv under his arm. As he hammered, he caught glimpses of the soaps. Was Phoebe Tyler on this one? If she was on this one, then she might have to fret about taking care of the ghost of her mother in a church.

Spill the beans.

Spill not a bean--if I tell you this. Spill these beans. Spill those beans. The haricot verts are fucked up this season. I didn't have sperm in my scrotum. I had blackfish.

I put some of my blackfish in a petri dish. Then, I put lighterfluid into that selfsame dish and lit the entire with a homemade match. Do not bung the beans if you're going to watch a matinee. What's weird is that, when you go to a matinee, it is light outside. The beans have streamed. The beans have killed the pigs. We poured beans and beans over the pigs until they drowned in the beans. We wondered if the pigs could eat themselves alive, but they couldn't. Too many beans spilled over pigs is certainly, we discovered, a breed of death.

*I knew what the money was for, it was to get me started. **A comma splice. I had no grease left, it was gone. I did not know what epinard meant, it was a word of which I had no ready definition. This is not a grammatical error. This error is what could be called a pile of epinard I wear as hair. Our goal was to make a toy submarine out of certain materials not ordinarily thought of as appropriate for water.

Pay through the nose.

Pay across many noses, okay. What we have here is lots of noses. Lost of people are on the ground. You simply have to throw your pennies over them. We made little coffins out of balsa wood and put them up our noses. We put them in our ears and said eulogies. We will say a little eulogy for each one. Pay unobstructed through the nose. I paid upon a nose--but never though about how clogged up its pores were. I squeezed noodles of dark greaze out of my invalid father's nose. This was his payment to me. He had spoiled me when I was young. He had said that I was his legacy. Once I got horrible acne, though, he had a more difficult time seeing me as his romantic legacy.

*When it was gone I would have to get more, if I wanted to go on. **Nice sounds here. No comma separating the intro dependent clause from the following independent clause. No dashes. When she named our child Vucan I knew we were going to be apart for the next year, if I couldn't make sense of our son's name. After she ignored my slobbering on the inside of her legs I felt I should offer an apology, if I wanted to light more candles and drip them onto her window sill. The problem is that I don't know how this sentence works.

Wet blanket.

First, I dampened the blanket. Then, I wrapped it around my brother. I got a corner of it deep in his mouth. When I poured oil on the sheet, it got clear. I could see through it. The sheet was wet not with water but with lubricant.

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