Everyone has had his brushings with Judas. Even Judas himself brushes once in a while with other Judases. And I’m not speaking of the ill-treated Judas Iscariot, who is the guy I like the most of all that Sky-Angels Gang of old —those radical, leftist, antisystemic donkey-riders shepherd by the Christian Superstar in a land and among a people I wished they had never existed. No, I mean the everyday Judas, the commonplace Judas, the moral midget, the little man who knows how to proclaim his friendship for you with big words and, when he sees the chance, pays your goodwill with envy, jealousy, ingratitude and hate. One has to be stupid not to see him coming.
I am stupid, like most of us!
I confess I didn’t see my Judas behind his well-crafted disguise. I can’t even say I wasn’t warned about him. But because the one who warned me was a Judas himself, a Judas of the transparent-moron, innocuous type, I believed he wanted to hide his own transparency by smearing “my friend” with the sickness of his own soul. All mirror-play, and a disregarded truth folded in lies.
I won’t tell how much I gave this well-disguised Judas in caring, hospitality, understanding, and even cash. He was of the whining type, you know, always complaining about his shallow pockets, which was the least problematic one of all his many shallownesses of recurrent looser. By that time his arrogance was well hidden, directed against others, and only when I wasn’t present. To me he came as a devoted dog, moving his tail, licking my hand, so to speak. Not that I liked his tokens of submission, but in fact I was not only his “friend” but his boss too, so I didn’t thought them totally out of place.
What he really couldn’t hide, no matter how he tried, was his unenlightenment. Spelling was in him a surrealistic performance; syntax was an act of spiraling up and down around a never attained concept; writing or speaking was for him gurgling an incessant techno-babble, a mass of long-sustained superfluity which dazed you into a trance of sheer boredom. He could get a cerebral ictus hearing words like “paradigm” or “hermeneutics”, which he surmised somehow related to “nautics” and never got to know how to pronounce it well. All this happens, of course, when you have a non-neocortical cobweb for brain foundation instead of the usual bunch of synapses. Be it as it may, theory (an impossibly understandable one) was his forte; never anyone saw him put it into practice, though!
And then arrived the day when I stopped feeding his gluttony, and not finding rice in my hand to lick he felt the time had come to bite it. He was ashamed he had licked it so much. And to remember himself a man instead of the dog he was, he rewrote the past in the most self-flattering terms to come to terms with his own image. And as the self-styled man he now thought he was, a brave one, he stabbed me front and back!
If you had heard him snarl then! Vipers and toads came out of his mouth! It made you miss his old, long-winded logorrhea! I’m sorry now I deleted most of his written material of the time out of pure nausea; it was a remarkable anthology of Dadaistic filth. Even comic, if you give it a second thought, for in his madness and fury, his littleness showed him as the clown he was.
Enters the Harpy. For here comes into play a most curious case of transference psychology. Question is I looked back down memory cliff (scary as it was!) and saw far away a spot, a nodal point, which offered itself as the origin of a sinister chain of events all of them linked by shattered friendships. And I don’t know how I came to conclude that if I reached to put some peace there, to purify the poisoned well, maybe, only maybe, I might find some closure and a way to manage my present pain. You follow my meaning? —because I don’t!
So I wrote a letter from the heart to the Guest Star of the time, the Harpy. I wrote her ignoring her front- and back-stabbing, her many lies and pettiness and hate, while highlighting my own failures and mistakes —for who is free from guilt when it comes to human confrontation? And she answered me with a laconic, “Thank you, the Harpy”.
But being the Harpy and having stayed attached to her grief of rejected slut for more than twenty years, she couldn’t lose a chance like that to sting with venom. And being also a born deceiver, she had to look unselfish in her stinging, blaming me not for what in her twisted mind I did to her, but for what in her delusion I did to a third party, the Cuckoo. So, after much demented hate-churning (and this was something she could do really fast!), she wrote me again in a soap-opera corny language speaking of my “tormented soul” (making clear she hadn’t understood a word of my letter, which was unsurprising given her spider-level IQ) and the malevolence with which I had treated the Cuckoo, the person, she said, she loved the most; the person, she said, was and had always been pure goodness and kindness.
Enters the Cuckoo, second step in this cycle of psychological transference. Now, it is true that I had put the Cuckoo out of my life sometime in the past. And too late, indeed! I’ll tell you about the Cuckoo: The Cuckoo was a man who had always been in love with me. To be totally truthful, I must say that I have no problem with homosexual relationships, not moral, not religious, not of the plumbing kind, not otherwise. Question is that of every horde of let’s say 10,000 men I might find appealing only one, which exposes me as a very decaf sort of bisexual. The Cuckoo was one of the 9,999 unappealing guys of the horde, and the warped way he found into my nest was to become the best “girl-friend” of my successive or concurrent girl-friends. The moment she and I had a problem —for relationships are about problems, among other things— he saw his chance, got into his best advising best “girl-friend” mood, and told her she was totally right in being mad with me for whatever trifle was the reason of the conflict of the moment, until the trifle became a geological aberration of atrocious proportions. Then he came to me and did the same, as my “best male-friend”.
The ultimate Yago he was!
And it is particularly interesting that, of the many times he played his trick, the Harpy was the only one who remained forever blind to his deceptions. Anyway, from all the wrongs she still thinks she suffered at my hands a gift has been given to the Harpy, a sort of “superpower” born from her grievances: she has become a successful marriage-terminator and man-destroyer of the kind that thrive in today’s law courts of this womanized corner of the European Entelechy.
Now the moral of the tale:
Dogs, harpies & cuckoos make a lousy zoo. Wanna heal yourself? Do not try to pacify the place; burn it down, root and branch, with all their inmates inside!
And by the way, in case you hadn’t noticed still, I’m no saint!
As for the poetry which has been born from these feelings and experiences, it is based on the haiku, although I’ve been a little disrespectful, or maybe just a little playful, with its metrics. You’ll see now why:
犬
JUDAS
Jesus!, he owed me so,
he had to rewrite the past
to dream himself whole.
A maker of words,
all empty, all sweetened lies.
He’s Void with a mask!
Glutton and kinky,
pompous and scornful;
says I love you while he stabs!
嘘
THE HARPY
Crystallized in grief,
self-inflicted dejection,
deems herself a person.
She loathes what she loves,
what could save her she destroys;
she’s grave, who’s the corpse?
Broods pain in the night,
unforgiving, barring light.
Folded wings, sharpened fangs,
hoards the Harpy hate!
羽
THE CUCKOO
A man who mastered
this: how to part love from love
by loving them apart!
A friend, listener,
adviser —tongue-sweetened Steel
splitting you from me!
Vacuity itself
turned to stone, gay palisade
between your heart my soul!
