Decomp News: OEDIPUS TEXT

Greek archeologist just released findings of a newly discovered scroll accredited to Sophocles's. It turns out to be an alternate ending to the landmark Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex. The new ending seems to foreshadow real world events and world governments are bracing for the reaction. The new ending puts in doubt many of humanities paradigms projected onto us by the ancient west. One Anthropologist who had a early look at the scroll was heard to of said “time is a creation of the ancient Aristocrats, so they can horde immortality and kill the poor. Tragedy is not natural it’s a conspiracy.” Decomp was able to find a leaked copy of the new ending. Here it is in full.

IOKASTE: Oh my cursed husband, who wants to untie all knots and solve all riddles. My husband would have taken the open jar from Pandora, held it upside down, and tapped the bottom for good measure. It is as if he cast this spell on us himself. We would have died happy without his curiosity. The men who have the key to the mystery are old. If these questions had waited a few more years, we would have been left without answers. I rather Thebes was sacked and my children and I were placed in the lowest of slavery. We would at least have our past glory, now there is nowhere on earth we can go to avoid this shame. Somehow, Mars has thrown the net of hated vengeance across my family’s entire life.
APHRODITE: Queen Iokaste, why are you bothering Zephyr with your words? He cares not for our problems. Instead, seek help or consul from me. IOKASTE: I speak anytime and anywhere because someone must be always eaves dropping on my family and conspiring to create the deepest woes. The only way such a complex plot against my family could be woven is if everyone and everything was in on the conspiracy. My childhood teacher, that tree, the ants beneath my feet, my own eyes conspire against me. The ruin I am evading unfolded many years ago; I cannot escape what has already been done.
APHRODITE: I can’t standing seeing you like this, dear daughter. How is your husband and family different from when I saw them just two days ago?
IOKASTE: They are none different. The only thing that has changed is that I know all my family’s relations. Only one fact changed in my understanding of the world. My child by Laios lived.APHRODITE: Is that not good news?
IOKASTE: My husband and his riddles! He thinks he won a kingdom with a riddle. He thinks solving this new riddle will save his kingdom. He is Cerberus, chasing his own tail into Hades. My husband has promised Thebes’s honey, but he comes back with bees and a bear.
APHRODITE: Calm yourself you sound like a drunken oracle!
IOKASTE: Oracles, yes. They have spun this web through time snaring my family. A curse we inherited, a curse that arced over his grandfather and great-grandfather who lived happier lives. A cursed arrow of Apollo that struck through both of my husbands on the same day. Why must my children pay for a curse from a dead man onto a dead man? Pelops has damned the innocent!
APHRODITE: Iokaste, tell me everything as clearly as you can.(Iokaste speaks aloud all the events for the first time)
APHRODITE: Oh Apollo is harsh and heartless! He will cut down men as if they are no different then wheat! The will of some Gods is for both kingdoms and curses to be inherited. If you do wrong now, it will leave a stain on man until that line is wiped out. The immortal mind may see the transition of grandfather to father and to son as one person. Some trespasses are too great to be paid for in one lifetime. If I were a god, I would weigh a man’s soul by his own passions.
IOKASTE: Priestess, is Oedipus not a good, honest, and just King? Has he willingly done wrong?
APHRODITE: Everything you say I know as true, but what can I do? All I can do is make offerings and pray to Aphrodite.
IOKASTE: But even she cannot change the past.
APHRODITE: The past has not changed, it is the same as it always has been. What she can change is Apollo and Mar’s absolute authority. When a god makes a judgment against man, man will always be guilty unless another god makes a judgment against that god.
IOKASTE: Then let us act.
APHRODITE: I warn you the goddess is more likely not to act unless she already planned to intervene, but my goddess is love and too much impossible evil has happened for me not to believe that impossible good could also happen.
Part 2

[ Iokaste and Aphrodite rush towards the palace they see Oedipus leaves the herdsmen.]
OEDIPUS: I can’t even die here; I would taint Thebes like a rancid dog in the well. Oh my children… guilty of being my vile offspring, sentenced to be in a station below lepers. Foul destiny humiliating me in my agony.
IOKASTE: My Oedipus, look at him broken like a bag of tar, blood and bones. He is passed death, as I should be. I must…
APHRODITE: We must speak with him, “King Oedipus over here!”
OEDIPUS: Speak, I spoke enough today. I spoke my way into Hades. I avowed my way into a trap. Wife, oh it pains me to see you, I have wronged you!
IOKASTE: You have solved your riddle. Oh horrible riddle that unravels our skin, that makes barn animals out of kings.
OEDIPUS: I walk on four legs, I am a sick dog.
APHRODITE: Listen to my consul the two of you. How are you different from yesterday? Oedipus you had killed that man on the road yesterday just as today. You are strong and wise as you were yesterday. Your children have not changed into harpies. The only thing that has changed is how you think of yourself and your family.
OEDIPUS: Priestess has your size not changed. Do you not speak in divine tones? If I am not mistaken, this is a goddess before me.
APHRODITE: I have also seen a plot has been woven against my children and me. For I am your great-grandmother and this curse is to eradicate the line of Mar’s and myself. My brother Apollo plots against me and the medium I control. I play heartstrings like a harp and he uses the threads of destiny to strangle his victims. He aligned himself with Hephaestus to avenge our forbidden lust. They want to cleanse the earth of our seed. However, I caught them in their plot.
OEDIPUS: But great goddess this does not change my hideous curse.
APHRODITE: Curse?! You have Olympian blood running through you. Mortal laws of husbandry do not apply to you. You are not human cattle, you are of divine stock. The divine lord of all gods, Zeus, bore children by what you would call sisters, aunts, and nieces. Do you call the all-powerful Zeus cursed? Do you call all of us who govern the cosmos cursed because we propagate ourselves from within?
OEDIPUS: But what are we to do great goddess, we are still scorned by man? Even if this holds true for gods, we must live among and according to men and their customs. We must also leave Thebes. If we do not Apollo will continue his pestilence on our people.
APRODITE: All of this has been foreseen. On the docks, there is a ship. That ship is destined for lands the people of Thebes have not seen nor heard of. Your children and their children’s children are predestined to populate these lands and you will call it Arkansas. THE END?!

Decomp book Review

My salted slug eyes struggle I got backwards x-ray vision where the sidewalk ends you’ll find decomposition. Help a brother rub one out join him under the over pass sniffing aimlessly orange pills. These are the days, before I knew my number. I have a dead see scroll version of “Maybe Will See”. Letters worn stickers on a kabbalah rubik's cube. He was an older man when he wrote it. He was leaving his mindset of a drunken blue-collar worker teetering between nihilism and nirvana. Instead, he was entering a state of reflection and cautious optimism. He no longer wanted to point out the pointless; he wanted to impart wisdom into the world. He opens with humankind’s greatest endeavor, (no not fucking) the exploration of space (cheating on Gaia) . He was born in 1920 and saw many of the innovations of the 20th century unfold; such as television, computers and humankind going to the moon. He has some insight into what these events represent. He does not care about the details of the endeavors; he only glosses over them. What was important for him, were the effects these events had on humankind. They distract us, they make us believe in a lofty ideology that we are not genetically predisposed to believe in, and it keeps us “from doing things to ourselves” (Stanford 1080). This poem is about humanity’s need to escape from itself so it does not do self-inflicted damage. When speaking of man’s exploration of the final frontier He states, “I am for this.” He sounds like a hopeful parent of a juvenile delinquent who approves of the positive effects that high school wrestling may have on their child. Man needs to channel his violent energies into something mysterious and infinite like the universe.
By innovating, our hunting instinct is eclipsed by our gathering instinct. “Our poking around” which “is pleasurable” stops us from attacking ourselves and others (Stanford 1080). Bukowski falls from the heavens into the mundane by making an enigmatic connection between space exploration and better peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Bukowski’s better sandwich could be like the creation of Tang, a side effect of advancement in technology. With this perspective, technology and exploration would be our salvation. The sloth, caused by the convenience of technology, coupled with the religion of science, would mesmerize us. The sandwich could also represent the fact that everything is more vivid to those that participate in a life explored. The exploration of space gives everyone hope, a reason to wake up. The next day could bring untold mysteries that could take a lifetime to digest.
Bukowski sees two sides of humanity in this poem; he sees a curious inventive side and a war-like, suicidal, and destructive side. Charles Bukowski, like all men his age, had lived to see many wars and many innovations, and he prefers our preoccupation with innovation to war. Seeing new things replaces man’s ever-acute nihilism with curiosity.
The title “Maybe Will See” has a desperate optimism to it. He believes our growing understanding of the universe is a distraction from doing bad, but what if humanity finds something? He creates a glimmer of hope and maybe his distraction turns out to be the Holy Grail. Maybe we will see. I pissed on the track.

The Word

Your words are like water. all words are water.
at least they occur as water occurs as two molecules happen to run into each other and go steady
When the words take shape when they are heavy
they freeze in the memory and as permanent as ice in a cold climate can be
or when one can cook, when there is fire
the words sublimate
they turn into vapor that falls and collects on one's eyes when they read, on one's ears when one listens. vapors.
but these changes from just words into weight and
weightlessness
require work require energy
when left alone the words flow still, and still flow freely
and in nature streams of spoken words litter once good earth
thoughts, curses, prayers, all pool in puddles or moisten the lawn in the early dawn
all the shit strewn creeks behind houses filled up with shopping carts and car batteries, that's the waters of idle conversation.
that's the rain of a million questionnaires
the scribbled written words, the shopping lists, the phone messages, the post-its,
the scribbled notes collect in vast oceans
by nature when the water is left alone it flows, it flows downhill,
gravity hold precedent here for the naked and untamed words
sometimes it goes directly down
down the drain
counter clockwise I suppose
depending on where you are when you flush it

old old house...pt.1

The old old house, it had dismantled applecarts for shutters on the windows.

It had a fence made out of big wooden doors taken off of churches and Masonic temples, all nailed together around the perimeter. It had rained so many times on the old doors, the sun had come and beat down on them to suck the rain back out so many times they were all warped. Leaning in different directions like some old peasants teeth, they rotted away.

The lights never, ever came on. “who lives in there?” I asked my mother 26 years ago.

“Nobody. If they do, they are probably those bums. The ones in jail, they don’t pray, and they draw and write on themselves.” In the backyard there was a small pile of bicycles, rusting. A shed had burned down and its black skeleton huddled in the corner, the door clinging to the leaning frame. Some kids once climbed the tree in the front of the yard a long time ago and hung bottles from its branches that would barely sway even in a strong wind, but occasionally clink into one another. Nothing was cinematic about this house, not the overturned floral sofa on the ground by the porch, not the vines and weeds that grew out of it. And not especially collection of bright orange stickers attached to the front door and windows. I concluded it was 1608, the address. The houses on either side were 1606 and 1610, they still had the numbers attached to them. I wished then there were something that would drive me inside the house. Maybe a little girl would go missing and I find a piece of material with the same pattern as the dress she was last seen in clinging to a sharp nail on the back gate. I walk slower when I pass the house, perhaps to catch a muffled scream come from the basement, something that would draw me close the camera from the crane shot narrows to my face my eyes, they widen and I turn and run only to lay awake at night finally throw the covers off where I am fully dressed and venture out in the darkness with a flashlight a rope a pocket knife back to the house and crawl towards the basement window on the damp ground where……..

It never came up, I never heard anything. I only occasionally heard the clink of empty bottles in the tree. I had an older cousin who lived a street over from it, and on a hill from his back porch I could see the upstairs windows at night. When the houses around it were lit up from activity, hers were blacker than the sky itself. Silent they were like a tomb like a mausoleum if it had windows, as if by misled intention or chance tradition mausoleums were designed to have windows because it was intended for the eager dead to look out but not escape or for the jealous dead to look in but not enter.

Ghosts would not stay there any more than sparrows would stay in the charred boughs of her tree.

I would follow my cousin out to his porch I stared out at the rooftops while he talked to the air. “I don’t know why she wants to leave me, man. Maybe she doesn’t like herself”

I nodded and watched the black space growing. Even ghosts would not stay, what has a house to offer? What when all its life is drawn. My head was humming.

“I think I felt like this ever since I saw this picture on her fridge, it was her when she was little..” My cousin was talking, he wasn’t next to me anymore, he meandered about in the fuzzy din of static in my head my ears picked up his presence. I saw the black windows of the house falling toward me growing the blackness spilling out of them. My cousins voice was like a slippery radio signal, “I looked at that picture every time I went over to her place, man”. He was coming from inside the house, and his face appeared behind the black window staring out at me. How did you get in there? Can you see out the window?

I must be hovering in the air in front of him. “It was like, she was that little girl, you know? And she looked all innocent, like asking me why I was doing this to her life, you know she had no idea I was going to come around and mess it up.”

He came in more clear now, the glass rattled slightly at his voice. I must be hovering I thought again, or I was on a string like one of those bottles and was swaying in the wind.

A string, its keeping me from touching the window. “I feel like she was looking at me, I mean she was looking at whoever was taking the picture, but in a way, I took the picture, you know how some people used to think cameras would steal your soul, well”

He kept talking but the wind carried the words away, and he took a step backwards and disappeared from the window and it went blacker still. The sounds went out and soundless there was no weight.

“There is a package for you, I left it in your room” my mother said when I came home.

I opened the box and spilled its contents on my bed, a musty damp smell waifed out and there were two sheets of old mildewed wallpaper. The weight was due to a piece of floorboard, and there were bits of drywall in there as well. I turned the box over, I was right. No postage, it was from 1608.

Kids, are you tired of having a old religion that you didn’t even have a part in making, shoved down your throat by your parents. If so, Shitty the Dung Beetle has something just for you! it’s the shitty the Dung Beetle crazy Libs, religion addition. With over two hundred pages of the most prolific religious text at your finger tips you can make man in what ever zany image you want. Here is just one excerpt:
ONE: 'You shall have no other (noun plural) before Me.'
TWO: 'You shall not (verb) for yourself a carved image--any likeness of anything that is in (place) above, or that is in the (place) beneath, or that is in the (something you drink) under the (place).'
THREE: 'You shall not take the (noun) of the (person) your God in vain.'
FOUR: 'Remember the (holiday) day, to keep it (adjective).'
FIVE: 'Honor your (person) and your (person).'
SIX: 'You shall not (verb).'
SEVEN: 'You shall not (verb) adultery.'
EIGHT: 'You shall not (verb).'
NINE: 'You shall not bear (adjective) against your (persons).'
TEN: 'You shall not covet your (person) (noun); you shall not covet your (same person) (noun), nor his male (occupation), nor his female (occupation), nor his (animal), nor his (animal), nor anything that is your (same person).'

Kids this is a time tested way of making a religion, but with a fun twist. The council of Niece, the diet of worms and now the living room of the Wilson’s will decide the fate and faith of millions. Remember kids with Shitty the Dung Beetle at your side every day is a shitty day.