The Birthday Party
Prayers On Fire

THE REVIEW

And the priest arrived and storms came from the frescoes of the shack-church. And the priest arrived and the faithful came and the cry rose like an erect phallus over the monstrosities of the lands beyond the ocean. And the priest arrived and my head exploded. For all the lust of millennia of flaming sexes rose from the prisons between the rocks and entered the Bahnhof, where the ragged beggar slept. And it entered him. And he entered the girl, like a deformed frog against her young sheathed legs. And he wanted her pride, and he wanted to break and create pain in the girl of the Music-Zoo, DEAD UNDER HIS FISTS. With spasms and wails and organ shrieks and sharp embers of guitar and phlegm. ZOO-MUSIC GIRL.

And the priest came again with thunder rumbling under his fetid feet poorly clad in sandals of fish bones and filled with a non-space void. Madness rushed in and the tear with it and on the hills and among the marshes a suitcase accompanying a man shone and broke and wept. A pit appeared and the earth of its torn body went on to form walls of tears.

And against the repugnant backdrop of a theater-brothel appeared the familiar silhouette of the priest. Here he is observing himself. Nick the Stripper is his number. The little insect with a pause rises over the audience and with a pause grotesquely erects and with a pause brings his hands to his crotch and with a pause falls to the ground in his blood and his sperm and in the mud abandoned by the cockroach of the previous night. And without respite inveighs against the hypnotized audience and with silence and paradoxical confidence he removes the prophetic garments while a few dwarfs beat on four brass instruments. And he soils himself with disgust and raises the vein and pierces it. He dies. And, with the priest he resurrects. A truly dirty jester figure.

Why do you beg for our smiles, miserable creature? Did God not throw you copper coins of Love? Did He not grant you fortune? He left you the Coin! Immense, eternal, infinite Coin, rightful pass to that Kingdom whose existence is uncertain... certain is its nemesis, Jester, sad figure of rosary. You inhabit it, face of bronze and dying, and die it after every death of the hour.

The ink drips like a gnashing of napalm and, like soot drenched in beer, it puts entire cities to fire and sword. And he, the Ink King enters triumphantly. Whores of the corrupted Kingdom and sodomite dwarfs and heavy cockroaches with brick-like armor. And sand worms and guttural moans and mountains and seas of heroin and that little king with the horse-face who swims in white salt and presses against the walls of his manors and against the borders of his domains and sleeps. Slow and broken beat of a spade bass and a guitar of decaying flowers: it is the blow of the king's scepter against the unfaithful prince. Monster's grunt: it is the percussion of blows against a rotten shell. The brain is rotten, the shell is rotten, the tonsils and breath rotten, the king's pleas against the revolution enacted at the birth of the world rotten, rotten ROTTEN. Like your truth Anita Lane. True, you say? Mister Nothing, you cannot always keep bothering Us with your nonsense about singing. We hit and stop. WE HIT and stop. WE HIT organs blindly like soft monitors and you continue in your lamentations. You are not a prophet in the desert. You have not escaped the persecutions of the Hittites, nor the Egyptian spears, nor the sands of Sinai nor the justice of the judges. And now you will perish in chaos. Prepare your rags, my animals are about to enter your penitential cell.

And the priest entered, dragging himself on knobby knees and saw his hands turn into a hiss of death and into pieces of filth and semi-rotten earth. And while entering he was stoned with gravel and overwhelmed with crow furs and with subhuman slowness a reforming prophet pushed him back into the distant Kingdom.

And the priest appeared one last time. He dripped resentment. He emanated foul-smelling odors like those from a dump. He wielded his voice like a six-inch gilded blade and with it floundered in the dark toward the shape of the piano. His voice became a pleading hammer that rose against the consumptive enemy of God and struck him, beat him, shredded him, pulled limbs from their holy original seat and stopped. Nuns in bat outfits, large as nuts, armed with angry fists immobilized him. And he continued the action, rotten and dripping with mud. Blasphemies like blades, blasphemies like flaming larches, blasphemies like fiery prayers. Defeated on the field. And finally the last icy flower on the enemy's lips, now obscene like the surface of the world on which grotesque beings stir, are born, mate and die and kill the similar ones born, mate and die.

The worm finally reigned on the outer surface.