GUMS GROWN AROUND THE LOTUS TEETH
Walter Tegheler’s Poems
by Philip Opdycke
Copyright 2012 Philip Opdycke
Smashwords Edition
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Chapter One
GUMS GROWN AROUND THE LOTUS TEETH
His name was Norman Blood; I had not seen him for several years, and I did hope he was dead; the last time I saw him, he conversed with Invisibles while in a crouch on Market Street; I doubt that he knew I was there, and I walked past without acknowledging him. He had claimed not only to be the Prince of Wales, going so far as to mail a napkin ring with a marriage proposal to Mary Magdalen at Buckingham Palace, where she was of course being held against her will, but at another time he claimed to be Isaac Cavallius, able chronicler of Wanhope, Ohio, which you must never believe; Isaac knew his parents, and this is not the man. Isaac more closely resembled Walter Tegheler, who, like Isaac, knew his parents while being an unwanted birth.
.... The mystery is, Why was the trek West thought to be necessary? Could any possible antidote to Time-Wrecking not be found as well in Wanhope, Ohio, place reflecting less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system, as in Saffrann, Achronesia (formerly named San Francisco)?
.... His body afire with agony, Walter Tegheler at last perceived himself to be a construct of rhetoric, nothing more, his creator an engarreted dunce who left Wanhope his birthplace half-baked and rather freaky.
.... Tegheler resolved to accept within himself the anti-corrosive chemical in canned foods, also the anti-stick layer in rice cookers. It’s part of life, you can’t stop it; we’re done with good evolution, so now progress is bad, we should have stopped cold somewhere back, before Time-Wrecking when the past was eliminated.
.... He thought there might be hope for problems in his mouth, receding gums, when he did hear about a legend concerning Nichiren Daishonin and his relics; a tooth there was, displayed at Taisekiji, around which grew something seeming to some very much like gum tissue; Tegheler wondered if, given sufficient chanting (he was new to any such thing), he just might make that miracle within himself, his mouth to reconstruct.... There is no end to the dashing of reasonable hopes.
After many impoverished years spent chanting Daimoku, which he felt were impoverished because he’d hit a Gohonzon, he finally came to the conclusion that his corporeal frame was made of the substance forming around the Lotus Tooth. Impoverishment also came from his being born to lowlifes and aging parents who simply did not care; his birth had turned the house upside down, and that is blameworthy.
.... The old from whom Walt was descended cared not for themselves one tenth as much as Walt did later on in regret at their having been; and I agree with him that the line was debased by the time it got to his folks, and that fact should matter much less than it does.
.... Where his versifications led astonished him, the previously occulted information; out of all his line’s inheritors, he’d been the first to shuck off traditions; he’d had a granduncle who played fiddle, but Walt alone, out of all his immediate get, was obviously musical, singing in some local theatricals being the only obvious proof of that fact. Beyond that, he was dreadful with harmony. Just give him his own line.
Had Walt stuck to family tradition, he’d have wound up trapped in a dead-end job under a boss he hated, who would indeed be a dumbass next to him, just ask Walt’s relative and he’ll tell you that, proof positive.
Respectability was never effectively sold to Walter Tegheler.
.... The first verses Walter Tegheler ever wrote had to do with a bee as it “occupied” a “rose,” done in amniotic fluid on a hospital end table; that’s why the Doctor thwacked his ass; Walt was already making sounds in a pained attempt to recite his work; he wanted them to understand the cryptographical patterns within his work, DADA IS NADA spelled in the capital letters on the left side of his verses.
.... He told me, “Here I am, Beckettian-in-Chief.... Such a nothing, yet I must be Chief.... I suppose that, if someone wanted to be at least moderately big in one’s profession, one could not do better than to wind up like Van Johnson the film actor.... Into his nineties he did last, quietly going in the board and care....”
.... He blurted, to none obviously present, “I hope that you don’t think that I’m obsessed, or that I care what others’ opinions are.... Waiting for a proper recognition, or a proper furtherance, a competency, by my very own homeland....”
.... Walt Tegheler remembered being carried down steps to the basement; they bumped his head, and he cried until he lost his breath (this happened more than once). He was then washed inside a laundry sink. For laundry sinks he came to be nostalgic.... They always made sure that he bumped his head, each time they carried him down basement steps; it was all planned, they were against his birth. Not only unwanted, let him wind up an insane derelict with a dented head, neither dolicho- nor brachycephalic, but a demented mixture neither side of the Alps would claim. Each time they would carry him down those steps, he would notice a rusted Similac can on a shelf, and he would recall “Similac” as “Smilac.” As to whether he walked back up on his own, I have no idea. He was of an age to walk, but they were dreadful old steps, a nasty and sewery lower depths visible under them.