CLOAK/3.3

While it is rude when speaking of someone's personality to put the words between inverted commas, how to avoid hammer-clawing at the space of speech about what is under the chisel here:
  • the tendency to sulk
  • the burnt-out Beardsley wood lurking of the tastes
  • the addiction to guilt and enslavement to procrastination for fixes
  • the tepid experimental pandering to both a male side swoony and a female ruttish
  • bad habits of expertise in the televised world
  • the impress of artists glamor death fame worn as angry longing
  • the grasping at lotuses, the records of treatment for windowglass cuts
  • the amassing of a little reputation at the expense of bleeding nerves.
Cloak is the antidote to public education—that Africa, always with us—its chains of children passed through hazard, graded, sorted, bullied in the halls, its slow white brain-burning clockface, its unquiet libraries where sticky heaps of paperback best-sellers gnaw the stacks.