Phranque
Might Frank-Thoughtless have not been Frank-Performer, living, perchance, on the edge of Wealth in a dilapidated apartment, a favorite of the children, a Frank who accommodates all their love and more, as he accumulates small devotions, as sharp as the rocks that bounce harmlessly off of police barricades?
Indeed he might have been.
Frank-Thoughtless have been Phranque-Night-Dreamer? Might not that engorged harvest moon have gripped him by his very veins? Was he not charging topless through the windy night, clinging to himself by his reins, drinking the darkness, to encounter a creative force where there was none? Was he not drawn forth, his book, half-read then, fledgling in his awareness, burning a hole in his purse, his pen bulging in his pocket, hollow drums unfilling his trunk, his guitar, exhausted from the day’s abuse, crying for him at home?
Would not this Phranque be breaking the law and all laws of reason and sense with every waking breath? Would not this Phranque be pure of mind but engorged of body, drowning in his own figs, caring for a sickly earth with a sickly body?
He might be, indeed.
And might he not have been Phranque-on-Fire? As a Fire was the destination he sought, nothing more than those selfsame fires that had warmed his ancestors’ harmless loins during ancient similar nights, but now a grave transgression against the city he had left behind, not to mention the love he had left behind.
And might be this Phranque dancing? Flying in a quivering orbit around the raging sun of a pagan fire, grinding his ellipses ever wider to include the whole silent selfish crowd, flailing on high, beating the hard mud on which he walked, simply circling, slowly circling, some meaning he refuses to see in himself.
Indeed, and indeed!
And would he not be as Phranque-In-Truth-of-Paranoia? And would this Phranque lay awake awaiting a Revolution he would never himself generate, heartbreakingly, and not for lack of effort, but simple historical circumstance, uncontrollable, even by an elite and malevolent few, for would not this Phranque have seen a Masonic face where there was only the schizoid fragmentation and paranoid impulses of a manufactured population, having manufactured themselves to refuse his own image alongside all those who would be his brothers.
He might! He might!
And might this Frank-Thoughtless also have been Phranque-Desiring? Too much in love and too little in beard? Satisfied eternally, yet constantly hungry for No-One-Knows.
Would the bonfire Phranque-Desiring had built burn all night, burning as he might fly around it in ecstatic orbit alone among a small multitude of inward selves, inward himself, in a paralysis of inwardness, turning planetward as the ground turned beneath him, reaching out to the mindless selves staring at the flames, forcing them to interact and acknowledge him, and yet he going home into the silent night unsatisfied back into his apartment outside Wealth?
But might this Phranque actually be our own Frank, solitary and unknown?
In the end, you are right, ash is ash.