---   B E N   M I L L E R  

Re: ...a ship shivers..., it seems to me that though Deter the cabaret singer

(...Moment in Time / My partner in crime...) cannot be totally dismissed as a

contributing cause of the passenger stampede back and forth across the top deck at Uh

Oh hundred hours, nor the berets of beef served in berets either, or even the sunset a

half an hour prior with its pathotic Shirley Temple overtones, still, still, still as I

mull the documentation regarding the incident I am compelled to give great weight to the

verse diary of passenger Wilson (...Today I spell lack / with two lls / one for love /

one for lucre...) and the possibility that the S.S. Yes Yes, though upon the high seas,

was actually scraping bottom at the height of the tippation, that is to say, scraping

the bottom of the hearts of the men and women on board, the arterial coral that --

contrary to the contention of deputy Singe -- is not harmless as a pink tangle of drink

stirrers but potentially as wreckitive as any of our other invisible scourges, name

your virus, name your laser. If you doubt me randomly attend a family picnic and watch

generations scuttle across the concrete floor of the park pavilion in unconscious

evocation of the sea structure embedded deep within. Or better yet hook up the radar and

scan the hairy, scary chest of each passenger on the Yes Yes and hear for yourself the

low blue echo of lust and the curling high pitched tweep of reason, glimpse the screen

spread with the calcified remains of a million milky moments, the emanating ur-skeleton

of ennui and energy, the showroom of aquantique furniture pulsing with the spellings of

the far off and too near words: isWoe, thereat, incompostly, abba-ca-debra, druint,

bizzle, coolthrax, resept, fanicky, greel, tuku drabbings, blih, blih, blih. To be

absolutely frank, I find it startling that your detectives continue to cling to the

para-religious notion that cause of the incident was a lowly sung song in conjunction

with 500 or so hats crammed with overdone meat. How can the trigger be circumstantial

when all the male perpetrators were uncircumcised and wearing bifocals? When the old

women, being prouder, were squinting through the muslin of their flowered dresses? When

these very same thorny, borny consumers are want to stay at hotels featuring lobby

blackboards upon which they -- on the way in and out -- commonly scrawl indulgent

equations (Rest erection = Easter as love pill, Prostate = pink lump of apology) that

have a true falsity more convincing than the digging white beak of seagull? And then,

too, there is the question of the tan business card removed from the stomach of

Passenger Ludwig less than a week after the incident. Robert Cappucinno, Caffe &

Market, Breakfast, Lunch, Ice Cream, History. Have you even bothered to ask the 

man how it got there? I did. And he snapped: Ask April 19th, the old bitch, fluffing her

avalanche of blond locksmiths. For ship's sake scan the middle of the man and see

what's behind that. And while you're at it hire a literary critic to decode the purple

graffiti that mysteriously appeared on the hull 72 hours before the hysteria: Store

Foment? Focus on Affiliates! A spray paint Q & A that could only have been applied 

during a most daring moonlight adventure involving a rope and yet, at first reading, seems 

entirely unworth drowning for. The answer we're looking for might be right there! Right under

our eyes! A clue twenty feet tall! Remember, the only real solution to any mystery is a

collage, a complete of incompleteness, a collaboration of stinking fragments that when

combined become deceptively odorless, the vile little scents canceling each other out.

Ah, the smellessness of chaos. Holy whole of unwholes! The hair of the mob scrubbing

the air as the boat lurched and leaned to the inner rhythm, scraping the reef of

recrimination and redemption. Their sweat not the nervous stinking kind but the sweet

sweat of hard work and good sex, of wood chopping and scrotum squeezing. Unplug your

noses, Gentlemen! Unshield your eyes and plug in the radar and probe even the chest of

Captain Ruger. Forsake the oiled mimifications of favoritism and let the echo lines fall

where they may. The truth demands it and the public soon will. We all find it extremely

suspicious, his eye batting explanation that it was necessary to do nothing, that to

still the ship would have been to invite an even worse disaster. There are even

reports, as yet unconfirmed, that he left the bridge in the middle of the trouble,

hands in his pockets.