INTERIOR PHRENOLOGICAL EXEGESIS OF THE DERYK THOMAS SKULL by M. Gira One night I was Iying in my bed staring up at the ceiling,weeping in slow gentle heaves, my tear-ducts and down into my open mouth. My tongue quivered with each sugary red drop. Eventually my mouth was full of blood, a steady flow of viscous tears leaking down my throat and forming a deep well of congealing misery in the dark pit of my stomach. The tears must have drugged me, as if my blood were laced with opiates, because suddenly when I looked down at where my body had been, lying supine like a cadaver on display, I now saw that I had no body at all. What I saw instead was an undulating mound of shining purple and vermillion intestines, actively snaking and threading and writhing as if my bed were a pile of living gory eels. My feet, pathetically white and bony, protruded from the heap - all that was Ieft of my former self. At the foot of my bed stood the rabbit, giant and snow-white, awash in a nacreous glow. It looked down at me with what I felt to be pity (I welcomed this in-my self-indulgent melancholy), though why I assumed it cared for me at all I don't know, because it stood there perfectly still and implacable, like a bunny-buddha, casting flashes of light and color out its eyes across the pile of offal which was now me, the steam rising from my goo and forming spectral shapes in the air above the pile, morphing in the rolling shadowed bunny were two giant spherical t.v. screens exhaling a light so brilliant I was stunned like a strapped electrocuted monkey-made-of-viscera into sudden nirvana. All that was left was a voice, the voice of Deryk Thomas, and it pounded in my head like a scream trying to escape, and it told me this: "You will use my paintings to illustrate your silly and miserable songs, so that the listener might dream of finer things-of Turner, Poe, Bacon, and Blake - as he is subjected to the running sore of your entropic, suppurating music, a music like bad breath even when it's 'pretty' ". And I did, and I walked into his eyes (for the Bunny was Deryk Thomas), and I came upon a luminous world of white fur, of knives slashing, of tortured shards of glass,where the women and men are beautiful, where the sounds of their bodies crackling as they self-immolate are like the sounds of a delicately figured music box, where pain is sweet and nurturing, where imagination chokes you like a noose. -- M. Gira Atlanta, Ga.1994