When Groucho spins, and joins bright-eyed Harpo in the open doorway? at that moment, when the two join up, existing as one, as two, as two mimics, as one pretending to be both and two pretending to be one and both just pretending, as one split into two, half-uncertain about how he got here?

That's me, after surgeries: spinning, split apart, approximately here.

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Beware of this piece. We write so we can say directly what no decent man volunteers. This feeble ink is my greatest power, and I abuse this power now, to bring you into Gone Now, and Cored Out, and Great Pain.

Here is Great Pain.

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Imagine a box, empty except for all the pain in the world. It is empty of words because all descriptions flee, cannot abide within, exist downstream.

Inside Great Pain we might, might, collide with a word. Phrases in passing, from a doctor or on a wall, or the lips of beloved. But Great Pain is found, is experienced, so the accident of logos, of meaning, is purely found, too.

Ideas that can pierce Great Pain seem destined, purposeful. Regrets, advisories, news of delay, all are Pinnochio's evil friends, at rough play with our salvation.

Frauds, though. In pain all ideas seem pre-ordained. Enameled, brilliant, they flex with borrowed muscle. The offhand remark might be a hole in the world, or nothing, nothing at all.

Later, if we live, when we are placid again, self-satisfied, dull with merely no-pain, with words rattling in every box, we take our scrabble turn and sort it out. Explain it away. Shim it in with artful, purposeful words and force the lid closed.

Stones in my kidney. Life is that, now: have one, then have many. Right now? Right here? I say No. Kill me now.

One stone, 6 mm, from what? Diet soda? Cottage cheese? Splenda? Sedentarianism? Huh-uh. It must have been somnambulist pitchblend, sucked at night, now radioactive, rolling into a vicious lie atop the ureter. Pretending to be a bad back for a year and more. Making me vomit my own piss, making knived kryptonite where once was languor and supple and athletic torso.

All of this, this ink? After. All After Words. We live in after-words. Here's mine: my life, my life for decades, is just like this, with this stone in me. Perfect pauses, discomfort, Great Pain in an empty box, horror routines that fade back to perfect pause. Repeat.

The routine is It, too: I piss firelavaglassrazors, ten minutes to recover, almost normal for an hour or two, and drinking ice water, to make it happen again.

To make it happen again. Deliberate. So that someday I might be better.

At last I get to my point: I create the Great Pain. Hour by hours by day by days in order to flush out the pulverized remains, to run that pitted blade again, from the small of my back (kidneyrabbitpunchmadeTysonshriek) along an all-new inside path to the napalm tube of my penis (neveracockagain) and...and. And in the last inch the grit ("it might feel 'sandy'") re-awakens the slow-to-heal scratches from the instruments, from the procedures, the briskly handled tools of soaped chrome.

A few dozen times a day I drink, to feel Great Pain, to improve my system, to get over it, to live. My after-words, my enobling fraud, is to see this, this echo of mere life itself in my compressed suffering, writ large. The way we walk into the blade, invite the horror, create the pain, in order to continue. For something better.

Let's allow this, my philosphy and fraud. I love you, dear reader, so I do not describe the bad parts. The ride to the hospital, half-remembered, clawed into the roof. The five-and-a-half hours in prep, the five different pain meds, seven attempts, five talon-time hours, before it even touches the Pain.

The first few days of bloody pee. The razorwire clots.

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Cored Out

I cannot really write about it. The boxes go here and here and here. I take a breath and say: 15 months ago I had two emergency surgeries to repair my anus and colon. Fissures, and worse.

This will be short. I am unable to say. It is almost all whitehot empty boxes.

The first surgery was two days after my wife's cancer surgery. Yes, I put it off. Yes, I pretended, I lied, I ignored it, because I could not be gone from her, I had to be Right and True. I made it so much worse, enduring it, as it ruptured and split.

The second surgery was 18 days later, to repair the first one as it started to fail. The second one was in the doctor's office, without general, without Valium, without grace of any description, to stop bleeding that erupted during the followup exam. To save my life, I lay awake, as he injected and cut and sewed and disfigured, turning a tight ring of muscle into the poor, partial, misaligned thing I have now. Part man now. Cored out now.

I wrote a performance piece, a comedy about this. It is brilliantly funny, and unreadable. Unwatchable, I am sure.

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Gone Now.

Gone now is me. Man, lithe man, spring boy, all gone now. All bend, all hopeful and torus and coil, all gone now. I am just part man, no longer whole.

Except when I fake it, like Harpo, when I spin just right, land just so, then I am angelic Harpo for a silvery moment, in a white gown and wide smile. Sometimes, sometimes I turn out whole, for an instant, when I manage to arrest the world, when I fake it, just for fun. As if I had really spun all the way around, and a boy returned: coy, complete, a dancer from the old days, with a bushy cigar and an unlit mustache, a gay heart, tra-la.

I wish the pain was gone now. I wish I could write blithely about the shape of an Egg, the history of the Smirk, or just Nothing.

The Nothing of just grass, scuffed under the toe. I would bring it to thigh-clutching life, heart-tearing detailed life; the aw, the shucks, the toe sweeping in, in slo-mo, the rapture of crushed and weak and reedy green, the sly look under smooth brow as one blushing cheek angles into one tanned shoulder.

As if never was pain. Never ice, never steel, never ooze, never bee-sting carpet in the raw pulp under easily split skin.

Aw. Shucks.