how servile the soul of this no-man for he is forever compelled to call out to his peers seeking their adulation.

all confrontations with himself end in fear, the true progenitor of his anxiety and ennui, these alleviated only by creation and an obsessive absorption in the world of objects.

other people exist with a singular function: relief.   

dreams speak to him of the horror within. it is not of death but exile. 

ask him: by what names does he know himself?

he is surface: veneer passes for depth among the unsuspecting. nothing is questioned in his world. nothing will be.

everything continues in complete calm, each day regurgitating the next. until he meets the other.

they are at once repelled and attracted.

the other humiliates the no-man, and the no-man retaliates. this becomes banter. the no-man recognises the emptiness of the other, the other the thinness of the no-man's veneer.

in this manner, they perform. it is often painful. the other's tongue is quick and relentless.

the other desires what has been exclusively the no-man's. to slip frictionless into the no-man's world. the no-man resists.

will they show one another what's within?

here's the no-man on the sofa, mouth drooping sleepily while the other rests his head on the no-man's arm. together, bound in unforgiving unconscious.

in a dream, a djinn whispers a name in the no-man's ear. it is like his own and means nothing.

the no-man wakes and stares at the other whose eyes are shut and vulnerable. can they exist apart now that they are known to one another? the other has found a way into every crevice in the no-man's life. the no-man looks away. will he repeat the dream-name?

to be known and welcomed, isn't that what is desired by all? yet being understood is the most frightening prospect for these two sons.

the two often exist in an asymmetry - the other with his cleverness, the no-man with his nothing. the other enthralls, the no-man negates. the audience has a preference. the no-man retreats embarassed. 

thus the no-man creates - the other counters. this arrangement a sublimation of the absence at their core and the viciousness of its surrounds - both civilly dressed in rhetorical and critical clothing.

perhaps they still believe humour is transgression, a pure instance of lawless freedom. yet they are captive in a show that must not end, entrapped by the adulation, their outerselves slowly being blown up out of recognition. only a dim awareness now of the absence.

fiction replaces the real and in this dream-realm the no-man and the other become myth. they are transmitted, perpetuated, consumed, refashioned, retold by the audience. the no-man and the other realise with a frission of the soul that they are no longer in control. they exist with no reference to the real.

finally, in this glut, the no-man and the other senses the nothing is now addressable. the no-man lets his nothing be. "it's nothing," he tells the other. the other replaces the nothing with a tetrahedron. "it's something all right," he snorts and the no-man smiles. a new chapter beckons.

the-noman