The Final Touche (Please Imagine Accent Aigu In Its Proper Place)

The beggars of the divine from the now extinct The Esoteric Order of Snotra.org who commune with me here have absorbed knowledge, perhaps better expressed as “a knowing of sorts,” when it comes to the soul of the man known to us only as Primrose Cohen. While much of his communique is bulging with literary insight and pregnant with psychosocial rumination, he occasionally shares something of the catastrophe of being an involuntary prophet. I think it is clear that Mr. Cohen shares some qualities with Poe's Egæus, and, upon birth, descending from the velvet veil, was startled by the sandpaper we know as reality. Yes, he cast an ardent eye on the ugliness we have created, and for that we are grateful. Yet, the man still shares aspects of himself in his own way, much as does the curmudgeonly speaker in the Blue Oyster Cult classic, “Burnin' For You.” Like that speaker, he reveals little as if he is already revealing too much. It is this hesitancy on these matters that infuses a certain urgency in my perception of Mr. Cohen's more personal words. For me, each syllable drips with a tightly wound passion that nearly strangles its progenitor. Is this the price Mr. Cohen pays for reaching outside himself into the murky depths of the abstruse in an effort to assign order to apparent chaos?

Below, I offer verse penned by Mr. Cohen and wadded up inside a legal size envelope full of copies of various documents that he sent to me. The documents were part of an ongoing investigation into what he called the “psycho-existential source of The Hum.” Confusingly, he had handwritten the words “The TACAMO connection” on a copy of a schematic diagram on which he had spilled cocoa. Although I found it odd that the cocoa was still in powdered form, I was more intrigued by the poem.

The Final Touché

The gamble toppled

And the bogey eye grit

Reigned down

Crushing me

Like I was Giles Corey,

And they wanted the land

That I don't own.

Their teeth were bitter borne.

Meade and silver

Peppered their breath

While I pleaded

Penitent but with no knees

As ineffectual

As the dying words

Of a truthful man.

Those spears from beneath

Wriggled inside me

But had no avenue,

And I dispersed

Like a crowd

That had never formed.

Primrose Cohen

Date Indeterminant

In my subsequent correspondence, I communicated with Mr. Cohen about the documents and about his investigation. I also inquired about the poem. Did he mean to send it? Why was it wadded up? Did he take colloidal silver with his cocoa powder?

Mr. Cohen replied in his next letter, “Cocoa powder is my only acceptable source of caffeine as I refuse to imbibe soft drinks, and I hold the conviction that coffee is some sort of trick. I don't trust myself to get a colloidal silver dosage correct. As to the poem, I intended to send it; however, as I was putting it in the envelope, I began to feel a crippling dissatisfaction with my verse. Angrily, I wadded it up and nearly threw it into a nearby desk fire – the circumstances of which I'll have to explain later. Just before I completed the action, I recoiled. I became angry at the petulance I had aimed at myself, and I regretted my rash crumpling. Still dissatisfied and yet having some regard for my work, I dropped the page into the envelope. You found it as it lay in its temporary tomb. Be sure to co-file a freedom of information request at the address I provided.”

I did as I was bade, and I filed the FOIA request. After some consideration, I hesitantly asked Mr. Cohen in a follow up letter if I could share The Final Touché here. His response was a single word scribbled on the back of a seemingly antique Christmas card from someone named Arthur H. Vandenberg addressed to a Mr. and Mrs. Jim “Bourbon” Huxley. The front of the card read, “From our family to yours during this joyous season” and featured a faded black and white photo of two adults and two children all wearing crooked derbies. The scrawl read, “Natch.”