The DFL Baffles

Originally published as a series

She wore a cloak at all times. Her name was Frances. The street welcomed her with its cats. She was followed closely by many paws. She left smiles in corners so that she could return and find them again and be happy. When she finaly removed the cloak, there was no magic trick of a magic trick. Only a large stretched mouth and a throbbing tongue eager for the mouth it already lived within. A tonguecat without skin to cloak it.
Asp killed Cleopatra. She was a mixed up tree.
Climb the fire furbished mountain to find not a vent but a thing stretched on sticks wherein to plump my tired body.

I smell differently when faced with fathoming a crime. If on the forage for food, then I switch noses. And eat the discarded one.

Inching towards being called a fable, the baffle slipped and became an allegory too short to be called anything.

Lost in clouds of confusion, Nemo's Ark forged on towards its hopeful berth within the clarity of a new-born day when the occupants would disembark, breathe in the luscious scents and squat upon their ends to write stories forever.He picked at the armoury of scabs covering his fevered feathered body only to find scabs that went right down as far as he could go using the business end of his beak. Scabs within scabs. Dead beetles laid in a trail of breadcrumbs for Hansel to follow his Gretel to the vast oven called Hell. A pair of scarlet wings was there tying and untying the loose ends of his imaginary heart.

The glass pyramid wanted to become a golden bowl. James and Henry owned both the thing itself and, therefore, the thing it wanted to be. They were brothers who had argued since childhood that most things in lie were too simple to over-complicate with arguments of taste. Fact was debatable enough. James polished the pyramid as if he were about to scry a fortune-teller's globe. Henry painted the scene whilst James modelled with the thing he polished, but Henry made the globe a bowl in mock golden moonlight shafting through the window like God's eyesight. Art is never a mirror, but simply a way of seeing things. Who gave whom red-eye remains a mystery as nobody had a camera for snaps.
The room had five sharp glass corners which the brothers cut their feet on. Before going to weary war over the remains with sanders and files.

Even dincopated music flows with unexpected predictability. It is as if music knows what is going to happen before it happens. I just hummed a tuneless tune, in the hope it would not commit me to its astrological harmonics. I wonder if I shall crack its coda or fathom how it made me dance to its tune. Music is fiction injected straight into the vein. Jerking like a puppet in the silence.

There was a feeling that not enough buffers had been put in place. The woman - in ancient smock - was bent over her needlepoint. The wireless was a huge valved contraption with illuminated dial showing Hilversum, Rabat, Luxembourg, Light Programme, Moscow ... and a woven loud-speaker. She intended to replace the old sound-wave mesh with the new workings of embroidery that she saw grown into illustrative shape beneath her flashing fingers; a porcupine of pins deftly left to find their own use in the tagging of the various lightweight guy-ropes of close-ordered sewing. The tuner was quickly wheeled from one side of the golden dial to the other on its sprung 'tight-rope' pulley action. The tuner knob was twirled by her tiny daughter who had just listened to a nursery rhyme read aloud on the Home Service ('Listen With Mother') and wanted to hear what else was 'on'. Just static interference hissing like gas. Polly put the kettle on.

Fame is not something you can weigh, even value. It is a fulfilling, often challenging, sense of being known beyond the baffles of one's home or inner circle. Firewalls notwithstanding. Fame knows no security. But no matter, fame lasts longer than death. No bluffing.
I'd bluffed my way towards the front. Someone held a sieve like a weapon. I found my dear darling Mum all wrapped up in a five pound note. I helped her out of the limelight

The inch inched nearer to an inch, ever a measure short or long of perfection. So tantalising, it seemed I'd died but my life was still incomplete.

If there were a dining club for shy diners - not versed in prandial repartee - would each member take advantage of the secret logistics of dumb waiter or serving hatch when providing a meal for just one other member, i.e. providing a single meal, by turns, in each of their own homes, while not revealing themselves to the diner visually, only culinarily?
A good question is one which you can't get to the end of and thus find yourself unable to answer it.

There is only one way through. A measure of its uniqueness is coming out the other side ... alone.

Baffle fenestration with subsequent transcatheter closure fails to stop old people choking on their own piss. Good to watch. It makes time stop.

Baffle fenestration is a very complex method used within literary catheters. Without it, the filter is in danger of working both ways. And I would be very much depleted by you reading this. As it happens, with the correct baffle in position, you are the one who is very enriched. And I stay proof against your reading attack. Thank God for Baffles!

Bafflement is a form of battlement.

During the cremation, the guests looked around to see where would allow them a bit of privacy to cry. Nobody likes being confused in public, and crying is the ultimate form of confusion. Or bafflement. Clouds the eyes. Upsets one’s logically unstoppable search for happiness. Logic declines bending to any emotions or motives that divert itself. Meanwhile, the corpse indulged in cry-creation in the full logical ambition of quenching flames.

Aboard the big ship Fable travelled a group of acrobats en route for a slot in the programme at the Cirque de L’une. They practised day and night on deck in contortions of uniform singularity, often with an empty ring of woven limbs about halfway down with two drooping long-necked heads above and an artful duopod configuration below.
“Old woman, overboard!” shouted the baffled shift-worker in the crow’s nest, when the act accidentally toppled into the moonstreams of the pre-dawn. Left to drown in unison beneath the golden wake.

Fanblades can whisk yester-eggs into oubliettes of spent imagination, making today tomorrow. I sit in the carrel deep in study of how baffles work in catheters. So engrossed-out, I fail to notice what I had in mind when I wrote the first sentence. Perhaps I am my own walking oubliette.

Buffered from pillow to pest, I share confusions with the dream that filters me both ways.

Baffles are baffles useful baffles in baffles counteracting baffles broadband baffles surveillance baffles of baffles your baffles internet baffles use.

As close as one comes towards using confusion or obfuscation as methods of filtering, the further one stays beyond the last vent or flap making the baffle. The fable is just the letters mixed up and its moral the f-word.

It was difficult to decide between the left and right baffles. So, I looked straight ahead and saw the triffid squawking: its head a turban of petals. Begging me not to understand. Blinding me to the blinkers it wore.

Frances found her favourite smile amongst the cat litter. She wondered how she could unlock its happiness for her own lips. To avoid swallowing it by rolling up her tongue as a buffer, she almost choked on the air left behind it, changing, as was unsurprising, into a gas in her stomach. Grim emoticon.

Baffles, as well as protecting against clear-sighted surveillance by readers of an author’s work, also serve to protect the author himself from the (a)(im)morality or other negativities portrayed in the fiction he has produced. You see, it is true that much fiction is ‘magic fiction’ with many 'cracks-in-the-pavement' and can bite both author or reader! Thus Baffles often serve as very useful valves or filters or buffers within even the most innocent-seeming of fables that you’ve written which may secretly harbour a sting. Anonymity/Nemonymity is just one form of a Baffle. There are varying degrees of Baffle. The ultimate being death (or if death is not possible) eventual self-imposed silence. And thus my final Baffle impends.

I saw the soldier step in the dogmuck. In the First World War, the trenches were full of such droppings from beast and fowl. Many dreamers collected it up in “doggy bags” to make their hard beds more comfortable in the dream whence the stuff came via the filters of sleep, dream and waking, back to the modern soft beds whence they came.

Whoever starts a Baffle with a question? That defeats the object. Mystifying a mystery makes it not a mystery at all. A swarm of Belief Fleas making the brain itch.

A strange evening: the moon looked like an opening through which angels could come and go.

I watched a dramatisation on British TV last night of Van Gogh stuffing his mouth with oodles of thick yellow oil paint squeezed straight out of the tube, then swallowing it over several minutes, then crunching on the tube itself, with yellow curds still oozing down his chin.
Later today I intend to eat all my stories.

A bellow in my hard of hearing ear was a way to alert me to a beneficial secret. The secret, you see, was an uncoded clouded Baffle. Near stone deaf, too.

My general view, notwithstanding yellow phlegm to write it:
Madness (as defined by the dictionary) is in all of us, except some harness it better.

May we hope to harness madness to climb mountains with.

Words are living creatures, which you can feel or suck or set moving with a literary motive force; they are insects flying in the headlight beams and splattering the windscreen in meaningful and meaningless geographies of collision, until the writer neatly ranks them as dead insects on the page like print.

This always becomes that eventually.

Angels sing loudest when their wings are unfolded, not flying, as such, but pinned to the dartboard by consecutively thrown darts from two contestants.

Too many baffles make a log-jam in God’s filter. Like an army of soldiers in a grave meant for one, raspberry spread as they claw ever deeper for their own share of the sandwich filling.

Tall stories. Long lives.

If you need a clue as to your own whodunnit, don’t ask the murderer who created you.

Abyss Mall was between two high-rise blocks and called by those with imagination 43rd Street.

Fuck is a word used too easily to shock. So, shock itself is no longer a short-circuited version of earthless wiring to the God of Fuck. We just lie back and shrug. Shock is dead. Shock was never born. Out-of-place sex could never shock … in hindsight.

My ambition is to be The Showman as described by Quisser. But that means I lose (myself in) the audience as soon as they start their appalling applause.

Life is harder when you think its should be soft.

Baffles are like gloves that only fit when you don't fit them.

A wet smile eventually becomes a dead smile.

Catch 49

Loaded, the gun misfires. Unloaded, it simply clicks. Jammed, the corpse lifts up its head.

Prime numbers are parthenogenetic. Fifty-one has monogamous sex, however, disguised as a menage a trois.

The sure foot is one that is confident of seeing beyond the ankle.