THE FIFTH BOOK

Text of the "FIFTH BOOK" written in Japanese on the body of the fat American.

THE BOOK OF THE EXHIBITIONIST

 A gaudy volume, gross and florid,
too many pages stuffed into too
fleshy covers. An overweight volume.
It's greasy with expanded effort.

Each word is pumped up with consonant cholesterol.
It's full of fat words.
The pages cream with subcutaneousfat,
New letters are guilded like showy teeth,
making comprehension constipated
and exorbitantly metalled.
This book needs to lose weight.
If you want to drop it,
watch your feet.
It's a toe-breaker.
Its own weight would crush its spine.

The pages have been liberally scented,
but the aroma has palled and grown stale.
The pages smell of sour glue,
or the bad breath of a liar
determined
to spend time smiling with sticky gums.

 All sweet taste and no enduring substance.
All glitter and gases.
This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower
which smells so bad after
a good hot water soaking,
like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet
incompatibles blended incongruously
to no purpose.

Chapter One promises excess.
Chapter Twelve proves the particular promise,
truly wearisome.

A reader is required to sweat his way to

comprehension,
avoiding the craters of hyperbole that scar its pages.
Every adjective is underlined
as though incapable of sitting still on the page,
incapable of being an equal to its neighbour.

Its humour is heavy and vulgar
full of expletives commanding you
to appreciate its wit.