Orson Welles when he was not himself, or perfectly, in the shadow orgasm
the Third Man, titled like that to
complete the time-sensitive irrationalism, of Austria, Vienna as the intelligence once pigs
      but now
sausage, Harry Lime, he did not create but it was what he chose to do,
compete on the black market,
after the war, to the detriment, horrible but completely thinkable, of so many
children, which the British
investigator was so shrewd to render vivid, lighting the potential American
patsy hero for a visit to say Look
at these, Undone by Harry’s defective, diluted penicillin, to convince him, The
Friend, the dupe who was
only out to convince himself Orson Welles was still alive, a twin of a
complicated shadow, more than even
merely American, what the box office has had a field and a day
discounting, sheepishly incomplete as
Othello, in sleazy overweight and Southwest in Evil, the Touch of, as if the
presence of which were
apparent in so rudimentary, undressed an act, so simple, without harm
but at the expense of the kind it
tends to claim, simpletons, like the leading man, easily upstaged, in the upbeat
and charming Ferris wheel
scene when Harry pulls on his face to reveal himself Orson, always and only
ever, and to double
conscience into an indifferent, profitable blister, self-knowledgeable as
any instrument capable of talking away
from, or is it to through, the notions that regionalize in itself, not seamless or
home person, just figment
justifications and habits passing through, into one corpse then another,
Like ants, at the laze of an elegance
which comes back a hand, Lime quips, the pun sprinkled generously on them,
preservative but without a
stitch of resistance, my money’s enough to make me invisible, tucked in a
Russian leading woman’s
laconic pining, patched to betray him but then at the last moment before
the British and local officers
can nab him in the appointed cafe at the finale, calls out to free him, and
off running rends him, enormous
typist’s fingers projected like a fugitive’s elongations on the alley wall,
everyone inside the audience
cheering against themselves, the authorities, who are also chasing, down into
the photogenic busyness
of noir indigestion and go-seek beneath the city, Orson breathing loud at
the point, known for sure that
this is almost every single character chasing him, including Rosebud, the
indistinct, the magnanimous,
in a different movie and mentally unconcerned with snow, where glide pre-
exists any hill worth the climb
against trickles of what betrays the telltale mess of winter, loose and
unabridged in its falling, typical
as his own, when he has to, dramatically but since empathy has been removed
by his person as talk, tragically
stiffed, a muse slumped in his jagged climb from a sewer, on a ladder,
left to explain the name that
hangs in the credits, without a line to lead how feeling should steal, Here
lies.