Helms and I

It is Helms, die anderen Helme, that things happen to.
I schlepp through Boca Raton–perhaps mechanically;
like a rat–then freeze to peek at the sun; rumor of Helms
arrives by mail, or I spot his title on some drifting list of
derelicts and [sic] undependables. My own appetence,
hunger, appetite (why should we call it lust?) gallops to-
wards deserts of the West, shabby ruins, trophies full of
holes, the maps of beggars, the scrapped papers of my
lost and doomed forebears who have already been de-
livered to the perverse asperity of winter’s sun. The other
Helms shares my weaknesses, but in a proud, overweening
way that alters their bitten roots, gnawed realities, torn souls
into the trappings of a pantomimist, soubrette, or barnstormer.
While I grant that Helms has written a fine sum of sturdy
pages, those pages will not redeem me, perhaps because
the sterling in them no longer applies to any particular original.
Beyond this, what of me survives in that other individual? Fitfully,
by fragmentary intervals, I have offered all to him despite the
wicked, miscreant means by which he belies and warps every
little thing. In this empire of his, I shall withstand, weather, under-
go as a gentle type of fugue, falling away into the pages of this
other Helms as (ist es nicht er, sondern ich) who writes this page?