Recounting what happened to Saint Stephan after he escaped from an army of Lossers in Los Angeles back at the start of January 2017
WORKING TITLE: SAINT STEPHAN ESCAPES LOS ANGELES, L.A.
Other possible titles in the alternative:
Saint Stephan Escapes The Lossers
Thrown off the End of America
The Wastrel Land
Celia, Celia, Celia Shits
Burnt Stephan
West Cokehead Losser
The Jap Salvages
No Kidding
Four Quarters Ain’t Worth a Buck These Days
^^^
PASSUS 1
As he’d clambered down the cliffs Pacific
Matters weren’t looking more terrific,
Star-burned sky, ocean’s swell, and coastline sand
Severally layering the end of land,
And Saint Stephan trapped against the water,
A vile Losser horde concedes no quarter,
Amazing in a grotesque way, this horde,
Or hundred, fit for a lunatic ward,
Rasping “nyug-nyug” as rockface they rappel,
Like rabid pigmen freaks spawned outta Hell,
Piglike men, if they men could be yclept,
Whan sacks of bacon fat are sooner kept
For our impressions of malevolent
Knobs swung down on ropes in tireless descent,
Defective copies landing on the beach
To nab Saint Stephan by collective reach
And end the lad, who’d shot their duplicates,
They, each a bug that crushed, proliferates.
PASSUS 2
Only hours and strange passing days before
It’d been, Saint Stephan went out the door
The film studio of Nicolas Cage,
HQ-ed in L.A., a risk-taking sage,
Cerebrating over Stephan’s screenplay,
In which the boss had also had a say,
Wrapping his mind around Dickerson, Dirk,
A role Stephan vowed Nick Cage couldn’t shirk,
When up from the rain a Losser appears
Seething before them in stretch-pants from Sears,
His spectacles fogged, his drool-smacking lips,
His fat arms float up from blubbery hips,
His hands balled in fists, his envious heart,
Bespeaking the meanness of his dull art,
Gurgling vicious from untalented mind,
Rasping through foul mouth with words most unkind,
Expressive of will greedy and depraved,
To claim desired works, by which he’s enslaved,
When up from the alley, out of the rain,
A Losser crops up on the floor again,
And balloons yet a third in studio,
So, Nick Cage says, “Hey, Saint, you’d better go!”
^^^
‘But was it not,’ Saint Stephan recalled, ‘just
‘Days since we dug in, in freedom and dust,
‘Retrieving machine guns out of a tree,
‘In The Goldstein Fields, where we would now see,
‘A fury of Lossers on their attacks,
‘And naught behind, but the wind at our backs?’
And Cage urging, “Don’t think, Saint, just shoot!”
‘So, we played our lead like notes on a flute,
‘And one by one saw each Losser go down,
‘Blasting out their guts, outside Tinseltown.’
PASSUS 3
Into the ocean forced, Stephan now stands
Some distance offshore, atop shifting sands,
Submerged to his waist in midwinter’s swells,
Brought in by squalls and the tolling of bells,
The cold bracing waves keep chopping away,
And Saint Stephan caught in their freezing spray,
As a plague of maniacs line the coast,
Scared of the water, like it was some ghost,
Waiting for Stephan to come out or drown
They grumble as one bellyaching clown.
^^^
But through his numbing passion in the sea,
Saint Stephan believes he’s spotted a lee,
Where he might shelter, and no Losser go,
To escape therefrom – the hamlet below!
He swims out and leaves the Lossers behind,
One mile, two, of the nautical kind.
He gives up to God at around the third,
Only to land on some curious bird:
Just manner of saying; no bird at all,
But a submersible, glass-domed withal,
Lashed to rocks shaping tranquil pool intake,
‘A rich man’s toy; some demon’s ploy; a fake?’
Nay, but lazing in Poseidon’s wake, he
Finds signs of spook-trade legitimacy,
A stealthy craft with Blu-Lady for name.
“You good swim, yeah,” starts a Japanese dame,
In a blue wetsuit showcasing her tits,
The trick being to prove it barely fits…
“Aah, I know you, Stephan Saint, I big fan,
“You go Ema-Rin, you be happy man…”
^^^
And so, in short, the tiny submarine
Got them to Japan, a jazzy nighttime scene,
But no sooner they light upon the dock,
Stephan grabs Ema-Rin, and whips out his –
^^^
Steve Kowalski: Hey! I’m not doing this anymore!
Saint Stephan: Why?! What’s the matter, Steve? That was going so well!
SK: First off, because I don’t believe you. Second of all, I don’t care for being cornered by my own poetic gift – where I’m better than you, and both you and I know it – into writing a paean glorifying your genitals, heroic couplets in the Chaucerian mode, no less, because, I don’t know why, because you wanted to be amused. Yeah, I get it now, and I’m not having it!
SS: As for your poetic talent, Steve, there is no doubt. That’s why I asked you to do this. But as to the matter of the veracity of the story, I’m telling you the truth. After all, I’m Saint Stephan. I have a reputation to maintain.
SK: Anyway, the very last line, the meter went long by half-a-foot…
SS: And so apposite, wouldn’t you say? Can’t help you there, buddy. I will admit, there are advantages to being a half-ghost and half-man…
SK: Ah, shut it, will you? And what did you do to that poor girl?
SS: I made her cry!
SK: Yeah, I bet you did. You fucking raped her!
SS: Unlike yourself, Steve, who could only write an immature wet-dream fantasy poem about it, but never –
SK: Yeah! I know! And you were the morally superior voice in my ear that tried to stop me. But, oh, my, just look at Mr. Do-As-I-Say-Not-As-I-Do, now… I’m not allowing this to publication!
SS: Well, that’s too bad, Steve. It’s really very good. And it’s all true, every bit of it, because I do not tell lies. But it’s not the whole story, only half of it. If that’s how you feel, though… And anyway, come to look at it, you shift between tenses, from past to present, then back again… so… maybe…
SK: Oh, so now you’re going to criti – Hey, listen! It’s called poetic license. I can do whatever I want. Furthermore, yes, I slide in and out of tenses, because it adds dimensionality to the action, pulling it forward, into the present, so that we are in the midst of it, and then pushing it back into the past, so that we are reminded of its place as a bold tale of yore.
SS: But, what about the rest? How I got back to Ukraine? Having gone all the way around the world?! Imagine that! I mean – just imagine! Don’t you think that’s great? Isn’t that worth a ballad, a… a… song of praise, a Beowulf-like epic of heroic eminence?!
SK: Ah, no. The part with the Jap chick is the best; everything after that is anticlimax; it loses steam, gets boring. And I, therefore, lose interest, therefore inspiration, so it’s not going into the poem: take it, or leave it. I couldn’t go, nor would I have gone, much farther; a few more lines, at most, at best, beyond the poem’s present halt.
But, here’s the rest of it, Saint, according to you:
Continued directly in the next frame, which is to say 4.62. Go there! Yeah!
Filed by Steve Kowalski, The Commix Writer Formerly Known as The Rational Man, April 4, 2026