Temperament sags. It’s a holiday, the liquor stores are closed, and the cupboard is a fractured Arabia Deserta. A far cry, a close moan, to/from, javelins poised at the dawnlit gate of joy. Rapid, punchdrunk, reeling off of quotes spooky in their obscurity and dusted-off goldflake arrogance.
So, overanalyzing of the bastardization of one’s own soul, commence with a backward solo, reel down its self-conscious mercury-wise Niagara and fullstop the snare till the boys bleed out the ears and the girls empty their wee purses of toothbrush and penicillin.
Baron Sunday’s not in the mood for fairy tales.
Neither’s Peter.
Nor Simon.
Nor Fiona.
Nor Puss.
Nor Jocko.
Nor Emma.
Nor Mimi.
Nor Roger.
Nor Gwendolyn.
Nor Gwenju.
Nor Adelaide.
Nor Melissa-Giselle-Meredith and the other sultry walk-ons gone Queen for a day.
Churl?
What of him?
He can’t hear us.
He’s warming his ears.
Anisette?
She can’t hear us.
She’s warming his ears.
Who’ve we left out?
At the glory-hole a bloodshot eye.
Pleading: let me in.
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Last words.
Reminders.
Chaplets.
Cassian’s 12-tone 12-step: there is no perfect prayer if the religious perceives that she is praying.
Gwenju keeps his growling to himself. For the time being.
Seated on the guest bed beside see-through Belinda, Gwendolyn wipes the blood from her daughter’s battered mouth. But there’s no stanching the seep. Each deep word a pussed varicose of crimson.
Millennial wind keens lonely from the backyard.
The garden coated in an inch-deep uniformity of dust.
Gwenju’s warning comes too late.
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Where are they? At the hour of Death’s proposed strike? Situate the lambs, now that the scythe is shining.
Peter, confessing his love for Fiona.
Puss, confessing his love for Fiona.
Fiona, Fiona, Fiona.
They pick that svelte bone blanch-clean and suck up to a casablancan denouement. The bitch isn’t worth it. And who, al fin del desastre, who are you to disagree?
So break out a new casque of Sated Python!
Simon looks in a strange girl’s mirror. And sees the man he’s always wanted to be. No regrets. No experiences which, once desired, have gone untasted, undigested. A happy man and more than ready to die. To taste the ultimate macaroon of Desire. Or will it prove the penultimate snack? That’s optimism for you. Though he’d prefer to do it like the Pope. Not quite shriven. But naked, yes. With a bottle or two of the cheapest 3eme monde puddling his dreamfree brain. And a girl, any girl, twined teddyless in his arms.
Meredith, sins now scrubbed away, sits up in bed. Grading papers. Humming. Softly. ‘…… Death, where is Thy sting? …..’
Punkette has descended from her first brush with Switzerland’s chemical gift to the world. She doesn’t think she’ll trip again but keeps the windows open, life too short for dotted lines.
She’s trying hard to memorize the scarier bits of her adventure. For the ears of Stuart. And the lips of Brandon. And the eyes of Jamie. Who she’s decided not to let pop her after all. (Again, no dotted lines.) She’ll tell them during their morning cigarette break. Between shop class and Latin.
Giselle’s dad is busy upstairs, all loving fumblethumbs and fury, in desperate search for that latest PTA pamphlet.
“How To Tell If Your Child Is On Drugs: Hints, Helpful Icebreakers, Symptoms & Signs, Horror Stories, Shaming Tactics ; complete with updated glossary, including such teen-terms as ‘louche’, ‘glom’, ‘stoke’, & ‘scourgette’.
Downstairs, Mom withers away. Having first put on Side 2 of the Frigtones’ Klassic Kingdom, live at Erehwon. A most peculiar, dessicate, and irritating anecdote about her own punk days.
-This scar on my earlobe? The one I always told you I got when I was crawling under the barbed wire fence at the Erin Go Bragh Folk Festival cause my date was a jerk and it was way past my curfew? Actually, darling, and forgive me for ever lying to you but you see I was stoned at the time yes (!) high (!) and my boyfriend, this was before your father of course, well he wanted to mess (!) around in the cemetery behind the local synagogue and I’d made the mistake cause I was stoned (!) at the time yes high (!) of wearing these really nifty swastika earrings and
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Plitseskaia, Fonteyn, Farrell, Fracci, Pavlova.
Delicacy spirals to brute.
Adelaide’s cigarette smokes unattended, tipped tipsy from the damp ashtray.
Adelaide, brief convulsions done with, lies crumpled between bar and barstool. One leg flung up, high heel caught on the bar ledge. Legs spread, though not in invitation. Her purple panties split with a crescent moon torn aloft the left buttock.
All this and more Jocko sees. His vantage point crepuscular. His extremities gone numb. He can’t believe it.
Emma, he murmurs. Emma, soundlessly he murmurs. He can’t turn his head. The purple of Adelaide’s crotch is darkening. As is the migraine free-zone over Jocko’s right eye.
He’s been hit before. But not. Eight years ago. Shoulder. But not. Eleven years ago. Calf. Rookie all nerves right on his ass going up deaddark stairwell. But.
A twitch of feeling in his hand. He lets go his wallet. Emma, he sighs. His eyes are closing and he can’t stop them. He wants to think of Emma. But darkness intervenes. And stuffs his mouth with Steve McQueen.
what the hell happened?
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Fiona stretches. In the sun. On the driveway.
Outside of Mimi and Roger’s.
A particular stretch. Left hip to asphalt. Left knee to breast. Right leg at full taut length. Towards Mecca. Quite a stretch. It’s the one called: jaded married lover buggers bimbi as she piledrives her blind sister’s shadow. At least according to Puss. Puss’s names for her poses, her frozen tabular aerobics are fanciful and nasty. Fiona relies on mere heraldry. Thus:
(Fiona): fimbriated bend, with slightest fess dancetty, ornamented with sparks and magpies.
(Puss): in the mirror’s reflection her anonymous partners lift her legs … they watch in lecherous silence as her soul disappears in a cum-loud scum-cloud.
(Fiona): saltire cantoned with multiple charges, a scattering of greyhound drops and the subtlety of cross first potent, then voided.
(Puss): stockings muddied where she kneels, lost in the task of a deep blowjob beneath il Ponte di Sospira … Venice’s clammy ambiance like the suck of impenetrable shadows … while fastidious paws play ‘chopsticks’ on the jerk and sway of her damp red hair.
(Fiona): crowned lion (with leopard’s head) rampant statant on a mount.
(Puss): she pirouettes and claps, a twelve-inch dildo warming in the toaster oven, her boyfriend trussed across the kitchen table, his whimpers a lubricated minute away from a crescendoed screech two octaves up.
(Fiona): a cooling down romp, her Virgin’s chemise, demi-volant.
(Puss): winter sunlight, late afternoon … her spine an etched seductive thrill, her long fingers loud in the clutch of her gripping groove.
(Fiona): nightingale’s tongue with sawtooth edges.
(Puss): -O holy crucified Christ! she yells, as the big-bollocked centurion drives it in and bellows –Inri!
(Fiona): trembled stern of a withered hollyhock.
(Puss): -It’s four in the morning, sweetie … are we going for the world record?
(Fiona): orle of small devils, gorged on a roast popinjay.
(Puss): she watusis from frug to twist as the telephone drones its unattended frustration … no one’s home … mouthful of sudden sperm.
(Fiona): wooden horse, suspended from a gallows, feathery tail feathered skywards.
(Puss): grinning like a Trojan nutter, she takes a hammering up the ass, strong swift strokes from some wall-eyed bloke she’d never dream of being seen with in public.
(Fiona): blinded stag issuing from a gate.
(Puss): her sunglasses fog with heat …-A shampoo and handjob, the cashier-girl nods, indicating a door at the end of the hall.
(Fiona’s favorite): purple palm, ivory digits, glove with fingers turned upwards.
(Puss): Goethe-quoting wandervogel, death’s-head helmet and dropped lederhosen, cock out, thick and stout as a stevedore’s flashlight, tittyfucks her beneath a groaning linden tree.
Mimi and Roger’s neighbors.
A liberal lot for the most part.
Even so, the scene in the driveway!
A writhing, a quivering girl.
A hope and promise.
Fiona, all-unknowingly, has brought the strongest of them jaw-gawpingly, girdle-gropingly to their knees.
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Imagining Melissa. Performing enthusiastically, if leisurely, the act this numeric episode signifies [* in the manuscript version, spoilsport! … viz: LXIX, which loses the visual of 6, of 9, their close and roly-poly congress.] Whose tops? Whose bottoms? Or is it a sideways and egalitarian fig-eating fete which Melissa enjoys with her new best friend, Wendy Hook? What does it matter? Melissa is free.
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Mimi lifts her fingers to her mouth. Cups a delicate belch. Postcoital breakfast most divine. White wine with lime and fizz. Toasted bagel with goat’s cheese, purple onions, capers, and wafered stripes of raw salmon.
Her husband gazes at the ruins of his coquefabue. A bacon, ham, and sausage torte, topped with béchamel and orange.
Their fingers twine upon the tablecloth. Their tangible arousal an embarrassment to those boothed nearest them.
-Let’s go home, Mimi whispers, her tongue a flick of satin sin.
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(Postcard X)
‘Madonna Of The Pomegranate’. Housed in the Uffizi, Florence. Painted by Sandro Botticelli (1444/5-1510). Round panel, diameter 143.5. Possible dates of composition: 147?, 1482, 1487. Her extended seraphic hand uncovers the split pomegranate in her lap, her baby’s fingers tinted and wet, dipped in the seed slit.
Above them, a burnished hood, the baldachin glories in the submarine movement
of fluctuating light. Botticelli’s rooms, unlike the Tour Maubergeon (Poitiers),
rich in living shadow. Cool to the eyes, the smaragdus sleeves of her immobile attendants dotted with flakes of jasper, cool to the eyes in the somnolent radiance.
Innocent of heavy costume jewelry hers is a natural regime. Lucent, the gleam of the exposed sea. Her extended hand, frevol vergua, tinted to the shade of living pomegranate.
A, (as in ‘apples & oranges & pomegranates’),
bitch with brat, twat with snot, Madonna with child.
Which one are you? Which one is He? Or do you,
touched by the spirit of Liberty, Equality & Fraternity,
flip a counterfeit coin ere each clinch?
Holly Whodunnit