Pastellito, Opioid, Peladan. The stage names of Baron Sunday’s idiot legion.
They’ve grown restive during their long wait. Restive and horny. The Big Man snaps his fingers with something akin to impatience. Waiting, waiting. The rhythm clocked out by His nicotine digits is a barely-remembered nursery rhyme. Some tender lullaby. Filled with panthers and testicle-mangling bogeymen. From some barely-remembered civilization He ate a trillion dawns ago.
His devils must be mollified.
He’ll give ‘em the Duchess.
She freezes in the cold cast of His quondam et futurum gaze. They watch each other across the hood of the limousine. On which she’s just laid out her dress to dry. Small hope, that.
The Duchess of Alba shines nude in the weak sun. Black hair drawn out, if not to fiery points, then to a minor electrocution equally worthy of the trio’s trousered truncheons.
She takes a small step sideways. Shackled softly by the white stockings collapsed about her shins. White on white, in a nicely ramped rumple. Her eyebrows are like a child’s sketch of seabirds. Her sweet tooth keeps her lavish. Plump in all the right places. She licks a crumbly trail of marzipan paste from her little fingers. Takes another step sideways. Nipples brown as bonbons. The left one tastes of strong black coffee. The right of piquant paprika. His palate’s memory tingles, counts the passing hours, passing daze (no, not sic).
Duchess yawns, shrugs, daintily fingers the mole two inches above her navel. She’s a real hammock-pounder, His sprawling royal pet. Pussy sweet with attitude. The Baron’s voice catacombs to a subterranean growl.
-Hop to it, my Deathless babes. Give Daddy a show.
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Gwendolyn’s astigmatism most pronounced.
Her gold-brown eyes fixed in standing pools of tears.
She takes it like a saint.
A daughter’s sad and eloquent abuse.
-My lids were coppered.
The lay of my hands, ivory and chilled.
About the 3rd knuckle of my sinister index a circlet of grey.
Skin rubbed dead from a much earlier, much less final fall.
A priest droned nearby.
I could not turn my head to curse him his piety.
To curse his body odor, his misplaced sense of irony.
He understood (I grudged him that much) the depraved wintering spirits that made desolation my crown, the ravages that broke the sapling of my back.
Those bachelors, your brothers (the ministers, my uncles) would document that agony, quarrelling endlessly their mottoes and peevish citations.
Alive, I would have been amused to find such disagreement, such insistence on precision …….
…… which goblet’s swallowed drops sped poison through my veins ……
…… which giggling, blue-veined prospect looked over her shoulder
to smirk at my pumping out of my soul, lips bubbled with a rosy
telltale froth …….
my favored destined debaucheries so broad in horizon, so rich a motherlode, that the choice of final landfall, the question of which gilt vein to tap, productive of long hours of conspiratorial disputation.
They cannot know Death was my virgin.
Was mother and father to unacted-upon lust and an ambitious agenda of eventual dipsomania, the churlish flashflood of bad manners like an after-dinner mint.
My white and constant Companion, whom they never saw, here, at my elbow, scarlet tongue flickering my ear.
Now, at last, the compact reigns eternal.
I am pregnant with Him, for He eats me from the inside out.
And as He feeds He breathes new sorrows through an Italianate marinade of ancient memory.
Of my father, whom you sore mistreated, Mummy.
Retentive only of lilacs, ice-ridden landscapes, and once, a shriek from the top of the stairs, cursing that hateful prick you’d married.
And what of the hateful prick, my doting Daddy?
Saddle-sore and childish playboy, from whom nothing could induce your forgiveness.
And yet, you made the syllables of his name my final, whispered sound.
And was it, as your troubled conscience contends, delirium?
Or shock at finding myself mired in the slippery pool of my own refined and accidental blood?
It echoes still, you know, nor will these stains ever wash clean.
I am eaten well away, unattended by professional mourners, sheltered from the choir of frat-boy castrati, hymning your womanly catalogues of experience.
So may the tune be pretty, your lovers strong, and may God damn you to long, long life.
Gwenju cowers beneath the kitchen table.
i am but a small dog a small dog am i
otherwise i’d gnaw and fang the ghostly bitch
to bow wow silence
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Detectives Hobsbaum and Muir.
They rest their world-weary bums on the hood of a squad car. Nursing their separate afflictions. One viral, one bacterial. Impotent before the barbarism of the human condition. Some monotheist’s private joke. You can’t help yourselves. Come Unto Me. My arms outstretched, my embrace the eternal option. Not that you deserve it, swine.
The volume outside the abattoir of Tattler’s Tavern lessening at last.
Inside, the three white-sheeted corpses are being made ready for conveyance to the City Morgue. There to be I.D.ed and further desecrated.
Eric Muir’s hot chocolate no longer hot. David Hobsbaum’s overly sweetened coffee standard government issue. The two make a simultaneous show of minor movement at the approach of a uniform.
-Hey, Jimenez, Hobsbaum asks, what’ve you got for us?
The young cop, notepad open, smiles.
-Gutierrez, sir. The name’s Rudy Gutierrez.
-Yeah, right, Hobsbaum nods.
Too bored to patronize, too old to chance. Gutierrez continues to smile, glancing down at his pathological scrawl.
-Well, sir, there’s some disagreement among the witnesses as to details, but the shoot-out’s pretty well established.
Hobsbaum grunts, sips, chokes with manly stoicism. Muir, granite-faced. Nothing sinks in anymore. A state of permanent shock. Rudy blazes, a cold and bracing synopses.
Sgt. Glass was the first to be shot. A round in the heart, killed instantly. Detective Pitt was apparently holding his wallet in his right hand, no chance to go for his weapon. Shot once in the face and once in the left ankle as he was going down. And then?
Here’s where the quibbles begin. One witness’s ‘Titus Andronicus’ is another’s ‘Comedy of Errors’.
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The right arm of Michelangelo’s David. Just slightly too long? Slightly too tense? For an arm clearly at rest?
Thus, Peter’s arm, draped down Puss’s spine. Puss, to Peter’s affectionate amusement, snores.
-….cio-cio san, cio-cio san …
Peter awake, angry in the same detached, groggy, kicked-in-the-head way that he supposes Saul-slash-Paul must have felt, buttsore in the gravel and chewing dust some 20 km. out of Damascus. Peter, dozy, his anger pasteled to puerile. Peter murmurs.
-I always wanted to know …
His chin lapses atop Puss’s Lee Harvey Oswald haircut.
Shirley Temple. Nefertiti. Between them, how many Kiki de Montparnasses?
He cribs a new possibility. The wasteland, all-purpose Gobi desert of healing.
Fiona: Lost City of Atlantis.
Puss: Agonistes.
-I’ve always wanted to know what it would be …
All things come together. The big bang. The universal orgasm. The final definition. In some circles. Of God? Of Death?
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-I’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to be married …
Simon’s belly drums the backside of his doped-down anonymous squeeze. Simon restrains a fart. It escapes nonetheless, causing little offense to gods or eavesdropping mice. He wakes himself up. To the harmonics of his arsehole and sinuses in trumpeting nasal choir. She dawns upon him slowly. As she speaks, over her shoulder, sleepy, smiling.
-Rest, she says, relax …
-crab and bacon omelet … then we lazy-fuck and then …
Her shrug frees her nude and slim and junkied beside the slight seasickness of the rust-sprung mattress.
-and then …
Her hand is the hard and true descent of pure unspoiled sadness.
-then, we talk … Simon.
On the holy heads of Stes. Catherine, Lawrence, Stanislaus et al., … upon the impossibilities of canonization-as-intestinal-flu, he, for the first time has heard his Christian name pronounced by a …
Yes, Simon? By a what?
Call her a whore and you’ll surely burn in Hell.
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It’s the silent hour. Towards four in the morning. If one puts one’s ear against the window one finds that the glass amplifies all that is outside. The river’s lisped, sigh-heavy slop. The grate of heavy manchestered chains over the stones of the sidewalk. Not a matter of noise. Nor music. The disinterested hum of catatonic stars.
A young nurse. (Wendy.)
Doesn’t wait on the morning. She sits upon the narrow bed, back against the white and dusty wall as the moon drops down a sperm-white triangle of light. At the heart of luna’s illumination she is seated, face turned towards the shut, triple-bolted window. Her body a somber column of absolute stillness.
Melissa (‘Don’t-Ask-Me-My-Name’) sleeps soundly, sexual glamour on brief leave of absence. Thin sheet tight over her lifted, dreaming knees. She keeps her body to herself. The good manners of a Constantinopolitan courtesan. With pinprick gestures which cry out for exclamation points.
Wendy brushes her friend’s hair back along the pillow, whispers.
-D’ya know what I’d like … ?
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Fiona dances on the driveway. Her hands. Peculiarly inept. Spastic. Almost. Like an Emperor playing golf (seen the pix, have we?) Sweeping away the cobwebs from the imaginary mirror into which she. Gazes. Simpers. Plunges.
Fiona tapdances. Her shuffle cooler than the whitest of white Negroes might pull off after the silence descends, the cigarettes go out, the music scratches into the final burps and wavelets of ultimate loneliness and all the invitees are discovered to have been long gone, far away, not even the echo of departing laughter loaned a snail’s traced currency.
Fiona may be a virgin but. A dope she’s not.
Fiona dances the cat. The valerian strut. Valerian? Valerian. Cats like it. And what cats like grows, wombed with blessing. In a garden where walls rise up. Furnished with mottoes that die a natural death. Ignored by subsequent generations, spared inherited scorn. Valerian. Minor princeling found in sandy places. Plucked root. Corymb bleeds red and white freckles. Cats leap walls. Valeriana oficinalis.
Fiona dances the valerian cat.
In Mme. Tussaud’s darkness. Much shivering.
Salome hisses.
-What’s the bitch got that I ain’t?
Decollated Head (stage desc: plastic eyelids swog clicketty-click back, revealing blue Semitic eyes, going quickly amber-embered). The body (headless) of St. John the Baptist.
Much shivering.
Fiona twirls, stamps, shrugs.
Valerian cat-dance done.
John the B’s toothless oval won’t cry ‘uncle’.
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(Postcard XI)
Slipped, accidentally, into a purchase in a bookstore just off Tottenham Court Road. Used as a bookmark till now. A Chinese ink drawing of Subotai Bahadur,
the ablest of Genghis Khan’s generals. Although under the nominal leadership of Batu, Genghis’ grandson, it was Subotai who punked the math, did the homework for the European campaign. In less than six weeks in the spring of 1241 he laid waste all the countries between the Baltic and the Adriatic, and defeated five of the finest Christian armies ever fielded. In the drawing Subotai performs a step from some military jig, chubby hands mime the throttling of pansied princes.
Ha ha, A,
guidebooks never were your trip, were they?
Walk thru Wales with me? This, out of
Geraldus Cambrensis’ Itinerarium Kambriae …
(it made me think of you, dry-eyed & sweating)
Bunch of monks sitting around the fire swapping stories.
One of ‘em says: -Before Jesus Christ was born in the flesh
devils had great power over human beings. When He came,
this power was greatly diminished. They were dispersed,
some here, some there, for they fled headlong from His presence.
Some hurled themselves into the sea. Others hid in hollow trees
or in the cracks of rocks. I remember that I myself
jumped down a well.
Dizzy Donna