They.
Is.
A.
Shimmering.
A shimmering binary language. Capable of daring. Daring to collapse. Fusing to recklessness. Reckless enough to be.
Mimi and Roger.
Patting each other’s nicknamed bellies. Post-breakfast. Theirs is the star. Theirs the season to be naked in. Collateral of passion that hollers: Flay the world, fuckers! This is Love!
Their hunger adult, unashamed. Vows replenished, dearth of faith curtailed. They speak the royal ‘we’ on impulse. Heraldic copulating couple. Goldenrod rampant as trivial detail dots the eye of husband and wife. Penitent sinners, couchant. Couchant, shimmering and smiling.
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Peladan, Opioid, Pastellito. Stripped and quivering, slithery genital knots uncurling to stiffen, stand, and nudge the sun, pillaring towards the dustchoked sky.
They are shed their gaudy vestments faster than the Fall of France. Even He’s impressed, Great Fuhrer of Jade.
He shoos them into the cavernous backseat. Their quartet choreography a cripple’s delight.
Still.
Even for a command performance.
This gangbang whiffs of rehearsal.
Baron Sunday’s eyebrows give the game away. The left one an arch. Pyramid of Giza. The other a more subtle curve. Salt-drenched assassinated slug.
Must He now recharge the batteries in the palatial cameras, the villa video-cams? Recastrate His eunuchs? Harrow His harem to reborn fidelity?
The overture’s brief as the show groans underway. Pastellito seizes the low ground. His head and shoulders hidden by the trestled drinks cabinet. His El Greco torso a whited sepulcher. There’s nothing tentative in the first movement. Nothing winsome in the way he winches Duchess wenchlike down. Her goblet gapes in its descent. O shocking pink! If mice could talk! The corpsegreen column of Pastellito’s loaf drives up and in. The shredded cotton of her stockings veils his baubles like wanton baby’s breath. His hands dig in her waist with a white and praxitelic clutch. Fingernails fantastically filthy. He quakes her to him like a machine. Hard to believe that he was once human.
Peladan makes now his fair-weather move. Cunning, typical. A flanking action. Hannibal’s Balearic genius at Cannae. His thumbs press hard the hollows at the back of Duchess’s knees. The tense, moist twins the Baron knows so well. Peladan’s tongue is long and black. It bull’s-eyes the wrinkled wonder of her dainty exit. The first stroke leaves her squirming. By the fourth her rippled button has an ocular, a weepy look. Blind socket for crows to pick, for Peladan to lick.
Somewhere, with a quincunx of weeping willows billiarding the trapped ‘do-me’ wind into a buffet of rising richness (the sort of perfume that enters by the ears, the eyes, rather than the nostrils), somewhere, close to Carroll’s Alice’s reemergent dip from out the hatter’s cunnyhole, something falls thumping from the turnip truck.
A patina of irrational disgust discolors Sunday’s vulture-eye.
-What’s wrong with that sentence? He gawks.
All shrug-shouldered. All gutter-language. All: ‘you’ll get yours …!’
-When will you respect Me?
There is no humility in the question. Nor is there any true hunger for information. It is the affectionate statement of proprietary worry.
I would kiss the ring. I have kissed the ring. But as to ‘when’?
When Wassily Kandinsky paints dogs playing cards. That’s when.
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Gwenju pees upon the bluebells.
Menstrual blood scallops the wallpaper.
Where mopey Belinda blended, fading.
Mummy pedals furious.
Places Gwenju cannot go.
Dust roues cakey where pee pummels blue.
Gwenju sneezes and barks.
Happy, unhappy, something in between.
Only Gwendolyn might properly say which.
Not damned, Mum.
Not damned, but blessed.
Ever and always.
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One witness’s mink-muff another’s thunderous herd.
Tattler Tavern’s domino-players. The senior of the triad of ancients (along with pinball-humping Tattoo Boy) swear that Adelaide Querelle was bringing the barrel of her revolver up to her right temple. The junior of the dominoes insists she was going for her demi-done cigarette. The third claims the shots came from behind the cigarette machine, bang-a-flash! bang-a-flash! and he shows them.
And the bartender, Mitchum Tattler, 6’4”, 310-lb. former All-Oxon pro-wrestler ……… where was he?
Ducked down behind the bar as of the moment the shooter pulled the piece from between her legs. By his own admission. (i.e. … ‘do I look stupid?’)
His wife, then? Keiko Tattler, 5’3”, 83-lb. one-time acrobat (of some talent too, if the Okinawan graffiti is to be believed).
Other duties as assigned. As in: quarrelling Querelle to quiescence. While her husband bulked his intelligent cowardice. Deafening discharge of the family heirloom. Grandpa Mishima’s hunting rifle. (Modified Yoshitsune model, assembly-line circa 1931.) Adelaide’s abdomen blown Holland Tunnel. A hole big enough for a dove to fly through, if so gruesomely inclined.
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Hobsbaum and Muir. Weary, unyouthful cops. Beside their battered, urb-blasted, baby-blue Buick, pausing. Muir elbows his partner with a locker-room’s brisk tenderness.
-Shitty afternoon for the good guys, David, he says.
Hobsbaum shrugs, balls his fists, relaxes, tenses, relaxes.
-Sorry about Jocko, Muir continues, I know you two were tight.
-Yeah. Good friends from way back.
-You were best man at his wedding, right?
-Other way around. Pitt was the last of the red hot bachelors.
-Yeah. Jocko was quite a guy.
Still, Muir muses, wasn’t there a Lady Pitt somewhere in there?
Best not to ask.
-You know what really burns me, Eric? You know what really pisses me off?
Hobsbaum is shadow-boxing the unknown, smiling, strangely animated.
-What? Muir asks, beginning to grin himself.
Hobsbaum freezes, right hand in front of his face, thumb and forefinger 1.5 centimeters apart.
-I was this close, Eric. This fucking close to nailing Emma.
Muir doesn’t understand.
-Emma? Sgt. Glass? You were what?
Hobsbaum’s no longer smiling.
-The babe was ripe. Ready to sing for Daddy. Another week and I’d have been gargling her knickers, my face her piano bench!
Muir’s grin collapses, stilts in a typhoon. And still not understanding.
He addresses several silent possibilities. Offering his congratulations? Redoubling his sorrow? A line or two about the grieving process and its labyrinthine weirdness? But Hobsbaum’s already hunkered down in the passenger’s side. His words float from the driver side window, musked with ersatz leather, stale cigarette smoke.
-Could have. But didn’t. Alas, alas. And anyway. The wench is dead.
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-Mimi?
-Roger?
-I think we’ve got trouble.
-No joke.
-Fiona! What are you doing here?
Fiona turns round to their chorus.
-I had a fight with Puss. I hate him. I didn’t want to go home. Can I hang out with you two? For just a little while?
Roger answers with the sequenced reason of an engineer of human souls.
-We’re sorry. You’ll get over it. We understand. Of course you can. Stay as long as you like.
Roger (never one to postpone pleasure for either friend or foe) runs a tub for his and Mimi’s post-breakfast play. His fingers trail the surface of warm water. Digital memory, skin on skin. The ridged suppleness of his wife’s spine as she arches up to receive him. Funny, he thinks. Funny how lust has led to love and back again to lust.
In the living room Fiona flares sunshot from the waist up. Her ponytail a mare’s bloodflecked mane. Banner of the shackle-smashing masses. Nose in a juggled book.
-What’re you reading? Mimi asks.
Her voice steamy as the bathroom mirror.
Fiona flips to the title page.
-Feast Or Fame by Aquinas Spengler. It’s a Happy Birthday from Roger. Any good?
-Oops, Mimi smiles, haven’t gotten round to it yet.
-Here’s a taste then, Fiona says, clearing her throat.
-‘This is the story of a marriage which collapses from the sheer weight of a man’s and a woman’s pasts …’
Fiona pauses. Looks up at her friend. Eyes quizzical, half-expectant.
-Go on, Mimi nods.
-‘in the end love conquers very little, though cities are torched, kingdoms laid waste.’
She snaps the book shut.
-Phew, Mimi. Dragsville.
-Um. Like three shots of vodka in a dry climate.
But Mimi, in this honeyed moment of plate-glass sun, Mimi’s anything but dry.
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Deathwatch.
The rise and fall, rise and fall of Duchess.
The dorian horror of Pastellito’s horsehead surges on. Showing as yet no sign of stress, structural fatigue, or milky deluge. Peladan, meanwhile, has licked and sucked and rinsed her thumb’s-width thimble to a reservoir’s salty overflow. Time to sink a rich colonial mine. For lubricant a handful of strawberry and amaretto mousse. Peladan’s balls collide with those of his confrere. Duchess, doubleteamed, twice-filled, squeals.
Opioid gazes down, odd man out. Baron Sunday knows him for a devout bugger, but that charming channel is presently merrily, strawberrily occupied.
Duchess daren’t disappoint.
Where has she done this before? He wonders. She’s got the waist-down humping, the upper torso carousel down cold.
She draws Opioid to her. Snakefingers spritz his wiry bush. Her mouth a void hello.
With an Iberian piccolo-player’s deft, deliberate speed, she peels back the lazy foreskin. Dark flab of flesh, lilypad sag, made inelastic by decades of rough self-rape. Wanker after false gods and fallen angels. Duchess closes her eyes. Like a child verging suddenly, half-startled, towards the abyss of sleep’s dreamridden maelstrom. Cheeks puff their rouged babyfat as she sucks a generosity of crown and shaft. Opioid rolls his eyes back to white, mouth a hanged man’s drooling loll. He plays with her hair, fists bunched with clumps of wild aristocratic black. Matador, fit to be gored.
Duchess’s tongue … as Sunday so fondly recalls. A moving shoal of rich mud, entrapping, with slimed skill, the bruised keel of even the foulest of monsters.
Opioid’s teeth are chattering. Slobber glazes his chin. He pumps his hips, stuffing the deep red velvet of her deep red throat.
The Baron’s bored. He lights a cigarette, turns his back on the groan and thrash of the vibrating limousine.
Curtain of dust. Mount Sinai-high and China-wide. With two faint silhouettes. Pixels struggling to maintain integrity in the midst of grey surge and yellow chaos.
Sunday pricks up His ears.
-cloister
-oyster
-nymph
-shrimp ….. th!
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Feminine intuition. The species’ secret weapon. In not-so-rare moments the only clue to men’s survival.
-Can I ask you something really, really personal? Fiona whispers.
Backlit by the sun.
-Depends, Mimi says.
Backing away, arms shyly crossing her breasts’ lush ache.
Parody of a hermit crab. Skidzigdaddlezag. And. Backing into Roger. Who clings her to him. Through the stiff warp of her denimed backside, exaggerated tactility of preppied trousers. Warm, obelisk-hard.
-Ask away, she hypocrites.
-Okay, Fiona breathes.
Question, begging to be popped.
-okay ……
(slight hyperventilation)
…… Mimi, when you look at Roger. I mean, when you just look at him. Sometimes. Knowing how you feel. About him. When you look at him. Sometimes and he’s not. And he’s not. Not doing anything special. Nothing sexy. I mean. Do you ever. I mean do you. Do you ever just get. Wet?
-Fiona! For Christssakes!
-Does she ever! Roger whoops.
He compounds his wife’s embarrassment. By scooping her tighter to him, a poet’s unexpected strength enlacing her waist. By vampiring down the left side of her neck, tongue and teeth in quick licknipping madness. And by, oh yes, the equine subtle nudge. Every inch of trousered obelisk shot to epidermal rigidity.
Fiona frowns. Bites the inside of her cheek. Hangs upon the details of her as yet unanswered question.
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(Postcard XII)
Color photograph, mid ‘60s, 200-inch telescope, copyright Hale Observatories.
Horsehead Nebula. One of God’s more whimsical parlor tricks. If something fifty light years across (from muzzle to mane) and dense as dark apocalypse can be winked at. Fifteen hundred light years away, the stallion rears its head from a swirl of opaque musk, the dense gas and impenetrable dust in startled and humanly-immutable silhouette against the hellish backdrop of Orion’s imperial purple.
Dear Ivory, dear Opal, dear A,
if you have not the strength
to destroy the world,
you have not the strength
to create it.
Rembrandt’s Skeptical Wife