Bricks are dropping in their hundreds.
Dust blocks out the sun.
A monster wheezes from one end of the city to the other.
The streets and alleyways are redirected into tunnels, apocalyptic subways, unnavigable canals.
All tourist guides made obsolete.
Birds rise from the center of one city and flutter back down, moments later, into the center of a transformed other.
Corpses take a few steps along the moving sidewalks and disappear into the open-mouthed absolute.
Rats run wailing into the surf of zero. Good riddance.
Mother of God’s been disconnected. Far too many leechmarks on Her holy calendar. Not enough hours in Her bleeding day.
Give it up.
Call it quits.
It’s done for.
(Almost.)
The jaded eye seeks beauty. The jaded eye is colorblind. The jaded eye blinks once, the vulture eye pinks in cataract coup d’etat.
-Sir, Churl nods in passing.
Baron Sunday returns the curt salute. And smiles broad upon Churl’s sister’s approach.
-Yo! Sennapeed! Yum! Anisette! How’s Daddy’s bestest little girl?
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Fiona is afraid of many things.
For instance?
1) That someday she might succumb to the desire to weep in public.
For no reason beyond pixie thoroughbred temperament.
2) That bizarre behavior will land her in a straitjacket.
A recurrent nightmare: onstage, in an auditorium of credentialed strangers. Each one demanding, in turn:
-Tell us about yourself, Fiona.
3) That Puss was right.
Someday her missionary zeal will unlid itself.
With a catastrophic sonic boom.
To cocktease is to proselytize.
4) That she is doomed to a life of impractability.
Like a Maeterlinck heroine.
Pleasing to gaze upon.
But …. Who’d want her as their woman?
(Begging the more important question: what man could pass the ordeals, wing the challenges sufficient to earn her hand?)
Her dimples say it all.
Once I was like Pelleas’ girl … neurotic, obsessive, losing precious shit in the most unlikely places …
Than I was the latest model of Sue Bridehead … liberated, brimming with backtalk, frigidity masked with a winsome, cosmic sneer …
I want to be mountable. I want, like Ursula, to come, screaming, at the end of the rainbow. To climax as the moon slides reflected down my cheek, fractured in a tear.
On my own terms, of course.
Fiona burrows on the sofa, sniffs deep the foxy perfume of Mimi’s sex-wet tee-shirt.
To California then! Where the natives canter their expensive nudity in permanent, tireless search. Where there is no margin undeserving of its own parade. Where the fictional electorate is invited to public referenda on everything from the weather to the preferred form of address when squandering Pacific daylight in the company of gladiators, nuns, vegetarians. Where even the lowliest cocaine dream finds its way into a filmscript. To California, then? Fiona, Queen of the Lemmings, strut to your calling!
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Calumnia, ensconced and waiting. Propped against the Tanqueray, shelved behind the bar of Venus Venue. Her eyes shine dark in the face of a small black cat. In a 4” x 2.5” postcard of Manet’s ‘Olympia’.
Weird Courtship: Night the Second.
Simon has returned, bareback rider slim and ever-so-slightly jumpy. His intentions chevroned on his sleeve. To lay Melissa’s ghost in the body of another.
He watches Melisande dance. Twice.
He wonders if she has any say in the deejay’s salacious selections.
‘Two’s Up’ by AC/DC. A blue-green sequined star shoots a harlequin’s fire off the small of her back.
Simon arranges his drinks and cigarettes. (Apple juice, Chilean Merlot.) Rearranges, surreptitiously, the strained erection in his pants.
‘Big Eyes’ by Cheap Trick. The live version. So that each thunderous paradiddle, each shriekback riff, each dramatic opera buffo pause in the lead singer’s delivery brings with it the tumult and roar of a hundred thousand appreciative Japanese rockers. As though Melisande’s body, stripped to a slow burn as she humps the invisible, as though the broad mime of her comic orgasms were their arenaed icon. With nothing lost in translation.
-Pigboy, Simon snarls to himself.
Resigned to his existentialist condition, truffle-snuffling Sartrean satyriasis.
Melisande’s hair in clean cascade as she twists her head from side to side. It could be gone-gone ecstasy or simple crick in the neck. One hand cups her left breast, a kneading, nipple-thrusting caress. As if to honeydrip and feed a yo-yo squad of lascivious hummingbirds. The other hand candelabras, fingers spread wide, stroking the air between her legs.
Simon guesses she’s that kind of girl.
(Likes it English on a solid-wood, breakfast table chair …
The kind who digs with her pelvis, likes her slender anvil fondled as she bucks and rolls …
Likes to rest her forearms on the guys shoulders, pads of her fingers tapping the back of the chair …
Staring over the top of his head, focusing on a toaster, a tea kettle, the kitchen sink …
Probably bites her lower lip three seconds before she starts to drizzle, starts to explode …
Probably …)
She outdoes herself on the final chorus. Ass to the audience, bent at the waist. Fingers braceleting the ankles of her spread legs. An invitation to pit the fresh wet core. To mount her from behind and horn the looselipped peach. Simon takes a deep breath to still the hiccough stuttering his glans.
-Hello again, she says, dabbing light sweat from her forehead with a cocktail napkin.
-Wow, Simon snorts.
-couldn’t take my eyes off you. I’m impressed, Melisande.
She smirks, brushes his knees with her knuckles.
-Did I make ya hard, Simon?
Simon shrugs, pigboy wary at the scent. Lest Mockery chuck her pretty chin, bite her thumb at him. Undeterred, she points to his wine glass.
-Buy me one of those?
-Be glad to. It’s a very nice Chi….
-Save it, babe. Anyway, it’d be over my head. It looks great and I’m thirsty. That’s all I need to know.
When her drink arrives Simon rediscovers his manners.
-Are you through for tonight?
-Yep. I can now pay the rent, do a couple loads of laundry, and there’s still enough left for a twelve-pack and a TV dinner.
-oh yeah, she winks, I get my weed for free.
Antennas mutually aquiver.
Simon polishes off his apple juice. Moves rook to queen’s bishop.
-Are you available, then? Sorry, ‘available’ is perhaps the wrong word …
-Whoa! Melisande softly cries, hands lifting to a garlic ward-off.
Simon notices that two of her nails are chipping. White lattice through deepest green.
-Sorry, he says, fixed smile cusping down his rising irritation.
-does the place have rules against …
-I’ve got rules, she says.
Sharply, though still softly.
-you’re just getting a little ahead of yourself. After all …
Her eyes are shanghai, mirth, and flash. Her lips lick to a whisper.
-after all, Simon, we haven’t discussed preferences, fantasies, shameful expectations yet.
-Sukupuoli?
-Exactly. A girl’s got to be prepared these days. Take it from me, not all the weirdos are out on the sidewalk with their yardsticks, measuring the distance from my soggy butch to the nearest playground and confessional booth.
Simon’s genuinely stung.
-I’m not a weirdo.
-I’ve yet to meet one who thought he was. So, what do you like?
Calumnia, felined on thin cardboard, represses a yawn.
Simon and Melisande adjourn to a corner booth. Simon’s sales pitch best voiced in privacy. Melisande takes her high heels off, places them casually, unceremoniously either side of the candle’s frosted, flickering bowl. She stretches her legs beneath the table, rests her stockinged feet in Simon’s lap. He massages her insteps with hypnosis in mind, pops her pretty toes for punctuation. Her warm heels smoother, rounder, softer than he’d have guessed, pressed against his blind defenseless bulge.
Simon’s played this game before. Finds it difficult not to cheat. Knows it’s not a simple grocery list of entrances and exits and niagaras she wants.
The thrill is in the details. A telling bit of color. A crewel-stitched word or phrase. The sketch that cries epiphany.
So.
He likes to worry a girl’s peeled grape with her panties still on. To watch his hand rise and fall, rise and fall, a hidden quasimodo hump.
He likes to lather her nipples with her own saliva, transferring the unswallowed drool with his mouth.
The first jump ought always to be missionary. After all, one-night stand or year-long affaire, the least a fellow can do is make eye contact at the inaugural juicing of an alien fig. (Although he’s open to change, change is a good thing, change is Simon’s friend.) And, given the beauty of Melisande’s rear, why waste the view on the moled and writhing sheets? Canine, or Ptolemaic, then, with her ponytail the left-handed rein.
(Slight pressure from her heels, light drift of her fingers through the hover of cigarette smoke … he knows the needle’s hit the vein.)
Elaborate.
Yes, please.
His right hand on her hip, pulling her on and off of his stiff pedantic plume, making the girl do the work.
(Her eyes narrow … she must feel strongly about taking it from behind … whether pro or con hardly matters.)
Star chamber sixty-nine?
Yes, and with a twist.
He likes being bottom and he likes to rim while getting gummed.
(She taps nails to temple … she’s a dancer, with a spine like a child, belly-button to the sky, nose to Mother Earth … Melisande does the math and smiles, liking what she imagines.)
He continues, her big toe tickling his heavyleaded fuse.
He likes to have his face sat upon.
He’s starting to sound a little lazy, a bit potentatial, babylonish?
When he’s drowning openmouthed, snowdrop scrubbed to a marshy denouement, it’s a point of pride to swallow, his tongue rattling guttertaut beneath a thick and bursting tropic shower.
(Too bad I just finished my period, she says … yes, that is a pity, he agrees, and, giving him her stage-face, she knows he’s sincere.)
Ian the bartender, huge shadow of anticipatory menace, stops at their table. Kisses Melisande on the cheek. Nods to Simon, sizing him up. Holding off on immediate approval, like a big brother, a loyal watchdog. Gently deposits her jacket, miniskirt, and purse on the seat beside her. Murmurs a goodnight. And departs back into the shadows.
Leaving a distinct pause behind, panting like an out-of-work bloodhound, bedeviled by deathwish squirrels.
For a moment Simon wonders whether his heavy-vetting has had the opposite, unintended effect. Saltpetering her to arid chastity. When she blows out the candle, he feels her warm breath on his wrist.
-Ready? she asks.
-Never more so.
-Cool. Your place or mine?
With the recent and sole exception of Melissa (blessed of memory), Simon has adhered to the hard and fast rule of the short-timer. In the comfort of a working girl’s bedsit, linger not.
He doesn’t think twice.
-Mine.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
In silent fury, following one of their famous marital spats, Roger, having made vigorous and reparational love to Mimi, had spent an afternoon repainting the bathroom window a cheery lurid violet. Had, in the innocence of his mollycot ineptitude, managed to paint it as permanently shut as a Pharoah’s tomb.
The space between glass and screen is now the happy home of a clan of shy, mildly poisonous spiders. Mommy Spider’s been busy. Babies swing like teardrop jewels from a jungle gym of Lilliput lace. In the brief existence of Arachnaville, the warm interior has been the lavish setting for a rich diversity of boy-girl copulations.
Mimi kneels naked beside the bathtub. Sponging a cloud of soap from Roger’s back. Singing softly:
-… when old King lear
left out of here
he lost his mind and daughters
he cast himself
in such a role
the audience shed waters
when Hamlet played
the part of prick
and sent his lover packing
he found his back
against the wall
in balls still sorely lacking …
Mimi and Roger, together:
-Cry hey nonny nonny
the fly’s stuck in the jam
so hey nonny nonny
the lion lays the lamb!
Mimi laughs, soapy hands nippling down her husband’s ribs.
-Oh my, she whispers, dropping the sponge between Roger’s legs.
-it looks like Moby Dick’s coming up for air.
Mimi steps into the tub. Steam rises along her long, lithe legs. Roger steadies her sway, hands on the backs of her thighs. He rubs his nose in the soft tickle of her pubic hair. Mumbles, fur-tongued:
-Make like Shakespeare’s dad …….. glove me?
Mimi sinks through steam, balances, taps, bounces, and sheathes him.
-Why good my lord, what manner of greeting be this?
Roger closes his eyes, mouth fixed on her left breast, wetting nipple, cup, and mound. Sports her to him. Hint of incest in his Laertes, hint of nympho in her Ophelia. Warm water slaps in soft, slow rhythm. In time to build, as spiders know, to a stormy Charybidean churn.
Fiona dozes on the sofa, weight of an autographed first edition Huxley comforting her bosom. California dreaming, braless in Gaza.
Music seeps along the carpet from the bathroom down the hall. A moaning like the ocean at midnight. Phrases, sentences, entire paragraphs. In a language no linguist can diagram nor parse.
Fiona touches cool fingers to her burning cheek.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Churl peers into the limousine. Marvels for a moment. Nostalgia tinged with comedy. Oh those pretty days past, of discovery, of eternal invention.
Dust clears, blurs, clears again. Peladan and Pastellito, well past the skirted vamp, make the best of their awkward disengaging of the Duchess. Suddenly twice vacated, she wastes not a moment in revealing her abhorrence. Self-centered demons … count on ‘em at your peril … She scours, scratches, a trill of hammer-ons. Three plunging fingers sufficient to restart her accordioned contractions. And a solitary sodomizing thumb. Duchess paganinis herself, frigging fore and aft. As the locks click and tumble. Opioid’s got her by the ears. At full gallop, like the Four Horsemen balled into one. A widening grease stain where his skull batters the synthetic sharkskin roof. Peladan and Pastellito, hip to hip, are slamming to a foxholed finish in the unshaven depressions of her oft-kissed armpits. Twin tufts asqueak and glistening with the gleam of ecumenical juices.
Churl pops a cough drop, straightens up and asks.
-Can anyone tell me what it means?
Baron Sunday drags on his cigarette, eyes him with steady consideration.
-I’ve got a job for you, young man. I want you to pretend that Duchess is your long-awaited lost-and-found. A distant cousin, perhaps. Or a mislaid wife, if you prefer. So drop your pants and join the orbit. Wipe that smile off your face! Lighten up! Fuck her brains out! Whichever comes first. Now go, I’ve a word or two for your sister’s ears only. If …. that’s …. all …. right …. with …. you?
Churl doesn’t have to be asked twice.
And is it because he can’t stand long goodbyes? Or is it because he dreads the next step up the Imperial stairwell, the arctic grip of His handshake? Or is it, and who might blame him, that he’s medium-flamed for a taste of cum-blanched aristocracy, hot for a trot through one sublime porte or another, more than merely happy to have a go at dripping Duchess?
Slice it as you please, Churl’s the only one who’ll ever know for sure.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
The Baron purrs like a great cat. Claws retracted, all motorized strokeable hum.
-Anisette, Anisette, you’re a balm to the weary, a salve to the diseased. What a sight for sore eyes you are, child.
-I’m pleased if I please you.
She is modest as only the thoughtful wicked can be. Behind her shades her eyes are dry. They wait for rain.
-You’re looking well, she says.
He can always depend on her for compliments. She’s been the rare one, knowing how groveling hyperbole only serves to rust His razor, dull His dirk.
And in His position it’s imperative that He transcend cynicism, reserve His crankiness for the tepidarial orgies, where no lives hang in the balance.
He cares deeply about His power. Hates deeply His celebrity. A blindfolded trapeze artist, with the edgiest gig of all. Sunday gazes at the ground, hands in the pockets of His suit jacket. Looking like a prince. (Be it only a regal figurehead in a parliamentary democracy, where the hourglass empties at the same rate for genii and moron alike.) In a moment He’ll fuss with His cuff-links, touch a finger pensively to His upper lip. Revealing some opinion as inoffensive as it is ambiguous. But this is no charity bazaar, no landscape gallery, nor Third World orphanage.
-Are you still enjoying your free agency then, Anisette?
His sad smile warms her. She nods.
-It’s …. Okay. It does get boring sometimes. But when that happens, well, I just move on.
-Ah yes. My roving ambassadress. Sounds a bit sinister, I’ve always thought. We do miss you back at the palace. Drop in next time you’re in the neighborhood. You can give the black swans a good scare and give the boys and girls a good fuck. Or a good whipping. The slackers are well deserving of one.
Anisette prods loose a seashell from a small mound of toxic, ossified spillage, nods again, amenable to all the above.
-It’s not easy serving two masters, He sighs, and indicates Heaven, indicates Earth, and veiled by it, the muttering hungry Underground.
-especially those two … the thin-skinned sods haven’t even spoken to one another in close to a century … I’d gladly settle for a junior partnership in the Firm at this stage but They still think of Me as some sort of aggrandized factory foreman, some jumped-up number-cruncher …. And meanwhile, Their minions keep right on dropping like flies, piling up like turds in Eden ….. I’ve given Them a pharmacy’s nightmare of plagues, I’ve given Them civil wars, I’ve given Them perfect strangers shooting each other down in the streets, and stadia of suicides duped into believing in free will or tiny voices in their heads and … and … and I’m still busing them in by the thousands with that weary old chestnut ‘natural causes’! …….. forgive me, Anisette, I’m rambling ….
Anisette pats His sleeve. Lifts her shades.
-Have you considered a leave of absence?
His roar of laughter drowns out the mating cries of her brother and the slippery Duchess.
-hey, she continues, I’m serious, thank you very much! Considered it? Let truces and ceasefires break out, let a few miracle cures sneak through. That’d show ‘em.
-Hell’s hedgehogs, I miss you! Sunday roars again, laughing and wiping His eyes.
-we’d make one killer team, Anisette, that’s no lie, and for starters I’d order Us to a decade-long filmfest where we could gnash our nasties and butter our popcorn!
-We’d have a blast …..
But, as she knew the moment she broached the possibility, as she now supposes she’s always known, ‘Death and the Maiden’ wanted-posters are a detail in a dream that won’t survive in sunlight. Minimal, but something. She made Him laugh. Even squeezed a bit of blank verse out of His Dryness, there at the end, at the edge of the city.
Holding hands, a sick sweet parody of father and daughter.
-Cropped poppies bleed beneath your nails
the winter of your name is smooth as gin
you’ve been My faithful fatal gift to men
you’ve baffled angels with your adult’s-only moves
made devils leap the void to taste you
you’ve fed them with a stinging lash
combing down your cruelty like gold
you’ve globed and bound the drifting keel
of every prow that’s strained your way
poor sailors dazzled, sirened, and circe-ed whole
within your body’s twisted lighthouse shine
my one-in-a-million tongue-in-cheek surefire bet
accept My adoration, Anisette.
Whomsoever Loves Me Knows No Fear.
What some have gambled empires on, Anisette gets for free. Death goes down on his knees in the dust, the snap of His ancient joints a catholic plague of locusts.
-And so, Anisette, if I may so humbly ask … what will you do now?
Anisette thinks for a moment.
Bends exquisite.
Answers Him with a kiss.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Courtly, long-dead voices lead her on a guided tour. The dogshat futuristic sidewalks of downtown. Where suits and bums alike gawp at the clearing sky.
Evening’s approach a third-rate prose poem. The sunset’s mariachi orange, drowning in the darkling purple swell. An early constellation beadlike with midget shimmering.
A secretary primps her make-up in a compact, fluorescent office lights dwindling down to sleep.
Half-hidden by an overflowing dumpster, a hardworking junkie spoons out some stranger’s cold abandoned take-away from a leprous container.
Small dogs test their leashes, out for a postprandial pee, their retirement-age masters dressed for flirting and complaint.
The dust has finally stopped falling.
In the morning tots will invite maternal abuse down upon their capless towhead brows, making ‘dust-angels’ on the playgrounds.
The pond at the heart of Evangeline Park is cloudy, a dull milky cataract, risen scum of asphyxiated carp.
Anisette pauses outside a bookstore cum coffee-bar. Where Gaia meets the Grimm Bros. and Lady Murasaki learns how to change the oil in her rose-red convertible.
Anisette eyes the new releases, pyramids of bastard promise.
‘Growing Up Rich And Lonely’ by Countess Phaedra Polly-Pitkin.
‘Belly Of Fire: A Theo Roosevelt mystery’ by Nikos Venizelos.
‘The Adulterer’s Cookbook’ by Bennett Headly and Marina Mistral.
Anisette steps round, through, and over a sextet of Muslim students, the call of the muezzin tinny from a transistor, summoning them to Mecca’s nag and pull.
In the bright interior she removes her sunglasses, suffers the ocular assault of posters advertising events, both garish past and gaudy future.
‘2 Nites Only: Book-Signing with Mary Angry-Blue-Eyes, acclaimed author of ‘Sioux Chevrolet’, ‘Kissing The Rim Of Fire’, and ‘If You Have To Ask How Much It Costs …’
A black-stenciled cancellation diagonals another.
‘Querelle Adelayde Reads From Her Prison Diaries.’
Anisette buys a styrofoam cup of jasmine tea, finds an empty table, uncaps her pen and turns the final postcard face down.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
(Postcard XIV)
One of the simpler designs presently flooding the market.
At a distance it might as well be the classic yin-yang favored in tattoo parlors.
Stippled, foxed, pinpricks clockwise in a spray of anhedonic black and white.
The ourouboros.
The one which circles Anisette’s navel is a marvel of complexity by comparison.
But final stamp, final postcard says simple serpent is sufficient.
Dear Anisette,
He asked me where I was going.
Sweet, really.
I fobbed Him with a kiss & a flash.
The truth?
Not yet, not yet, I don’t think.
Alright, I’ll try.
I’m here.
Inside four walls.
Being told this story:
Close your eyes and open your mouth, said the snake in the