now is the stalker of his towton queen
paid gorgeous ransom through a spider’s web
In his darkroom (all improv and strung-up nudes) Puss sobs soundlessly.
His trembling has no end in sight. The red walls pulse a quicker tempo. Hostile womb threatening expulsion. There are some truths, as he’s just discovered, there are some truths best swaddled in benevolent lies.
His pride had made him reckless. Pride in his craft had left him with plums en plein air. Blind watchmaker, frozen in the present tense. Not even into the double-digits of his exposures. When the face fair leaped from the fleshing crowd! His soi-disant friend, now the skulk and shadow of a four-foot mohawked nymphet? Beardless, foulmouthed, mocking eyes.
Peter?
He had rushed (headlong, idiot) anticipating the exquisite reward of the hero.
Her relief! Her orisons of giddy disbelief! Her sweet mouth, begging to be bruised!
Puss swallows hot tears, lips ratcheted to a thromboid quiver. The red walls smirk betrayal. Stuttered angina, brittle as eggshell. His passion is ash. Brief smoke in rising dispersal.
And upon his head.
Cupid.
Raining down hot piss.
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What had he expected? she wonders. Kisses? Laughter? A slavegirl’s lap dance, climaxing to melting, ninnied surrender? Spread-eagling for the deposit of his imperious 20 percent tip? His thirty pieces of silver? Adrenalized bearer of bitter tidings, barely disguising his triumphant peacock strut. As if anything, absolute toto, were possible. Which it damn well isn’t.
Fiona sits at Puss’s kitchen table. Fully clothed for a change, in honor of the solemnity of the news. Her right hand soaking to the wrist. In a bowl of lime juice and ice water. The three middle knuckles and most of her little finger are a strange liver-grey. An ache that peaks and pearls when she curls her fingers. Perhaps she overreacted? Punching Puss on the back of his head like that?
His blurted confession whines in her brain. Whining, whining, over and clovered over. And then, so quick, his pathetic defense, before the retreat, the silent, tearful exit. (…I never thought…harmless…awfully naïve…forgive me? …)
Fiona curls her fingers. Bites her lips. Considers their early days. Of sweet mutual curiosity. And playful cocktease flirtations. A silly running joke. Was he trying to steal her soul? Stringing it piecemeal, clotheslined in his red room? And now he’d done something far worse. He’d sold her tonguetied bell. Her precious virgin slice.
And to think there’d been a time Puss might have had a chance. To be the first. Columbusing her estrecho dudoso. To taste what heretofore had been but gazed upon. With the clinical admiration of the hard side of a lens. And at a respectful distance, according to the established legend.
Fiona bites deeper her lower lip. Pain scatterbrains. Mimi. Mimi will know what to do.
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Roger kneels beside his brooding, restive wife. His instinct is to comfort. To wake her into peace. He watches a moment longer. The meter and stress of the nightmare’s middle act. Her lips are moving. French-kissing a ghost. A murmuring, a slurred moan.
-… yezzur … yezzur …
Ziggurat?
Sumeria?
Mimi’s far away.
Roger touches his fingers lightly to her exposed ankle. Her soft foot twitches and is still. His hand moves beneath the blanket. Practice tells him where he will encounter the blind hem of her long tee-shirt. To lift. To creep beneath. Sliding eelfingers smoothly up her thigh, pausing at the firm curve of her buttock, grazing the angelhair which dusts her childlike cleft, dipping soft pressure against the small of Mimi’s back. Slight sweat of sleep. Of nightmare. A different sort of moisture than … Though productive of the same arousal. His penis pokes from the folds of his bathrobe. Attentive and parade-ground stiff. Roger shifts his weight and brings his cheek close to Mimi’s wounded mumble.
-… free … bad … fools …
Her breath is warm as delirium. Roger, rising from robe’s silent fall. Deft as stealth, the blanket’s removal. Mounting the sofa he kneels above her, watching the shadows his candlelit body casts down. Lust’s hard and merciless serpent darkening the gold of her brow. With minimal coaxing she slides onto her back. Her eyelids nervous with dreams. Soundlessly, slowly, Roger positions her, her pulse like poetry, her body’s suave heat in innocent resistance. Her long legs rise, knees touching and then. The swift separation, to east and west, her thighs untrustworthy allies abandoning their dark central queen.
Roger sinks into Mimi. He licks her forehead and fills her. Mimi gasps, opens her eyes and.
-…….. oh ……. ! ……
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-axis, Anisette says.
-chalcedony, says Churl.
-avarice
-fosse
The sidewalk under their feet has a checkerboard pattern. It reminds them of a mantelpiece they once played beneath. Sibling games. Isis and Osiris. Lovers’ private jokes. Like ‘wind on waves’. Like ‘kiss and tell’. Or ‘freak’s museum’. Their favorite childhood passwords: ‘one-eared sharks and spiders big as geese.’
-windsock
-tufa
-coriflage
-cascade
After the Fall they’d dreamed of opening a restaurant. A different lay of fare each evening. Catering to exiles like themselves. The looped, the lonely, the quietly deranged. They’d settled instead for a lunch counter and a liquor license. Nightly they drew lots as to the molesting of the assembled clientele. And then Stevie came. The hired, necessary hand. Winsome, easy, proud of her dancer’s kundalini legs. To steal their hearts. First hers, then his. With games only two could play at. Like ‘rain on marble’. Like ‘fire in the hole’. Or ‘frog’s legs & lark’s tongue’.
-suleiman
-bastinado
-samovar
-clitoris
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The usual dream. A line of children, emerging single file from the base of the wavewhipped, windlashed lighthouse, staggering pigeon-toed, favoring their gore-splattered groins as though more might spill with any false step. Gwendolyn, in wavelashed, windwhipped nightgown, slips her hand beneath the chin of the nearest child, to lift its head and peer into its face. The usual dream.
The wind will die down to a scuttling whisper, the waves will freeze and then dissolve into air, the children will batten into stapler, tea cup, cigarette case or snowglobe and the lighthouse will ticktock through its disguises: obelisk, metronome, wine bottle, hard-on, palm tree wigged with electric sun.
Gwendolyn stirs, elbows into the next compass point of her semi-circular bed. Her eyelids flit and flutter above their Pandora’s box of dreams. In 19 minutes Gwenju will lift his head from his oversize silk pillow and stare at the odious white box with the blue fidgets, on the bookcase nearest Mummy’s gypsy head. One minute after that the blue fidgets will go red and the alarm will shrill, along with the overspill of the outside world, its inaccurate weather reports, jittery bankers, scandal-slimed politicos, dope-fiend athletes, and rumors of a Dark Ages revival in the east.
Gwendolyn will open her eyes, reach out long or short depending on where she’s landed, fiddle the clock radio down to a murmur and hum, prop herself on her elbows and say her beautiful good mornings to the worried little dog who loves her so much it hurts.
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There are times, and this is certainly one, when Jocko wishes he was not a man. As feelings go it’s more of a crick than a headache, but real enough. The handbook of indispensable clichés might prescribe: felt, w/ every fiber of his being.
Jocko would demur. He merely wishes. Wishes that he could linger. Tenderly. Even thoughtfully. Floating ‘in the moment’. A haggard, baggy possibility that strikes him as a cat-nap in Dior pajamas. But being a man he finds he’s picking spoilsport nits.
So.
Instead of tender thoughtful lingerings Jocko would much prefer to be sitting in Tattler’s Tavern, ordering a second cold beer (and no, Christ-in-Heaven no! not elbow to tit with that perpetual verb La Querelle!) And not thinking of manly displays upon the tossed turf of the playing field. Nor politics (local, global, tribal). Nor shoptalk (twas the dead secretary threw me … a change of diapers for the tough guy, Counselor …). Nor sex in the abstract.
It’s something of a ritual with him. Honest enough to pass as mild neuroses. This need to relive what’s just happened in some other setting. Preserving it at a distant remove, in preferably public solitude. Bar, confessional booth, the sardine coil of a stalled metro car. Before Memory shows up and pulls rank with Her stern baton: the blue pencil of ‘rewrite’.
Jocko sits in a tatty chair in a dark corner of a motel room.
He surveys the one-time menace of his naked body. As background music, an almost subliminal whistling from the bathroom. Where Emma showers off the evidence. It’s a familiar tune. He can’t pin it down. It’s on the tip of his iberia, so to speak.
For a forty year old he’s not in complete decrepitude. Given his diet, his loathing of exercise. (Centipede’s beatings, the rare foot chase down reeking alleys.) Slight paunch but as yet no need to accede to elastic waistbands.
From navel to knees his body hums. His beaverbit groin (thatched, snowscape), matted and glistening. With sperm, vaseline, Emma’s lush menstrual leavings.
Jocko suspects she intended some measure of humiliation. In the process a restoration of his dignity. And the best uncondomed skindive in recent memory.
Why had he been so surprised at her strength? When she moved on top? And galloped hard, maid on a mission? When his passion broke in long overdue detonation? She made him cry out, gushing into the irresistible pressure of her splendid, indifferent body.
That goddamned song!
What is it?
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Unlike Jocko, Emma doesn’t need to wallow, either delighted or ashamed, in this or any other postAetna minute. In the hot spray Emma’s skin feels nice. She massages her shoulders, breasts, and arms, caressing fingers slushed in the thick film of soap. She allows herself the briefest of congratulations.
-By God, I was brilliant.
And resumes whistling.
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At about this time, while Jocko and Emma contemplate their separate nudities, Baron Sunday’s motorcade waits, bristling, at the edge of the city.
A pretty aide-de-camp, permissive in canary-yellow waistcoat, brushes a blackened maggot from his sleeve and leans to light his Master’s cigarette.
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(Postcard VII)
Color still from ‘Last Tango in Paris’, a film by Bernardo Bertolucci (1971). Provided to dues-paying members of Maria Schneider’s fan club.
Her beauties compete with such esteem that even pouts and spoiled whinings spark gratitude, are found to be strangely thrilling.
That hair!
Those eyes!
That trembling, frightened, buttery lower lip!
The apartment.
The wedding dress.
The rainstorm that clings it to her body.
As her lover Paul offers her a dead rat’s ruby a la mayonnaise.
Elektrik A, Tune Up the Voltage!
just when I’ve deep-sixed her as a lost cause,
Ms. Dictionary bounces me like a ten-inch Turk!
Item: kip = a gymnastic feat that is executed
when hanging by the hands from a piece of apparatus
& consists of moving from a position in which the legs
are above the head to one with the head above the feet
by flexing the hips & swinging the legs forward & upward
above the head, then arching the back & thrusting
with the chest & forcibly kicking the legs downward
to raise the body – called also ‘upstart’.
Shoot, if a girl can do that who needs a dowry?
Nadezhda, Tsarina of All the Blushes