Puss dries his eyes. Indulges a fancy. Falls for it, even. That slamming sound earlier? Not his front door. Fiona? Still at the kitchen table. Playing hard to get. Well, he’s just as playful. And twice as hard. His fancy pirouettes to a red and randy rhythm. To Carthage then I came … With a loaded hot rod roaring.
A distant rapping grows in volume. Puss’s fancy lives for a bright bare moment. Hard, cold, smooth as the swell of the copper knob he yanks.
Peter, breathless, close to collapse. The doorway throbs with prodigal heat.
-Come in, Puss sighs, turning away to damp his eyes against his sleeve.
-Thanks, Peter croaks.
-Jesus, Puss, you look godawful.
-Did you run all the way just to tell me that? Puss sniffs.
Peter has followed him into the small kitchen and now stands, frozen, like an inept burglar caught faux pas-ing Medusa’s pantry. The kitchen table dignifies lust’s tacit alliance.
-What is it now? Puss asks, irritable with an anger laced copiously with self-pity.
Peter breaks his trance, strikes a not-so-funny cruciform pose, fingers brailing the air, Caligula in fey extremis.
-She’s been here! he whispers.
-I can tell! She was just here!
-Yes. She was. Just here. Amazing there wasn’t a collision in the hallway.
Puss turns away from his golgothic guest, reaches down two clean glasses and pours generously from the heavy opaque bottle of Sated Python. Peter takes the offering with palsied, balletic fingers, dervishing down to bum-boy ridiculous.
-I’ve a bone to pick with you, Puss gargles.
-Not now! Not now! Can’t you see I’m deep in her aura?
-Screw her aura, Puss says quietly, sitting sadly down at the table.
The residue warmth of Fiona’s fanny greets his backside, fading.
-Okay, Peter says at last, flexing his shoulders like an athlete in aftermath.
-Pick away, Puss.
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-Mimi’s Answering Service, Roger says.
The sarcasm in his voice is at throaty ease in the post-bliss of consensual rough sex.
-who d’ya think it is this time?
Beside him, Mimi wiggles her bare bottom, grins into the carpet.
-Unm-gn-umh?
-You’re right, Roger says, if it’s important they’ll call back.
He lifts a hand lazily into the air. Dawnlight floods idle through the float of his fingers. He brings his palm down fast and hard, a spank that makes his wife bounce.
-That smarts! she yelps.
Her teeth sink into his shoulder.
-Jesus! Christ! Oh …
Roger leans up to kiss the blood from her descending lips.
-Good night? she asks.
-Good night.
-Productive? All that?
-Um.
-Breakfast?
-Let’s. And out.
-Mazzini’s or Decker’s?
-Decker’s. I’m starved.
-So I notice, Mimi smiles, eyelashes meditative on his collarbone.
-favorite memory?
Her words cool his nipples.
-Same as yours, I’ll bet.
-Right. Was I too selfish?
-I think it’s called assertive these days, sweetheart.
They laugh, kiss, ignore the ringing telephone and the rumble of their own touching bellies.
The favorite memory referenced is, indeed, a shared one. Roger, bucking into Mimi’s estuarial splay. His fingers shred the fabric of the sofa arm, his thumbs drum her temples. Mimi’s feet make monkey-claps, sole to sole behind his head. –Oh Mimileshka, Roger moans, oh baby angel luscious love, I’m about to … -Better not! Mimi bellows. With a fist-thwomp to his thorax. And a reversed, full-nelson bump and grind. And a quimmed, full-frontal faultline quake. And a pelvic lift-off that rolls them, twobacked and briefly airborne, off the heaving sofa.
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Of special interest to any mite stopping here for a quick pint or a slow smoke.
The ‘notes which refused to come together’.
Nolly old hens, locked out in the slush and wind at cold midday when the sun above a certain latitude seems at his most shiny pointlessness giving off such a brightness over so much black and white and grey …
Perhaps it was in mind, the imagined vital statistics which would carry the love-and-ruin (or sex-and-more-ruin) plot right jiminy along but without the names (even the X, Y, and Z of the new wave might have helped) it could be anybody at all.
Or nobody.
Or some other story, even.
Now there’s a thought!
note 1: corrupting (pleasure)
note 2: a toss of the chin, cheeky and cocky, where the lips purse
as though to cup a tube of air
next: grabs (drops?) / (makes a mess)
next: tongue darts tiny slaps as if frustrated or restless
next: span of a slippery heartbeat, echoes rattling up the spine
next: celestial toothless moist seraglio
next: mouth brushes over skin, elegant as rarest ritual
(rare as ritual elegance)
(rare as elegant ritual)
next: humming fingertips coo the flute’s descending run
next: tug the tent peg as the wind comes up to billow out an
odalisque’s swimsuit
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-Notes on my travels, Churl reads aloud.
His sister listens politely, twiddling her compliant laces. Not nomad, no.
Serial stayer-at-home. Putter-down of fragile roots.
Of his first night in the city of Chemise Sanglante. Of April in its cruelest. Of the coincidence of numbers. The 7th, the 31st. The 2nd, the 19th.
Of a fortnight with the plague. 8,000 corpses carted out through the Northern Gate. (Not to mention those others, conveyed to east, south, west.). Of the apparition in a pale quarter of the night sky. The ‘broom of doom’ said some. The ‘dustpan of perdition’ said others.
Of the fights and riots instigated by the ad hoc morality squads. Of the old men dreaming amid their dungheap harems. Of the latest sign miraged above the salt lake.
….. moving scimitar of stars ….
And how the inhabitants thereabouts were sore alarmed. Of the hideous death of Napoleon Chatterjee, trampled in a surprise run on the bank. Of the foul language with which the holy places came to be polluted. (And later, associated.) Of the heretics struck down by strange wrath (lightning bolts, bumblebees, jujubes). Whose bodies lay untouched, spilling open in their ripe rottenness, to stink till the rains came (which, incidentally, washed away the pious right alongside the wicked). How all the eateries of the kingdom (five-star restaurants, greasy spoons, oyster bars, hashslingers, family owned and operated cafeterias, veggie pizzerias, hot dog stands) came to be banned due to the oral and gastric phobias of the insane royals. How moo cows ran for public office. And won!
Anisette guffaws at all the right moments, resting her chin on her brother’s pharaonic knees. The headline act rumbles, just offstage.
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Baron Sunday baffles his head in wide wonder.
-She spins a mean yarn, My Centipede does. Her brother though … all lies, even the bits that are true.
He snaps His fingers in brute countdown.
-Wayward pilgrims. Loose ends. Time to tie ‘em up and bring ‘em home to roost.
Duchess’s hands are smeared with blood. A rosy bubble bobbles on her lips. The fragrance loosed from the unstoppered vial can almost be made out in sunlight. Sweet, familiar. Undermined by boiled cobwebs. Her revival is a sequence of eviscerated rodent squeaks. Sunday winks at her out of His pale vulture eye. She faints for the third time.
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‘L’agonie du regime.’
Oh sweet thing, sweet phrase.
Meredith Warwick sits upright in his steaming tub. Lathered in foam from nipples to shins. On the edge of the sink a thin prim candle burns, its base fixed firm to the chipped saucer by its own red drippings. Mr. Warwick imagines himself as Marat. Interrupted mid-correspondence. Exquisite moments away from assassination.
Chaste and furious, the ghost of Charlotte Corday, giving him the tonguelashing of a lifetime. Mr. Warwick groans, capping down the hot brim of gathering jets.
His triweekly masturbations are disciplined and moral affairs. Or so he would convince the sin-squad of angels, vigilant with abacus and quill. To keep his girls at a safe remove he plays the game of History in his head. He ranks them, though not by classroom performance.
giselle
whitmandy
francelaine
baileyvonne
ulsteresa
mcguinessally
redgroveronica
petersonia
lebrunhilde
sterlingeborg
gordonna
collierin
babelinday
newportia
faithprudence&charity
Agonie spelled backwards their forbidden city.
He changes addresses with a slow stroke of his slippery savonillaed hand. From the Paris of St. Just to the London of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Little mouse mouth. Ophelia’s overbite. Elizabeth Siddal, floating fully-clothed in a tub not at all a la Warwick. As her lover’s pal paints, coaxing hoarse giggles from her frail consumptive chest. Stunner’s rapt face, cathayed to a look of simple animal stupefaction. Or is it the laudanum and gin? Makes her seem so fertile crescent? So available for violation? The thick agony of his soapy shaft siloed with its payload of snowy sin.
And while Lizzie catches her death of cold, on the floor below another visitor rifles through Dante Gabriel’s notebooks. The ones replete with half-cocked sonnets and broken-backed villanelles and. Sketches of Jane. Turbulence of dark, stormcloud hair. Eyes deep as supple narcosis. Neck pillaring from the provocation of a blouse’s choking collar. Mouth a thousand-kissed fig, lush with coagulate juice. And feathery at the fork, then smoked in full charcoal black, the heavy enchantment of pubic hair, done loud then louder, as if solely for the purpose of making Johnny Ruskin cry pale in his dreams.
And with that cruel renascent image, Meredith lowers his intelligent gaze to the release his game’s effected. The smooth froth of soap between his fingers, gravied to a thicker roue that has nothing nothing nothing whatsoever to do with Giselle! Giselle! Giselle … giselle …
It seems that History is once again to blame.
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The Duchess dreams of Francisco Goya.
His hands, his eyes.
His pithy, pissy misanthropy. As he bade her strip.
She wonders what he would make of this latest, most final alliance? Startled, she likes to think, startled to genuflected admiration? More likely though, a disrespectful dredge of the cache-sexe details. The sort she used to share (twas once upon a time, past tense of a thousand and one nights) with the girls who prepared her early afternoon baths.
Graciela, Alejandra.
Too shy to query outlight but dying in their moist bloomers for the fantastic news. Which came straight a bocajarro, derecho al tiro.
-When you’ve been done by Death, mis queridas! Well, after that, humping mortals is … yawnmaking basura and that’s not the half of it.
Duchess cooes in her sleep. Pearldove untouched by slapstick. The voices of His lieutenants. A thin buzzed fire fringeing in on all sides.
She licks her lips with auditory self-love. He plays with her waist-up beauty. Her breath still sweet, in spite of the majestic efforts of His Beau Geste Bitterness.
A clock ticks in Madrid. A cock drips in Seville.
His purple bruises her lilac. She folds his dubious poignard in a sheath of swampy velvet. He lights another cigarette and tickles her bare skin with the sprung bluebottle flame. He balances a strawberry petit four on the plump placid pedestal of her left nipple. He blows His nose in her silk mantilla and glorias the kama sutra countdown.
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(Postcard IX)
Printed off a pirated filmstrip by some hero, some lackey, some capitalist roader demobbed out of the People’s Liberation Army. Mao Tse-Tung, Great Helmsman, swims the Yangtze River. Against the current it goes without saying. Pumpkin-head abob the mighty breadth, chopped scuds gray as iron, an eternity mirrored in waves and once-rich soil, leaching saline and formaldehyde.
A, Blessed by Gods & Men,
funny story … at the foot of Cerro Chato,
on the Chilean-Argentine frontier, there is
a deep artesian well. Buried in the well
(& still very much alive) is a sub-Conquistador,
one of Pedro de Valdivia’s lieutenants, now
Commandante of glowworms, silverfish &
the occasional overweight firefly. His crime?
The rape of a native princess, a crime compounded
by his refusal to consider any form of compensation
(on the grounds the doll was no Catholic).
His eyelashes, finger & toenails have grown
right thru his armor, his beard & hair have
taken root in the watery earth & his cries ….
are few & far between.
Kitten With a Whip