Outrages women commit on other women.
I dance dervish, twilight full of ocean swallows and blacklight fireflies, dusk heavy with the powdery musk of that poor moth crushed between death music and the senseless waste of another woman. Round, mutter patter mutter LEAP! Can’t stop, feet patter patter. Hands quickly passing signs so ancient they leave behind a residue similar to rust and tar pit oil beneath the fingernails. My skin ripples full G-force [Goddess], then sloughs off in gauzy veils. I light the ground beneath my feet with excessive and incendiary steps/ ghost memory/prehistoric invocation, until I blaze for darkness.
The medium screams,
“It’s been so long, you’ve come and gone!”
The other day, while levitating, I looked into a mirror. Scars and black veins boil empty from my heart’s crack.
The Rapture has no hair and it isn’t going anywhere.
NECROMANIA SEXUALIS
Come flying. Sweep me from intoned footfalls along the edge where my sweetest flesh peels, soft rind. Sniff the aroma; this peach’s haunches are young yet steadfast. I throw myself into your arcane circle—gravy and angels—to be motionless at your whim, or harrowed in the frenzy of my worst nightmare of burned bones victorious with salt… and most succulent undefended dream of squirming sexuality.
She of the Heaven of Plucking Fingers put a baby mouse in my uterus, then another and another, as I lay roped to four silent winds. Next came the boa seeking them, slithering with a mouth of all the murders of autumn, devouring in upward pursuit, not disappointed. My sick holocaust reached its first abyss.
Nipple in the chalice, slickest sleekest silver of groin flowers not just reserved for the hollow silver between cheek and gum.
A hole mined between my breasts for ravager’s gold, fucked until the ribs clattered a talismanic greeting for my own secret underground, heart floating in midnight’s reckoned cream. This nymph’s chosen nowhere.
Detachable dicks like leprous centipedes screw my brain until I’m blind and deaf, then eat me from the inside out, jungle of pleasures my grace and fall.
My religious mouth hungry for the vastness of what their wings held up, borne to the morning’s teeth. But frames were wood, feathers made only of paper. Quarry-bound priesthood, sacred groves ferns in fossils, stones and acorns in amber. An eon of engorged altars, I always dreamed to be your feast, tingling at the merest mention of your pirating tongues.
From childhood on I was a diminutive freak, aflame in the savannahs, filed only with prigs who hid their buttoned lightning in hypercritical blood. All thunder was cast out until I bared my teeth from a cage in the center of the street. I became the subject of much sermonizing during the day. At night the preacher and deacons had different lessons to teach. No decent woman claimed me as hers. An X burned into the earth of the wildwood marked the spot where they believed I’d risen from hell as a baby. Then, eventually, at gibbous moons, a thick soup… chunked with mutable blood and ashes… began to be found in my cage. Burning visions of salacious obscenity were etched upon every leaf blowing in and out of the cage. People turned up missing. Small wonder. Who wouldn’t flee such a town? Animals were heard screaming at wee hours. Yet it was only menstrual blood, assuring the righteous that none had impregnated me.
You, I dreamed of, touching myself when the stars finally chose me and red stippled my thighs with a miniature freak doll, miscarried in front of a guilty elder. What love is more perfect than that which devours perfectly to possess completely?
It was my choice when I came of age: prisoner in their box, a stockade to forever create a barrier between the sky and my feverish skin—or the wood and paper angels who lovingly ripped the tender smoke to shreds. The second abyss.
I invoked, “Come flying!”
A key turned in the lock. The door opened. All turned their backs on me, their seed parts painted black, never to blossom… except for enigmatic fondlers only innocence could be stained by.
Cloistered, I became appetite itself, luminous with the urge to be consumed by the fires in lip unleashed. Then, finally, they took me to their groves where they first demanded the names of my seducers. Sometimes the most succulent surprises come after the ghosts of crimes of adults sworn to better.
I’d had my share.
Afterward, they circled me, circled, paper feathers raising peppery dust. Watching as the flesh of my whole arm was eaten to the bone, arching my spine until passion grailed into delicate honey. And as I fell, I did so smoothly, treasured, my flavor and desire cherished by the virtuous. Coltish legs bent and quivered, the sublime stripping hours. It was as the relentless tide would be if it could ever have the moon, deeply reflected in the third and final abyss.
DIABOLA
If you believe you conjure up the darkest of masters: Satan, Cthulhu, Set, WHOEVER, forget it. You only chant up [and chat up] the worst part of yourself.
Scream for Lucifer and he whispers, “Sh shsh, mummer.” Cry to Cthulhu and begin spitting bubbles of black saltwater.
Weep to Set and he tears you into so many pieces that you sift among the sands of the moon desert in a fruitless waste of black endeavor.
Yet, eat shit, drink blood, sacrifice genitalia to genitalia, fuck holes drilled between the eyes of your desolate children. Meditate long amid the elastic night’s curtains until you manage to realize some degree of hushed restraint and complexity. Transcend to grieve, matching the list of your faults with the list of your losses.
Winning is subversive. The deadly earnest of your inconsequential orgasms fell short of the profound. You repressed, suppressed, seduced and reduced the gods you might have reached and the god you might have been.
PORTRAITS
‘O you cold censors… you are, like that legless cripple who was wont to say, ‘and why do artists bother to paint full-length portraits?’
— Marquis De Sade “Reflections on the novel”
An excerpt from “Reflections On The Novel” by The Marquis De Sade.
‘I must reply to the reproach leveled at me when Aline Et Valcour was published. My brush , ’twas said, was too vivid. I depict vice with hateful a countenance. Would anyone care to know why? I have no wish to make vice seem attractive. Unlike Crebillon and Dorat, I have not set myself the dangerous goal of enticing women to love characters who deceive them; on the contrary, I want these to loathe these characters. ’Tis the only way whereby one can avoid being duped by them. And, in order to succeed in that purpose, I painted that hero who treads the path of vice with features so frightful that they will most assuredly not inspire either pity or love… never shall I portray crime other than clothed in the colors of hell, I wish to see the crime laid bare, I want them to fear and detest it, and I know no other way to achieve this end than to paint it in all its horror. Woe unto them that surround it with roses! Their views are far less pure, and I shall never emulate them.”
An excerpt from Villeterque’s review of Les Crimes de l’Amour.
‘Such scenes awaken evil tendencies in the wicked; from the virtuous man, who is ever steadfast in his principles, they provoke cries of indignation; and in him whose heart is willing but whose flesh is weak, they incite despondent tears.
These horrible portraits of crime do not even serve the purpose of rendering crime more odious; therefore, they are both useless and dangerous.’
An excerpt from ‘The Author of Les Crimes de Amour to Villeterque, Hack Writer’ by The Marquis De Sade:
“What are the two principle mainsprings of dramatic art? Have not all the authors worthy of the name not declared that they are terror and pity?”
(Of interest may be De Sade’s interest in this article that he wasn’t the author of Justine.)
Take these quotations any way you wish. Ultimately it’s what we all do: relate, translate, predicate.
For better or worse, one’s contemporaries are not one’s arbiters. The same time that kills us judges us.
THE EXHIBITIONIST
Lucia stepped through th
e door and stood at the summit of the old stone church, the building had long ago been abandoned— as had she. She abandoned her ankle length coat, revealing that she wore nothing underneath. Leaves skittered away from her as the wind flapped that coat’s edges. Her long dark hair rippled, rustled like a field of black wheat.
Two men, part of those who devotedly attended Lucia’s daily routine, stood in the park across from the forsaken cathedral. Kurt and Leopold took note of the time, never questioning why they attended. Few people ever wondered what they did and didn’t have to do.
Lucia began by doing a slow touching, stroking breasts and belly, expressionless. Searching her own flesh for a mother’s love. She stood with her feet wide apart, the act of determined masturbation giving her the appearance of being on a rolling ship’s troubled deck, sea legs firmly beneath her. A vivid scar running from her clitoris to between her breasts was also deftly plied, each pucker in the sutures treated as a quivering extra nipple.
She never looked at the gathered men, grinding herself high above street level. No other women ventured down this block… not even hookers or crack heads. Lucia fell into neither category. And it had to be the neighborhood’s sinister reputation that kept anybody from calling 911. No, she never noticed those who noticed her. She stared toward the sun, pupils dilated as if everything was in darkness.
Kurt wondered out loud, “Is she trying to blind herself ?”
Her skin was very white, as if powdered in crushed pearls. But nothing covered her.
Some men had brought their own chairs to set up on the sidewalk, eating burgers, drinking beer. Months ago when Lucia started exposing herself, they catcalled and whistled. They raced up the gray steps after her as she re-entered the church, cobwebs trailing from her sleeves. But they never found her.
No one pursued her anymore. They still made up her audience, fascinated, keeping silently rapt these dozen or so raptors.
Now Leopold snapped a photograph, doing a pictorial of her since summer. It was autumn: black leaves, white flesh.
Her body, well-curved though a bit thin, seemed to hang suspended within the folds of the coat, as if she had been crucified there, arms out flung in pitiful supplication to an uncaring creator. Lucia shuffled her feet in a circle so gradual that the marathon of seconds during which she had her back to her fans made them sigh.
Kurt rubbed his eyes. “What’s… that?”
Arms out to gods unknown, coat furling the elements, Lucia exposed to an early season’s chill. The polished curves gave way to a peculiar shadow. A cloud grazed, then blotted out the sun. Purpling bruises knotted every available inch except for her face, hands, and feet—the only parts of her the coat didn’t conceal when buttoned up. One breast had popped, blood running out around it. Blood also flowed down the insides of her thighs.
Leopold cried, “Some bastard got her! Which one of you was it?”
Rumors had flown about Lucia. Some were convinced she was the bastard daughter of an old priest and a novice nun. Others countered that she was a baby-machine for the Satanists who used the disenfranchised church for ritual murder. More insisted she’d been a gangster’s mistress, that he’d given her to his men after her cunt had stretched too much for him.
“It must be an optical illusion,” Kurt suggested. “It’s how the sun hits the warped stained glass this time of year.”
Lucia began another disturbingly sultry turn.
“Hey, sweetheart! Take the coat off!” crowed a new comer. “Bend over and shake it!”
Voices shouted him down.
“Shut up, you asshole!”
“Show the lady some respect!”
“This ain’t no peepshow…”
Turning. Leaves as black as sin moved between bones whiter than pearls. The only organ—her heart—howled like a freight train, spinning within the dustbowl of her rib cage. Her face upturned, beatific eyes upturned toward the sun.
Leopold’s finger twitched on the camera’s shutter. Then other men took out cell phones, capturing her surreal image. Each would carry this likeness wherever he went, making copies, pasting it onto his website. Or hiding it, afraid ever to look at it again. Although they would all be back the next time Lucia called them back again.
Gossip suggested that Lucia had been kept in the confessional for twenty years, a prisoner of her father, brothers, uncles—squatters in the old church. Police found her after she’d set a fire that gutted much of the building.
“How is it we’re here today?” Kurt wanted to know.
“Or yesterday?” Leopold added.
Could you always identify reality even when shown everything?
Leopold had taken the photographs, documenting each outrage perpetrated on Lucia for the police. Kurt carried her, wrapped in an overcoat, from the blazing church. He’d heard some dozen men screaming when fire reached them, jackals baying at moon flames.
What was this? Suffering’s symbol, forced to display itself. The rules of evidence in flashes of insight.
Leopold was there with his partner, Kurt, the night they found the priest and novice embracing in suicide pact. During the raid as the cult was discovered offering Lucia’s sixth newborn to Lucifer. While a S.W.A.T. team shot it out with the feral gang that ran a slavery ring from which no child or woman was safe.
What was truth? Uncorrupted testimony against narcissistic “justice”. Standing up to history.
Lucia turned. The church’s façade crumbled behind her. When she came around again, the sun had burned her eyes to cinders. There was nothing left but darkness inside the coat, only her head and feet visible above it and below. But it wasn’t empty. The wind shrieked from it, bearing ashes, bleak black leaves, damaged pearls.
Lucia’s fingers curled, hands reaching down, touching that shadow, stoking/stroking the fire that—by definition—must consume.
NURTURE
She described his scars with her hands, the way a sorceress conjured the most sensuous of defiling symbols. He’d been drugged until he laughed as several of his bones snapped. An impertinent percussion, yet as round with their notes as the circle they stood in.
She hadn’t needed to lure him there with lies. The planets were in perfect alignment. He knew because he’d watched it on the evening news, during his final supper at the homeless shelter.
She’d promised her body to him and had delivered, round as the shivering moon, skin oiled with crushed opals and pearls in warm myrrh. After he finished, she squatted over a goblet to catch his semen as it dribbled from her womb. To this he added the tears of nightingales, the flock then committing suicide by diving in one sighing streak into her magical fire.
A caravan, laden with jars of wine fermented from the damp droppings of newborns fed solely on black cherry juice, slipped through her mirror from another time. A hundred thousand warriors from yet another era, less Imperial Roman butchery than Philistines—such as Goliath on hashish—and drank the wine. They pissed steam all around the circle, then circumcised themselves, next throwing the foreskins toward the line of Heaven. These never fell back to earth.
“Do you remember telling me that you were an orphan?” she gently asked him.
He nodded.
“And that you grew up in a series of foster homes where the vilest things were done to you?” she pressed.
Blue sapphire glittered on her eyes. Her lips were the wettest scarlet stain.
“When I was very young I wanted to grow up to be a preacher. Then all I wanted was to destroy—as I had been destroyed. He replied, unable to show any signs of remorse. It was she who looked sad.
“Every child has a chance. But cast among demons, no child has a chance. Do you recall what I told you my name was and what you must do now?”
He smiled. “You are Babylon.”
Jesus, re-incarnated, slit her throat.
SONG OF THE BLACK ORCHID
I lie in the dust. I am the invisible object in the fog. I am lives strung together, as when the planets line up. I am
as deaths collected in the mouth of a cat, hamstrung and then hanged from winter’s piebald branches of a sulking willow tree. I am devout down to the black circles in the chambers of my heart’s throbbing sacrilege. I am the infidel of venerable disembowelment. I only seek the keys to your salvation and a chance to lead you among the phantoms, the uncanny cure for the hellborne theist and the healing guardian of blaspheming thrones.
Enter the mist and look back across your shoulder, fingers tracing alchemy’s symbols between your legs to resurrect the orgasms of forgotten Immaculata. This is your hereafter, running behind you on a thousand legs. Here is your afterworld, my changeling lover, Mumbo Jumbo rapist, Hobgoblin son and Eidolon daughter… dominions of my scourged smile.
MAN OF LETTERS
“Did you think that was funny? Do you even know what those letters mean?” Child in a mask, hands tied behind him with rubber bands, sitting in a corner next to the cat’s litter box, smiling invisibly… mother back to unborn, tiny teeth hidden behind leather. She was punishing him for having written S&M on her boudoir mirror and B&D on the bathroom mirror.
“The S means Sadism and the M means masochism. I like to cause suffering. And apparently you enjoy suffering or you wouldn’t go out of your way to piss me off. And the B&D stands for bondage and discipline. This you deserve and shall receive, over and over, until you learn how little patience I have with you,” she said to him, simultaneously cold and seething.
Yet he knew all this. She often tied him in the corner, flogged him, fed him the horrid scraps the cats wouldn’t eat. She even made him eat the contents of the cat box… made him do all sorts of gross stuff like that if he failed to do as instructed then slunk away to hide in his room, she’d leave him quite bloody. He’d long ago gone beyond tears and terror.
The Myth of Falling Page 2
