Dahliaed

Dahliaed

Mark Coleman

  My body's in a hyper-excited Twilight Zone, the kind of thing you'd expect after two pots of coffee. It's like I'm trying to set a world record for masturbation. Feel like an asylum escapee. Burning up inside with a fever. Head aching, balls dried up, eyes flaming with such salacious intensity that I feel they could explode at any minute. Drowning in a deluge of morbid, overpowering porn. Like arm wrestling with a gorilla. Or having my femur gnawed on by a ravenous crack head.
  Shimmering piranha teeth wresting. The Komodo dragon eats the bones. Blood and semen drying on the floor. Coagulating and gasping for breath. Swimming ever onward even in rest. Mixed together in a great barbershop pole of confusion. Down the legs, across the belly and chest, up the arms, and on the throne of splintered palms. Strawberry shortcake ladyfingers. A mess of a day. A nightmare of a night. Migraine inducing overkill.
  The toilet filled to the water tank with shit. Tongue lolling, panting like a parched poodle. Hair unwashed and strangling my every breath. Teetering, falling head first from a high rise. Downward. The air an angry siren calling me downward. Further and further past the shocked window washers and bug eyed exec's. Macadam head splitter. Brains all over the bystanders.
  Screaming and running down the street like a flaming Richard Pryor. All aghast and ghastly. Grey matter matted all the way down to the pubes. Runs through the car wash with the old Banshee schtick. Past the sedan that five minutes ago had "wash me" fingered in its grimy windows. Broken condoms caught in the monster machinery. Taken away to fill up like water balloons in the drains. Come pouring out of faucets halfway across town. Extra Mojave minerally. On a nightstand sweating.
  Their bodies like maggots in an apothecary. Coiled like snakes in the caduceus. A sheath for the rod; she engulfs him, tries to swallow him whole. A burn victim in the E.R. howling like an alley cat in heat. Ass up in the air, tail swatting invisible flies. Across the world and wisping and swatting. And the scab tears open and he goes haywire in blood and female ejaculate. The hymen broken and the glasses fogged over and perspiring, giving the old drinking glass a run for its money. 
  They stutter then shatter leaving only a bit of crooked frame across the bridge of the nose. She arches her back and he forces her into a kind of epileptic fit, eyes wild, teeth clamping into his shoulder like a vise. Her flower lactating angry nectar. Her whole body seized by a sort of tunnel visioned pain. He finishes and she lies there, laid, grinning from ear to ear, feeling halved. The Black Dahlia verb conjugated. Understand? Consummated aggression in rooms that dot the apartment complexes like fireflies in a New Jersey blackout.
  Night lights. Agony glowing in your children's bedrooms. Rising. The great serpent, the asps pouring out from under the bed, the horned masses ascending the spiral staircase that is the expressway from Hell to closet, and vice versa. Stomaches growling, mouthes snarling. Hiding her sliced grin under the covers as he prepares to make it permanent with a smile of his very own.