In the Cold

In the Cold

Mark Coleman

  The rain washes away what remains of the child’s smile, and all that’s left behind is the man. Bent over. Catching bits of the past in his pockets. Straightening up to meet the woman whose eyes seek to console, but whose heart beats in time to another.

  The kindred under the neon “Jesus Saves’.” Standing in bread lines. Palming crumbs for the long days ahead. Army coats soiled and muddied. Bedraggled strands of hair splitting vision in two. Beards sloppily slapped on. Tin cups shaking blind dimes together. The street musician rusting. The guitar begging. The chords lost.

  An ambulance’s lights going out as it turns the corner after cutting off a few cars. Leaning in a doorway. Locking lips. Hand running through her locks. The perfume you can taste.  Her gloss glittering your lips on contact. Walking past a park transformed and enchanted in the twilight. Swings like phantom limbs reaching back to schoolyard romances. Innocence and that chest pain that did not signal cardiac arrest.

  A bed disheveled, and losing corporeal form after prolonged bouts of lovemaking. Candied pillowcases with an auburn wisp or two left behind to compete in magnificence with the few rays of sunlight that manage to force their way through the blinds. A bottle on the dresser losing its volume. A book laying open to a page with a passage you had read to her. Underlined by passion.

  Booths in the back of restaurants where the waiters let you be. Flash bulbs at the scene when flashed forward, but here only mood lighting. Excruciatingly slow Mondays in the office with the calendar like a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. The X’s leading to the O’s. The dance floor like a beached whale. Jonah finding a flute to pass the three. Trying to paste back the shorn hair. More stubble on the cheek.

  On the corner with a tinny cricket in the branch drooped over the fence. The stop sign at the end of the road far too red. Dripping on the sidewalk. Applying pressure to the wound. Traffic lights too quick to change. Puddles too quick to reflect. A boot coming down, and wiping away the wearied face with the same eyes as you. Heavy hearted. Hands limped and dwarfing.

  Loneliness turning to a sob in the throat. Trouts thrown back, but unable to find the river. The sundress clinging and changing colors. Whimsical kaleidoscoping. Whispering in one another’s ears. Biting the lobes occasionally. An earring taken between the teeth which playfully tug. Tip of the tongue sliding along the loop. Scent of Chanel and her sex. The throbbing that synchronizes.

  Lying there, staring at the ceiling, fancying that you can see the sky beyond. Toes curled up under the covers. Resting hand in hand. Pining for someone in your arms. A waltz with delirium and the sister of a friend. Trembling lips that lack the courage to consummate. Wanting nothing more than to kiss her.

   Her absence knifing at your heart. Ailing intermissions. Interrupted. Fracturing out. Broken ashtrays. Mirrors hung as crooked on the walls as your dreams on the crescent up there among the stars.

  Kids out hopscotching beneath parental umbrellas. Marbles and Hula-hoops. Saturn with its rings grown wider and further apart. A doorbell forgetting its function. The inhabitants unaware that someone stands in the shelter of the porch. The boards all warped. Bowlegged and unwanted. Tie with a sloppy knot. Or maybe just a clip-on. Pants with a wiped-out crease. Nothing much to look at. The yawn excusing the arm around the shoulders. Mindful of the popcorn bucket.

 Exhaustion in the back seat. Fogged windows. Perspiration clinging to the brow. Parked up the hill with the city spread out below. Lit up like a Christmas tree. The advent chocolates half melted in the moonlight.  The weeping willows hiding feral cats, and pianos with missing teeth. The heat waves streaking desert asphault in the morning. Compulsive daytrip. Odds seeming good.

  Socials forcing adolescent backs up against the wall. Spiked punch bowls bleeding into soup kitchens. Courageous girls grabbing a boy here and there. Whores in the homeless bar drinking away their fathers. Winos in the library waiting for the storm to pass. But the clouds keep gathering. Piling on top of one another. A man taking a deep breath as his foot leaves the curb. The bus swerving, but not missing. 

Banquet

  Banquet

Mark Coleman

  The banquet was laid. An ocean of morsels with head and tail intact. From across the table, she darted glances at me. But she had been tainted. Her every move carried with it an acknowledgement of having taken another’s seed in a moment of desperation. Tainted solace grown into a guilty conscience.

   She knew that I was through pursuing her. Any urge to connect, even in the most superficial of ways was abruptly obliterated. I imagined the new avenues this unshackling would allow me to pursue. The brutal alley fucks. The faces and bodies without names or meaning. No more wishing wells, just toilet bowls in which to unleash my primal urges.

  Dried up. Champagne flute in hand. Tasting lips that my eyes had not even had the pleasure of taking in yet. I saw the nipples through the sheer cloth. The bodies in postures of begging. The eyes filled with a longing that did not extend beyond the sensual. Hopeless, bestial unions started on the innocuous barstools and ending in the grim, infested boudoirs.

  Bulbs on chains with their knowing arches. Surrealistic rhythmic beats to sway to, and bugger out. The chicken wire ceilings serving as a voyeuristic specter’s perch. The nonexistent eyes that everyone can feel penetrating them to the very marrow. The chill that runs along your spine, and makes you jolt in the middle of orgasm. Interrupted half-buck. Holding on to the pommel. Marble white knuckles.  

The knowledge that what you seek to empty into the saddle depends on the utmost mental acuity. 

  The cogs in your head going haywire. No moorings. Spinning in every direction. Eyes in meltdown trying to grasp all the room has to offer from the broken woman beneath you to the spider eggs aching to burst, and send all their eight-legged monstrosities to web out across the light fixtures and sockets. Down the dresser in a veritable waterfall of eyes. Pupils dilating with terror and understanding. Life in all its horrible manifestations taking hold of you. Slamming the skull so haphazardly buried beneath the fat into the filth-caked floor.

  Splinters of it sticking here and there like coffin nails sealing the rotting plant fodder. The flowers will continually bloom. Continually sweat petals of putrescence and rot into the merciless, insatiable soil. Soil that extends its mouth like an ear gradually losing its hearing to the insignificant beating in your chest that you mistake for your humanity.

  Floods of carcasses that shed their skin in acid baths of reckoning. The wind blowing out the calcareous flutes as the tackle blew out the jock’s knee. Keratin reeds at the end of the tarnished brass necks shooting out abattoir buds that hide the face whose counterpart screams out its agony below.

  The light refusing to go out. Ceaselessly reasserting itself. Making sure that the self sees the destruction wrought upon it. The limbs collapsing, and going wolf-wise. The pods exploding in showers of worthless dross. The rapier ribs sharded into tumorous organs. Pus leaking out of sockets, and running down mildewed cheekbones that once were just the foundation for the place parents directed their blows.

  Weeping in a crib. Taken out, raped, tortured, broken, and sold to the circus where you watched the pinwheels and paper funneled cotton candy corollas gripped so guardedly in tiny, pink fists that one day would violate the cunts of prepubescent girls as they squealed halfway between horror and delight. The Ferris wheel going up again. From its apex, gobs of spit rained down on bellies fattened by little monsters whose faces shine through their carrier’s flesh as though the spittle were streams from a water pistol in a wet t-shirt contest. Incubated in wombs diseased with hope. The world without sharpening its claws and waiting. Anticipating the moment it raids the market, indentures with its familial tether, and drags the screaming beast home to sheer and cloth itself with.