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.