Birthing

Birthing

Mark Coleman

  Wrote extensively in my notebook. Then somehow the notebook went blank. Erased no doubt by some nascent, malevolent Djinn. Maybe some metaphysical conflagration took it with my heart. My eyes are always cold or hateful now. The primal therapy sessions brought out intrauterine trauma. The womb is a hostile place. The mother gives birth to death. Nigrescent conception on mattresses woven out of straw, lilac, and mortality.
  The quiff belongs to the hoopoe. Always has. Always will. And yet we put it on our own stupid, speedbag heads. Like peacocks hoping to attract a mate. Preferably those with mouths like a cichlid's. Love's a four letter word, it's true, but another four letter word usually takes its place. The word screams and moans and finally expires. And so we take to our beds and strike strange poses. Stretching and straining ourselves to Hell and back.
  Stove on about to light a final cigarette when someone knocks on the door, and you begrudgingly get up to open it. She stands there prettily wearing her tiara of rain. An umbrella clutched in her left hand as a baby might clutch at the maternal teat for a suckle of milk. Her Shelli Segal starry with heavenly dew.
  She smiles in a slightly uncertain and unfamiliar way. Mentions a smell of gas. The gas emanating from the baker's suicide machine. You ignore this, in the same way that you write off that new smile of her's. She does not seem impatient for an explanation nor particularly perturbed. You take her in your arms with a whispered "thank you." You said it so faintly that you doubt she even heard.
  She kisses you with her ruby lips. The lips you know so well no matter what shade they choose. You can still taste and feel them in her absence. The butterflies they leave all over your face. Fluttering and flaunting their delicate wings. Unlike the moths some women leave. Just dusting up your face until it's nothing but a coal miner's grey, morose mug. Her lips are slightly purpled beneath the lipstick due to the cold.
  You relish her as though it's your very first encounter. Under the skies of Hawaii. Rainbows arching their way off to the waterfalls to play with the nymphs. Promenades you walk with her stopping to stare at the anchored boats and far too blond surfers. A momentary kiss or a playful snub usually on her part. In the distance, other rendezvous and private soirées. Twilight coming on. The revelers beginning in earnest.
   Parasols up and down the beach. The sun beating down hot and steady on the sand between your sandalled toes. The vast expanse of ocean spread out before you with fish you could never dream of identifying or naming. Not to mention the flora and fauna of the surrounding thickets and forests full of the birds chirping away their unrequited love over the flute of Pan. But yours wasn't unrequited. You carried her into your suite as though you were newlyweds. Which in a since you were.
  A crude mudra dances along your whiskered cheek. Her tongue twirling about yours. Playing along a broken tooth or two. You feel the crevices of her own. Your tongue is slightly more persistent in a faux alpha sort of way. Her skin is as soft as a bap and as warm as an Indian Summer, now that she's sharing in your warmth and the fireplace's. The stove discreetly turned off as you move into the kitchen. Offer her a cup of coffee or tea. Just something gentlemanly you feel compelled to do. Despite her love of chamomile, she refuses.
  You think, my God, children really do become their parents. Whether it's in a domestic or carnal sense. And most of all in divorce and longing.
  The corps a corps begins in the familiar manner with a copious amount of necking. Libidinal and frustrated, you're afraid you'll come before your lips even touch the tiny arboretum of hair. But you don't. Your cock simply stiffens and pearls. You lick her thighs then her inner and outer labia. Parting her to tease the pillow soft, wet margins. Finally, you make your way to her clit which peaks out of its hood like a tiny toadstool.
  Her back cat arches as though she wants to brush the ceiling with her belly. The pleasure is somehow mixed with something ugly and damned. The softness is still there but a sheet of annealed glass reflects something doom laden in her romance novel stuffed mind. A great sadness overwhelms you. A flood of Khattam Shud begins to drown you just as another flood will soon fill her womb.
  You continue what she or you started, regardless. You can't remember which. All of a sudden, your mind is failing you. You're drawing blanks when only a matter of seconds before the drawings were as rich as a precocious child's coloring book. There is a fracturing and splintering here when the two of you should be united as one. In an instance, you realize that this is the last time you will make love.
  Being that this is a termination as opposed to the middle of something beautiful, a more apt word for this coarse union would be "fuck." Despite your eagerness, or perhaps because of it, it is still not something simply salacious. It is something more though that iridescence of finality would suggest otherwise.
  That face muffled by the looking glass of atrabilious emotion. A grimace gawp there soon to engulf you. Your tongue goes about its anfractuous way. Down her tunneling pleasure garden. A floral palace meant for a king. Apparently, you wear the crown for only one more night. Notwithstanding the little deaths that came before, which seem meaningless now. She takes your scepter in her hand though you know you've been demoted to some sort of prince or, worse yet, court jester.
  As you expected, after bringing moisture to her cunt, she's manouvering to take you into her mouth and down her throat. She breathes noisily and gags a bit on you as she swallows you to your untrimmed pubic hair. She acts as though she's quaffing the most exotic of beverages with her sonorous slurping. Perhaps similar to the ones in the oceanside Hawaiian kiosk like bars with silly umbrellas stuck in them.
  She doesn't neglect the glans and licks both sides of the shaft. Then you're completely acephalous again between those gorgeous lips. She eyes you inquisitively as she flicks her tongue over your urethra. You notice something else in those eyes. Almost parasitic and certainly foreign.
  With a shock, you know what is there. You've seen it in the mirror often enough. It's malice and melancholy. As though, the whole act was a small parting gift.
  She complains of tasting pre-come and ceases the whole operation. You hope hopelessly that this may be the reason for that look of her's. The most rudimentary of logic dispels this almost immediately. If such were the case then why had she, in what should have been the throes of passion during a well received cunnilingus on her person, such nastily scrawled, nonverbal messages clouding her otherwise angelic face. You remember your confusion at that smile of her's and realize that you should have let it register instead of simply brushing it away like a common house fly or, more accurately, a swarm of mosquitoes.
  She yowls tinnily as you enter her though you try to do it as gently as possible while peppering her with kisses. Without complaint that you can taste yourself. You imagine she can taste her own juices in your mouth. You find a bizarre comfort in knowing that you are assimilating yourself. You wonder if this will make you whole again. Maybe this is the key to immortality. If so, the same unending life would be granted her. To spend cradled in another's arms forever.
  Withdrawing with frequency now you rub your tip gingerly along her lips. Her lips, both of them, quiver with the shock of almost diminutive temblors. She arches her back for the second time in this ever darkening night. You glance at the ceiling to which she seems so intent on reaching then one last time look into her eyes as you once again enter her. The now placid pools drably spell out a single word: FIN.
  You recognize it due to your overindulgence in French cinema. The picture show's over even before you seed her. The theaters have been boarded up and the staff sent home or gone on dissatisfied into clerking. They look like the dead Drive-Ins that you see as you make your way through Barstow with a Big Boy thermometer still floating like some idol to consumerism in your head.
  The masses sole entertainment now are the tumbleweeds that rush down the dusty streets and bang noiselessly into the facades of the cinemas and their cross beamed windows. Casting X shadows in the noonday desert heat. Occasionally one will get caught in the spikes of a cactus. A lizard eying it with suspicion.
  All this will end in the sitting room of an abortion clinic. Anxiously waiting. The father of death as all fathers are. You are jealous and somewhat mortified by the fact that she's in there in stirrups with her petite pudendum exposed to another even if he is in a lab coat. You know this will be the case, as your morbid act comes to an end with simultaneous moans. The curtains falls. Her pupils and irises run together in remorse. She can already feel it kicking. You avert your gaze which now lies on her mouth as you pour into her, sleeveless. She won't want to keep it because she won't want to keep you. You're not sure you would either.

Louise

  I often wonder. I wonder why you held my hand when I donated blood to people I didn't know. I probably wouldn't even like them if I did. You were gay. I was straight. It made things difficult. I was going to ask you to prom. You asked me why I drank so much. I said that I'd get sick if I didn't. You accepted that and never asked again. I wondered what you'd look like naked. I found out and was not disappointed. Your beauty, of course, went deeper than that. You hate the way you look. The perfect breasts that you left like a politician's flyer on my front porch. Your eyes could have gained you admission. Your soul's worth a million of mine. Mine's all smoke and booze. There are no mirrors here. They're all clouded over when I exhale. I wish it all would disappear. But magic acts lose popularity. People hate riddles that they can't solve. I've started reading The Book of Monelle. I'm drunk and I've started to cry.

Angelic



  It's hard for me to say this. We were both shaking one out in detox. We didn't spend much time together. Yet, your eyes and heart burned and buried themselves deep within me. Your voice had blood and magic in it. Your stories broke my heart. No one as beautiful as you should have to deal with so much pain. No one should take advantage of someone with such a kind smile. I'm no good at love poems. I'm not even sure if this is love, loneliness or even a poem. You're looking for an out. I am too. The lines in your forehead are your humanity. You'll never drink so much that you'll lose your glow. The ravages of our small eternity will never take your soul from you. You'll still be nothing other than an angel in as many years as time chooses to allot to you.

My City

 

My City
Mark Coleman
 

  Liquor bloat takes you over. Some toothpick of a space boffin comes and steals all your women. Throws them out the bedroom window to the curb where the getaway car sits idling. You watch as they go down. They're swallowed as they once swallowed you. The seats and steering wheel are surely ripped. Tire marks on the grass.
  You'll miss them, sure, but a part of you is glad to see them gone. They all brought trouble. They never stick around when it starts to get tough or you start to need them as much as they need you on some level. Whether they'd ever admit it or not. The Gutenberg Bible bleats and bleeds in an anorak whose pockets are full of fieldstones. The best thing about the book of poetry in your lap is the typeface. The author is a hack of the highest order.
  Hard eyes birth a mercurial smile as he retreats to the stall with a paper towel fifi. The drawn out hand washing to ascertain exactly what this strange dark-colored creature is up to. After he tears six pieces from the dispenser, moistens them under the sink, and adds a few squirts of soap, you're pretty sure you know.
  There's no suggestion of guilt. It's not entirely natural to come into something so rough. You think, "Hell, it's only a matter of weeks before he goes Vaseline and Brilo pad." You search your memory for your own strange masturbational aids and come up short. All you can recall is rubber molds of porn stars' pussies and lips connected to tubular sperm receptacles that the packages claim are dishwasher safe.
  You go back to the bathroom and blow your nose into a paper towel. Someone's shitting next to the  Indian now. He's sitting in the wheelchair bound, crutch hobbling cubicle. It is indeed rough. You can't imagine pounding your cock into something like this, no matter how well lubricated. It feels like your cheeks and chin when you haven't shaved in a few days. It's the sort of improvisation that ends up bloodied. I know. I've used cheap motel wash clothes. The small scabs tend linger under the glans.
  As usual, you forget to zip your fly between the urinal and the door. Today, you're going bare back, and almost wish the cougar sharing the space with you would have looked up before you noticed your faux pas. She's a bit weathered with liver spots, sure, but she's also that elusive breed: The Redhead. I saw five of them on the way here today. One had the added benefit of being some sort of Cuban-heeled Asian. Hair down to the middle of their backs. Gorgeous.
  You've wanted to bed one down since middle school when you used to stare at the fiery ponytail of the girl in the desk in front of you. Outside, you turn the post to find the key-shaped hole you're supposed to deposit your cigarette in. Wishing that it resembled that floraled pout that greets you when you nudge aside a pair of lace panties. The derriere lifted from the cold kitchen floor. The back arched. The desire for the spelunking tongue to explore that burning bush.
  Sitting at the bus stop, you watch the cars run over the wreckage in the street. The sparkplug is directly in front of you. They keep hitting the right headlight. It splitters over and over. You wonder if a shard will come your way. You stare at the revolting sculptures in your city that some fucking idiot should loose his job for okaying. Created no doubt by men with large, unwieldy hands.
  You imagine that they have small heads with multi-colored butterflies fluttering in them. They must write platitudes on their dollar bills and stick them in vending machines hoping that something magical will come out. The public is outraged when their art is vandalized. They say it's part of the city. It's nothing but shit made by shit for shit.
  Here are some tips for the aspiring artist: work in black and white, if you must work in color use yellow sparingly, avoid clichéd images, the same with text, if the images don't speak for themselves they may not be images at all, if you imitate your professors or peers or take their criticism seriously you will never amount to anything. If you have to go to art school to do anything but use the toilet and kill time, you are done. If you like Ansel Adams, you are done. If you approach art with the heart and eyes of a dilettante, you are done.
  Never go to a  PTA meeting unless moms are your thing, and then you're better off meeting them elsewhere. On the bus, they sometimes dress like their daughters. Or they have muffin tops offset by wide-brimmed straw hats. The thin ones in tight fitting jeans, white shirts with thick blue stripes, and librarian glasses are the most beautiful. They have slightly shriveled necks, and hands with large veins. They speak in complete sentences and read mystery novels.
  Learn to love cute girls in wheelchairs. The one I always see coming down the ramp has a piercing and hazel eyes. I think she's keen on a bearded, beanied boy who can spend half an hour rat
gnawing on an apple core then another half an hour working on a granola bar. He carries a slim volume called Don't Sweat the Small Stuff in his backpack. The lid on his water bottle snaps loudly back into place.
  The blonde next to you has buck teeth, and holds her bag closely to her chest. She is plagued by self-loathing by way of comparison. At the end of the light rail is a brunette with her hair tied up. She has pre-ripped holes running down her pre-faded jeans, and is clutching a scarf. She stands askance with her hand on the rail. When she finally sits down, three stops along, she reveals her ass crack to you.
  Deep in thought staring at a Mexican girl's hair in front of you. You can almost smell it. You're tempted to reach out, and run your fingers through it. A few strands stand loose from the otherwise immaculate flow. When they get on it's their tasseled boots and legs. Some have cherubic faces. You know they're too young for you but you'd still cover those faces in kisses.
  You hear someone in the food bank line talking about a whore, and how he's going to gag her and brick down her throat. You think of the tears that will run down her face as he does so. Her swallowing all those angry, blue ball ejaculations. Perhaps, accompanied by the nickel taste of blood. Bubbles at the bottom of her nostrils.
  You wonder if anyone's ever held an umbrella over her head when it was raining. Or held a door open for her. How long has she sold herself? The joiners don't join the union but they do join the circus. John Barleycorn runs around doling out pittances of relief. Old men with crackly, pitted faces sigh as this Saint Nick warms them with his embrace.
  Kasperl (not the Hohnsteiner variety) and his old buddy Punch hold blackjacks to beat down the dreams of the poor and the downtrodden. They round up the street sleepers on Christmas day, and depending on their state of mind and/or level of intoxication throw them in the drunk tank, general population, or a holding cell. Sometimes, they just see how far they can throw themselves. It's usually into a lake that's not too deep. Occasionally, it's just in front of a bus, they may or may not have taken before.
  I chug a bottle of Nyquil to kill the inspiration because all I want to do is read a book. My vision will start to blur and I'll end up spending the night watching wretched television shows instead. I'll think about what I've read recently on the way to an interview. I have no idea where the office building is. But I'd like to sleep in a room, eat, drink, smoke. It's simple for some. Hard for others. For you and me the jukebox is never playing.

 

Curlicues

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Rumblings

 Rumblings

Mark Coleman

 

  Find a lipstick smeared refry in a parking lot, and imagine that you're kissing the woman who discarded it. Lonely without a red cent in your filth caked pocket. Staring at the asses of the girls who pass, regardless of whether or not they're with their man. Sleeping in the rain. A torrential slumber. On church doorsteps, corrugated coffee shop chairs, and cement inclines covered in fast food paper cups and wrappers.

  Waking up with bus bench, trash can moire prints woven into your aching back. Everyone is talking too loud, especially the niggers, who all think they're pimps and thugs. They slurp the soup with  unidentifiable chunks of carrion in it. Eat their feed as though it was served in troughs. Everything falls apart or drowns in the drool of an angry male nurse.
  It's more unnerving than the incessant, parable singing during a Catholic communion. Standing with one minute breaks to sit in the hard pews with people better dressed than you after walking day in and day out. Consecrating faith after the priest gives the okay with gilded bibles and solid gold crosses. Peeping a married woman through a bloodshot squint. She's been throwing glancing at you. You wouldn't mind at all.

  An Ethiopian in a skull cap crumples up grocery bags with a few bloodied belongings in them. Pants with the knees ripped out. Shirt unbuttoned to show the too white curls tufted on the starless night that is his skin. Hair bedraggled, umbrella folded, eyes jaundice yellow, nose strangely aquiline.

  The noise of the human race makes you want to put a gun in your mouth. You have no plugs so you stuff dampened wads of shit paper in your ears. You still can't block out the mad, living cacophony. You think about throwing yourself in front of a bus. Nothing comes of anything. Your half baked plans to do yourself in are absorbed into that noise.

  Spent so much time in the pursuit of knowledge just to have it wiped out by television in the sober house. Hocking yourself to the bone. The little clicks on the man's typewriter start to drive you insane. You can count on one every two seconds. People won't stay in their fucking rooms. Don't know how to not slam their doors.

  She laughs too loud as she checks in the guests. The cackle makes gooseflesh. The maids push their little carts back and forth over the marble floor. The phone keeps ringing. No one thinks to answer it. You feel like some legless creeper just crawled over your grave.

  Picnicing in the cemetery with the only woman you ever loved in the ground beneath you. Drinking Peppermint Schnapps with an MIT graduate going streetwise. Make out with a whore who's missing her son.
   Full of rum and snipe smoke. Warm and cold at the same time. The wind goes through you. You try to get to the park early enough to reserve a leeward space. You have neither coat nor blanket. Just a short sleeve shirt you try to take refuge in. 

  Sit and watch the fountain that spits as much as the tubercular Mexican hobos. You don't have a TB card. You don't win the lottery. The clothes room isn't open yet. A spade coughs in your face and your coffee. An old racist cracker does the same thing as you turn the corner.

  You've only changed your clothes once in a week. The ball of manager rolls from office to counter and back again. Rattles dimes and nickels. Counts bills. You sign up for day labor then go outside and pass out on the sidewalk with the lightning splitting the sky in half. Further off towards the disgusting skyscrapers it quarters.
  Call an ambulance on yourself in detox. They won't do anything until you're blowing zeros. They throw you in a jail cell to scream it out. Eat the pharmaceutical diamonds they give you in Dixie cups dancing with flowers. You'd never cheek something so important to your well being. Not like when you were on a hold in the mental hospital. Try to get sleeping pills with whiskey stealing the course from your blood.
  Kid won't stop jacking barbeque covers in lieu of the real thing. Gets hit with brass knuckles in the back of the head. Takes off his hat and starts gushing. Tries to make a bandanna out of a pair of faded jeans. Cracks a few jokes then goes and lies on the heat grate with a stolen bottle.
  Your backpack goes missing when you're out. Sleeping in pot plumes and vodka fog. Drinking Skoal when you're released and sharing cigs with a 23 year old boy and a 51 year old woman at a bus stop. Both of whom lost their children because a circle jerk judge decided they were unfit parents. A lady gets set on fire by the river. You can't find a burned patch of grass down there.
  Hole up for a few hours until you're 86'ed. Everyone is out of cigarettes. Everyone has cigarettes except for you. You panhandle twenty one cents and buy a tootsie roll. The clerk gives you a slice of pepperoni pizza on the house. You grease up the application you're filling out. The pen keeps sliding out of your slippery mitt. You keep missing the homeless lunch truck at the capitol. You walk fast but things keep passing you by. You puke up a shelter meal in the bushes. The cactus grows crooked. Its spikes branch into your brain.
  The doorman demands a dollar for a smoke. You go around the corner where they won't even accept your poor, proffered payment. Starvation is in the near future for everyone without a picture I.D. Hunger is a thing only the truly privileged know. The pangs make fools out of anyone who lets them in. Your writing distends.
 The weeping willow refuses to weep for you. You are rewarded for your self medicated depression with month long trips to rehab. You eat a meal under Christ's sagging body. You turn more into a nihilist. A toothless vet with Nam tours spinning sidewise in his mind is convinced the city is going to break out in war between the haves and the have-nots. A hooker blows you in a Porta Potty with the steam still rising from the shit in its bowels.
  The stripper thinks you're a gentleman during a touch, all nude lap dance. She has you massage her breasts, twist her nipples, grab her ass. Her auburn hair tickles your neck. Your paunch of stomach growls. Your dick hardly hardens. Human forms float out of the mist. Fat men in wheelchairs sneer at you with all their corpulence.
  The clouds overrun the heavens like the black cockroaches that you heard someone refer to as poor man's bubble wrap. They blot out every star in the sky. They hate their shine. Most people that know you know that you hate most people. The bars are the only time that you can stand them.
  Termites eat away the sun. The exterminator never comes. The piranhas go crazy. You wait all day for the cable guy, watching the snow on the set as the snow outside takes the lives of young bums. They were already dying. You're dying. Inside of you there are earthquakes along unsightly fault lines. You take yourself into the world and try not to look the part. You put on your best clothes and shop around for part-time work.
  You spend whole nights looking at the menus in restaurant windows. A mob catches up with you and holds you to the ground. Their heels grind into your skull. Your arms and legs are pinned down. No one answers the telephone. It just rings and rings. Even the voicemail shuns you.
  You crouch on your heels with it held between your head and shoulder. Lie in bed with it and stare at the ceiling. The cradle is too far to reach. There is never anybody there. There is no one outside. No one in here with you as much as you wish and pray for it.
  There's not a single neon orange crumb in the chip bag. The slice of hamburger is mildewing. The mustard on the hot dog is turning pus. Still no one answers the phone. You just want to hear her voice. Hear an utterance of some form of reassurance. Be told that all is not in vain. That you still have it. Whatever "it" might be.
  You're afraid you've gone Hemingway, and lost your raison d'etre. That it's all disappearing far too quickly like hair from a prematurely balding teenager's head. The girls already shun him. He can't even pick up his friends' scraps. He wanders the streets, digging through trashcans, hoping to find a doggy bag.
  They walk by him as though they've been raised on platforms with their high heels echoing along the street and down the alleys. Heads held high. Eyes somewhere/anywhere other than on his face. A whole day's shopping in crook of arm and hand. Find half of a shooter. Down it and feel absolutely nothing. The gulf inside of you just yawns that much wider. There are worse things than going hungry.

Lack

A little magic would be so nice. But I know that I have a tendency to ask for too much. And apparently anything nice is much too much. Even if it's the smallest most imperceptible kiss. I'd spend the whole time wondering why you weren't with someone else. You'd be disappointed as Hell. I'm disappointed as Hell. With everything. Especially, this lack of magic.  

Literary Whore

Literary Whore

Mark Coleman

  There’s nothing but full stops in the book you’re reading. Blackout, coke-fueled stop, stop, stops. Alcoholic MVP brain dead from lack of intellectual stimulation. You’re having some sort of panic attack. Spasms wrack your body. Can’t open the bathroom door. Can’t get off your boots. You know you need to relax. Sitting there flinching. Disappointment and tortured thinking. Overly masochistic self-depreciation.

   You need a drink, and some form of companionship. Wishing that you had gone to school for journalism. Sickened by your observational death. A girl in the lobby cowered by a suitcase. Ask if she needs help then immediately regret it. There is a great sadness in her eyes. A sadness that seems tired of itself.

  Meet a few stragglers from a wedding after party. A couple pour out a little less than half a can of beer from their two combined tipples for you. Smoke six cigarettes and some of their pot. They take a picture with you. A shit bored disposable camera. Meet the girls. The wedding crasher is sleeping in their bed. Straight from prison.

  Picking up road kill missed by a chain gang. The wind kicks up, and the lighter refuses its light. If it was a Pez dispenser, how much easier it would be to get what you need. Rub blow residue from a pocket mirror on your gums.

   The back of it shuns its Chinese character. The original owner was a sweetheart. You were on the verge of proposal when the romantic fissure took place. She’s gone now, and it’s all she left. Excepting a hole in your chest, and the tingle of a year and a half long embrace. The ghost of her body’s warmth haunts you.

  Madras eyes underlined by the violet half moons of sleeplessness. The full moon in the sky has its own hand in their creation. The week is dissolving in the rhinestone of remembrance. The ice keeps melting, and so you keep beast of burdening it to the ice machine down the hall. The room’s nice but no one visits you. Strangers treat you both as an old friend and a pariah.

  You lust after girls a decade younger than you. You continually sleep alone. If only a Salinger elevator operator would lend his hand. A steady intake of booze to keep the fire inside of you. Your fate is chilled. Depression eats away the segments of your spine. Loneliness refuses to be ignored. It wants your life. You contemplate handing it over.

  It’s always been rough going. You’ve been holed up in your room. A one nightstand might keep your heart from falling apart. You desire something less alienating but this absence of any form of tenderness is going to land you in the madhouse.

  Your entire shocked being needs a boost. The bump rushes up the quarter of straw. It helps. You take out your soul and look at it. It’s been making love to your misery. They make a cute couple but you wish they’d break up.

  The whore with the missing sock who will blow you but not kiss you. Saying that you don’t know where her mouth has been. Your longing doesn’t care but she turns her head away. Fell for you, and looked for you in the bars. The bartenders would inform you of her constant presence. Just narrowly missed her again.
  Maybe she just wanted to keep the promise of a birthday present in line with her trade. There doesn’t seem to be much help for people like you and her. Even in one another’s arms there would still be that unrelenting gulf. All the lights in the picture house have gone out. You didn’t like what they were showing anyway.

Melancholic Motel

Melancholic Motel

Mark Coleman

 Some mornings you wake up and your heart’s broken. Some mornings it’s not even there. There’s just a dull ache where a beat should be. Other days the sun discovers it on the nightstand where you left it beside a pack of smokes. A few crumpled dollars. A couple of quarters and nickels. Not many pennies.

  You can feel the previous night in your head. Rust fills your mouth and coats your tongue. Your saliva’s brine and motor oil. The spark plug is missing. You probably lost it in a pint glass. Your forehead’s stippled. You think of Bukowski, and remember reciting one of his poems in speech class.

  You wrote a song about her but never sang it. She never heard or even saw it.  The lyrics fell apart. Dissolved in sulfuric forgetfulness where most your valuables go. You might still love her but it’s hard to say if it’s not just mime histrionics. There’s an inscription in every book on the shelf that you wrote yourself.

  Your lusterless eyes just take in the pattern of the motel room carpet most of the time. Little mice squares litter. The yellow that the green pushes up. The lamp on the desk is curious about something. What that might be is anyone’s guess. The desk’s legs taper. Daggering into the floor.

  Your suitcase has exploded. There’s dirty laundry everywhere. The laundry machines hunger for your change. Just as the television hungers for your finger to touch the remote’s clitoral power button. The volume buttons care nothing about their state of disrepair. You hear the other sets and sex in the adjacent rooms. A crying baby somewhere.

  You’re sure there are tears but you can’t feel them. In the matchbox there remains a solitary fire-tipped splinter of wood. You drink the rest of a bottle of beer with a cigarette butt in it. You sigh and go to the bathroom. Sitting there with your head in your hands.

  There seems to be a little death everywhere in the room. It’s not the little death of a pair of lovers. Something seems to be taken away from you with every passing second. You wonder how much the prostitutes go for around here. You wouldn’t even mind if she were venereal. You just want to get away from yourself for a while.

  Time refuses to pass. The hands on the clock always seem to be in the same position. It’s as though their existence is solely for amusement. The pen is out of ink. The perforations on the notepad are dazed. It’s hard to say what’s written on the ones in the wastebasket. It wasn’t inspiration. Whatever it was the termite weeks have eaten it away.

  Your soul is desiccated. You don’t miss the moisture. Sometimes, there’s a drizzle outside. The rain mists. It gently dots the shingles. The flotillas of cloud on some exploratory excursion. The gold against their prows. The cottony mastheads against the tender blue. The gossamer thin hulls. There’s no saying how long their maiden voyage will last.

  There’s rot in your bones. Your tibia’s holding on by a thread. Your teeth have gone un-drilled for too long. There’s a Russian doll echo inside of you. The round burns too slow. Everything lengthens. Then recedes for a bit into the exhausted grey background.
  There is no expectation. This is all there is. A bed you don’t sleep in but just sit on the edge of. There are too many pillows. Not enough sheets. The air conditioner is broken. There’s a torrential sweat on your face. Maybe all those beads are really the tears you can’t feel. You’re still pretty sure that sometimes you cry.

Love Clots

Love Clots

Mark Coleman

  The metaphysical terror that comes with falling in love. Waking up with hunger pangs. A parch for her very being. The horrors come with their cold sweats and tremors. Your mind goes berserk with adversaries. There’s a conspiracy against your bliss and blithe. You see it in every eye that caresses her.

  The co-worker that has the audacity to share a joke that you’re not in on with her. Her pearly whites and his porcelain caps forming a forbidden union. The shop clerk who takes a little too long over her. Helping her select the perfect dress. (Never mind, he’s probably a fag.) An affectionate water cooler touch on the shoulder over some perfectly benign banter. The shoulder that you had just kissed, last night. Whispering sweet nothings.

  You just keep hitting the call button so you can bask in the radiance of the nurse who looks like the greatest red carpet starlet. Her heart and shine is what you really want to buy a share in. This is a world where everyone is so busy fucking each other that no one stops long enough to make love.

   Holding hands in Palisades Park. Eating gobs from the same blob of cotton candy. That sharing of pink confectionary floss almost a kiss in itself. Broken down at the top of the Ferris wheel. The passenger car swaying as you rock yourselves merrily. No fear in it. Just a glitch in a lover’s afternoon.

  Maybe, a bit of necking. Or just a tiny, teasing peck. And sometimes it’s the Gravitron. The floor drops out and you’re stuck to opposite walls. There are times the Gravitron never stops. Some children enjoy this who have never known the slightest tenderness or affection.

  The arching amateur paint strokes on your hospital gown. The raised hatch on the hideous yellow socks. The “Fall Risk” police line on your wrist. You step on the floor and an alarm goes off. Its pig squeal echoing through your head.

  They strap you down because you wouldn’t stay in bed. You don’t bother to writhe. The television that you watch and watch without the least comprehension of what’s happening on it. The morphine that brings a moment of euphoria. You stare at the ceiling. They give you a couple more shots during the night, and the world almost seems like a place worth being in.

  Then, they take you out of the audience and turn you into the human pincushion. The pinheads laugh and dance. Their chonmages making them look even stupider. The barkers there are all full of jolly and good spirit with their promises of monstrosities. But just as in Browning’s film, the midget is humiliated and heartbroken.

  The almshouse is quickly approaching. It’s façade higher than any cathedral in the world. Icarus will always fall. I will always fall. Sometimes it’s in love. More often it’s into month long drinking binges. Trekking through a blizzard, half frostbitten, for the handle I so desperately need.

  The hurricane comes, and the fishing boats descend to the depths of sea and time. Where the fish have corkscrewing flashlights on their heads, and some maniacal king, who cares nothing for you, rules. His scepter is so bejeweled that it is the envy of all the angels. (The fallen one cries his lot into the flames of damnation.)
  His throne is so golden that God wouldn’t sit His fat ass on it. The women bow down to his maleficence and power. They wrought their own chains and they are proud of them. The clot in your hand breaks into smaller clots but it still hurts. The IV’s are out, and you can smoke. But something still seems wrong.

Rosy Promenade

Rosy Promenade

Mark Coleman

   The covers to my chin, I fell into an embryonic sleep. Twirling down alleyways encased in marble-veined buttressed glass. The shops on either side displaying their polished and dusted trinkets.

  The bell jars beneath which stand rigid, obeisant praying mantises reflecting the sun’s rays. Chaperoning those swimming pool dances on the hotel room’s ceiling. Lying there in remembrance of planetarium school days.

  The delft seahorses lined on wicker rocking chairs as fragile as their seafaring brethren. The diaphanous dorsal fin fine as a square of blotting paper. The curlicue tail beckoning in foreplay come hither. The head like a miniature wolf’s from bespangled snout to starfish eye.

   Hobby horses with a button missing in their heads give up the neigh. The mauve thread fractured out of knit. Stuck in black plastic potholders padded out with Styrofoam peanuts. A little yellower than the ones in the cardboard boxes your toddler builds castles with. Dry rot on a pogo stick. 

  The ruby lipped Russian Dolls rotund with quadruplets. The carefully painted babushkas from which the central parted, flaxen hair arches as the bristling cat on the scratching post flashes its adamite embers. The logs in the hearth prodded by insolent pokers flame as the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

  A dirge howled by the hound at the foot of its master. The corncob pipe scorches as the match hits the tobacco. A long inhale. A tubercular cough soothed with grappa. The dog snuggles in closer to itself and moans. Its ears lay back on its head.

  I move past a cathedral covered in gargoyles. They sit on their haunches and grin out at empty space. Small scale Passions run through cornices. A shamrock cross accentuates the cleavage of a passerby. Sext and pious chatter.

  The candy store on my right parades its saccharine wares. Peppermint barber poles rooming with licorice sticks. Bottle-nosed strands of taffy on wax paper beside multicolored nuggets. Lemon, Chocolate, Grape, Melon, Vanilla peacock in their cases. Gumballs spiral down into the palms of girls in sundresses.

  Cokes wind up cambered straws to the pursed lips of foppish men’s dates. Eyelashes bat flirtatiously. Milkshakes in stainless steel elevator up to the flipper adorned blender. Spattering the countertop. Coquettish laughter over French fries swimming in ponds of ketchup.

  Packards outside the movie theater. The marquee missing a vowel here and a consonant there. Inside they talk fast, garbled nonsense and speechify the nuclear family. A semi-salacious poster promises licentious adventure. Excited couples rush to the ticket booth. The attendant gets a paper cut, and sucks his thumb.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  I find a dying rose in the street, and proceed to pull off its petals. An erotic poet would find in it a different life than me. For me it has a human face. My fingers stain red. I think of lipstick and a passion drenched Malevitch square.

  The soft tangibility of blue velvet in the mind taking on voluptuous curves. The warm mound of breast from which Empedocles will never escape. The hips thrown and the buttocks tendered.

   A woman approaches in a tight fitting dress, her black satin underwear peaks out at me like a playful child around a corner. Her budding anemone eyes seek out a tenebrous horizon. An enchanting white mist clings to the orbs as it does in those blind. There’s a sort of grope in her spyglass glance.

  The ships are too far to sea to properly make out. If they were bottled, she could peruse them at her leisure. The schooner with its spruce hull and paper sails.  The Plasticene sea raging behind it. Fragments of pelagic tissue pasted to the sky.

  A truck unloading orange crates bars her way. They are piled before a farmer’s market on the sidewalk. A few rogue fruit find their ways into the greedy paws of street urchins.

  Further along the gulls cry over the boardwalk. The crabs march up and down. Their eyestalks frond swaying. Their pincers snapping open and shut. Rostrums in philosophical mull.

  I wipe my hands on the back of my pants, leaving a menstrual-esque stain. My blue-collar movements are reflected in a rainbowed gasoline puddle. I attempt a whistle but it dies somewhere between my tongue and lips. I feel like a mechanic, and I wish that I had grease on my jeans.

  A twist in my boxers makes me change my position. A crick in my neck has me gazing up at a starless sky. I move about the hidden constellations to positions I would have preferred as a child. Standing on the mantelpiece with a spur in each hand.

  Broken snow globe wintering the carpet. Tiny splinters from a calf’s femur running off in streamlets. The idyllic scene disturbed. The shepherdess displaced from her sheepfold. The ceramic Zupfe rolling end over end to the clawed foot of the couch whose cushions remember every unfaithful liaison.

  The rose in the vase has gone un-watered and has begun to wither. In some cursory manner, she has made it to the ocean. Rushing down the esplanade, crushing lavender and centaury under foot as though they were nothing but frost flowers on the lake back home.

  Down past the cracking indigo beach huts. The startled tourists beneath their umbrellas showered by the sand her heels kick up. They don’t attempt to shake out their blankets. Their silver trunks and pitch pupils shoot blistering glares at her. The sun at its meridian wishes it were the moon.

   The waves crash against rocks above which towers a sprawling, uninhabited estate said to be haunted by a suicide. An exclamation gathers at the back of your throat. Beachcomers, shocked out of their work, stare at her figure as it disappears into the white-crested waves. The tin in their hands drops back. The metal detectors nix the treasure. Only the noose has solved the pirate’s riddle.

  Someone dives in after her, coming up with nothing but large bunches of sea grapes in his hands. Women in straw hats and one-pieces begin to gather just close enough that their toes are submerged in the water. Men with cheap sunglasses about their necks on Dayglo elastic cords and sunscreen on their noses mumble reassurances through graying mustaches to their wives.

   The wives shoo them away like the swarms of flies that overtook a section of the beach where a whale decided he’d give the landlubber life a go. The woman may or not wash up. If she does, the crabs are sure to find her first. Picking over whatever the fish choose to leave them. Her features will be ruined. A small child on his first vacation raises a seashell to his ear, and listens to the sea spread out before him.

Delirium

Delirium

Mark Coleman

  Disappearing like a shut-eye nightjar on tree bark, I sank into a soufflé pillow. Dreams came barreling up from the cellar to meet me. Twining about synapse latticework. Images of death and dilapidation fluttered beneath my eyelids. Skeletal visages both human and otherwise tottered to an unlit region of my subconscious then came howling back at me.

  Dislocated jowls swayed like hanged men. Sinister pop-eyed cuts with a perpetual stench on the breath screamed indecipherable obscenities and threats at me. Fecund runes into the furrows. Buds opening in yowling prematurity. Grimoire pages browsed by the phantasmal wind. A few variegated autumn leaves spiraling their way to a dusty parlor floor. A light dash of sorcery from the French windows. An eye wide at the porthole. A fish finning it back home only to find teeth there.

  Dolls in pink crinoline skirts, their beady, little eyes throwing hateful flashes, curtseyed before receding into their recursive, stucco abodes. Shredded nighties on the carpet. Girls having precociousness forced upon them let their pussies do all the screaming. Frogging up ratlines to meet libertine acquaintances in logeing crow’s nests. Opera-glasses seeking out the ghoulish Lilliputian bosun walking bow-legged from the captain’s thorough buggering.

   A gray man in a gray suit sitting at a lunch counter with blood in his coffee mug, grins and takes a Bathory sip. The fedora upside down beside him has a daisy in the band. It makes one think of an assignation in a spring arbor. The book beside the fedora whose title is hidden must have an inscription if not an armorial frontispiece.

  Trilling birds shattering as dusk overtakes them. Pigeons giving voice to very human anguish in the bow-nets. The ruderal microscoped in their pupils. Showing little by little in the cracked façade and seismically shifting flagstones. Shadows without a source thrown haphazardly like fishing nets in a tidal wave. Mice eating ork ork laden cheddar, and promptly seizing out. Bubbling red squeaks at the floorboards and boxwood.

  The attic is full of strange, forgotten trinkets. The sagging sawhorse. The neglected rocking horse that has not known a laughing child’s embrace since close to a century ago. The medallion laying on top of a wedding dress in the cherrywood trunk. The cardboard suitcase with nothing but dust in it. The gem in the spider web. The tiara in the dark corner beside a trap that has never been triggered.

  Jellied eyes blown out the front. Tongues in formaldehyde losing their wag. Swagged out in purple. Regalia in the form of gold teeth and a cane with a chrome skull handle. Whores huddled together simply beaten in mass. Children in tricorn hats flying tricorn kites emblazoned with sickle and hammer. Agates in their pockets begging a game.

   In the street, the marbles scatter and careen in all directions. It’s not hockey, but the children are sick of playing on the sidewalk or the porches of the apartment houses where an embittered adult will kick at their humble treasures, or in a huffing fit punctuated with words like “fuckers” or “bastards” their shins which are unguarded seeing that they are still in short pants.

  Calling card jacks left on the dismembered, half-eaten boys. Letters laid out like menus mailed to their mothers. Sommelier sophistication in the cannibal. No bone through the nose just a splinter stuck in the gullet. Sweat beading the brow of a back-bent laborer. The tubers beneath taking in parasitic rot as though it were a ringed beau’s cock. A creeper cleft in two as though lightning had struck him. The skies opening up in a downpour of viscera. The breams in the angler’s bucket gape as their brethren are gutted. God shrills a cackle. This is the truth of the land He envisioned.