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.