The Ginger Werewolf

The Ginger Werewolf

Mark Coleman

  Every year comes another eccentricity thinking it's a New Year's resolution. Really it has more in common with a Christmas present. The kind of small item thrown in a large box as a means of throwing off the guesswork of children. Even though, of course, the rattle is telling.

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  Stopped in your tracks by the growl of an angry dog. The dripping jowls. The bristling hair. Bestial fury in her eyes.

  You can't understand what you've done wrong. What cause there is for offense. It seems a minute ago you were elevated in her estimate. Now, it's as though the minute hand has swirled back and you're reliving a moment in an alternate reality. 

  One in which there is no room to err in the slightest. The tiniest fluctuation of voice, at this junction, could come back at you a hundred fold. So, you step back a pace in your mind to chew on the druthers.

  How to darn a rip in the cloth of time? A rip that bleeds, no less. You look into her eyes for a clue. What you find there is a patient brutality.

  You keep your hands stiff at your sides. Bite the inside of your lip and think. You try to grasp her perspective, and come up short. 

  Surely, there's a hint beyond the imposing posture, the unromantic dilation of pupil, the tick of lip. Surely, there's a sentence you could string together not overly apologetic but still hitting a bedroom nerve.

  You know there will be no makeup sex. For without the passion you are so tenaciously trying to light, wordlessly, there can be no making of love. The stand-in would be a pornographic fuck. Replete with the obscenity of emotion you are trying, on your end, to avoid.

  You don't want a fight. You are all to familiar with the feminine K.O. The twisting of words into a knot of vines that canopy forests. The grandfather calls out an hour. Though, an hour has not passed.

  You race through an entire vocabulary only to palm a single vowel. This you grunt then retreat. You can see the string unravel. It hangs there against her breast.

  You wonder if you should try to pluck it. But like gray hairs, you know another will only take its place. These are growing at an astounding rate.

  You picture her as a werewolf. A lupine lover refusing to bite. The jaundiced eyes of a drunk with only 40% of his liver left. She will never stoop again to leashed companionship.

  You play your own trick on time and roll back the years. The first time you called her after pacing back and forth in your kitchen. Searching for an unassuming way to start a conversation with the girl who surreptitiously slipped her number into your liquor bag.

  You didn't know what she looked like then. Could never have imagined her as the ginger werewolf you picture now. She was more like a porcelain doll. Something to be treated with the utmost care.

  You ended up with a faux pas introduction that as far as you could tell, she did not hold against you. You suggested a time and place for a date. Here you faired better, for within the unread manual was the rule that a dinner and a movie was out of the question. The first impression you evidently made would have to be followed up with something unexpected yet within character.

  No time for apprehension or insignificant pauses. You had to strike and strike quick. A fencing move that could not be parried was in order.

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  The peach pit fell from her hand. It tumbled slowly along the gutter and into the ocean. She sat on the bench with you, and took your hand in hers. 

  She did not speak and she did not have to. The bench was warm. The sun was bright. 

  You leaned in and kissed her when it became too much. The old who had lived and outlived the moment walked by and smiled.

  Later you sung her a Leonard Cohen song. She asked if you were really her man. You answered, in no uncertain terms, that you were sure of it. Doubts belong to the future anyway.

  The first time you conjoined bodies was not the first for either of you but it seemed like it. Neither of you ever put any real heart into one night stands. Herein laid the revelation.

  She was exquisite in her movements which made you clumsy in yours. You left your socks on for fear that taking them off would send you tumbling backwards. You didn't want her to notice that she embodied everything that had ever overwhelmed you.

  In Cancun, when they came out and stuck their red flag in the sand. It took you so long to swim back to shore. The waves that tugged and begged for you. You thought you were going to drown. 

  Here in the future which is the past, you are drowning in such a different way. There's a rip in her stocking. You point it out jokingly. The jeans on the floor have rips in the knees.   

  There's a little crosshatched bow on her purple bra. The three rows of semi-circular hooks you have to get past. The straps slip from her shoulders. Leaving half then the entirety of her breasts showing.

  A suckle at the teats of the She-Wolf of Rome. Tarzan like you climb up and up until you reach her lips again. You undress each other.

  Thinking back on it. It seems there was a misplaced hair. You chalked it up as a fluke of the gods. No god is perfect even when you capitalize the "g."

The Cul-De-Sac

The Cul-De-Sac

Mark Coleman

  On the Fourth of July, our fireworks show came from the heavens. We were too broke for so much as snakes, anyway.
  The wind blew back my tore up peacoat. Exposing blood stained jeans. It changed directions. Trying to knock me over like an adolescent cow tipper.
  They go off. You listen to them as you lie drunk in your room. You thought of walking down to the park. But you don't need to see them. You've seen them before. It's better to just hear the dogs reaction to them.
  Earlier it was just kids throwing poppers at each other. You thought it was funny to do it in theaters at that age. Unfortunately, you could never throw them hard enough that they'd explode against someone's head.
  They symbolize sex in the movies. You think of the sex you're not having. All the hand holding you're not doing beneath that display of patriotism.
  All the drunks in tanks with small windows and no glass feel abandoned and forgotten as the semi-elite nation fattens itself up on the Stars and Stripes with friends and family at beer cooler barbecues. You're a step away from suburbia but you haven't made it yet.
  The city is a broken shard you want to cut yourself with. A shattered reflection of the humanity you've never mustered the courage to regain.
  Godless this nation of man made meteor showers. Dreams forgotten. The Sandman an Indian Giver.
  The gun shoots peacock plumage that try as it might will never reach the stars. Duds those that are not gun powder flowers. They are impertinent enough to not give us the microcosms of color that we so desire.
  It sounds like the finale. You cross your hands over your chest. Your breathing is labored. You use sparklers to light your cigarette butts. Toast a hungover nation with vodka that could strip paint.
  It sounds like Iraq out there. A homeless vet with PTSD cowers on a bus bench wishing he could disappear. He doesn't. The war drags on and on.
  The people revolt. Their morality rewarded with bullet holes in their heads. The puddles of blood expand, and the nations fuck themselves in them.
  Hermaphroditic in self accolades. The essence pouring into their cunts from their cocks. An essence with the past stamped over its face.
  The mouths snarl as we beg for scraps. Threaten to snap and bite. The main target in the killing field zigzags. Hoping to throw them off.
  The scope that holds the murderous eye crosshairs him. A minute later, and his brains are on the asphalt.
  The brains to which a mind was knighted. A "Sir" of beliefs that the average man would not find unreasonable.
  Children of napalm run down the streets naked. The refuges lose their cubs, and cry against concrete pillars. The niggers are given syphilis. Transformed into sideshow attractions.
  Their noses fall off and their cocks turn into unruly blisters. Run down the legs of their pants. Rivers as brown as the Platte.
  MK-Ultra watches spiked johns scream and convulse. MK-Ultra erects towers. MK-Ultra drinks too much whiskey.
  The Stingray watches. The sky watches. You didn't want tan lines. You wanted to impress him, and ended up impressing them.
  They size you up, and eat your innards in the airport. Play tug of war with your large intestine. Trampoline on your udder sized breasts.
  They drag him out of their patrol car and slam his head against the wall. In the cell, they are unrelenting. This is the American way.
  Bleeding and apologizing as they strap him into the chair. Bleeding and apologizing as they spatter him with more threats that come out as spittle.
  A broken nose with a thumb driven into it. A beaten companion trying to fade away into its paws. Forgets its species and thinks its a hedgehog. The canine unit is ready.
  They round us up. The tanks run down the gardens with all their carefully selected perennials. Wives weep as they look down at their severed green thumbs.
  The tank men wail beneath the unrelenting tracks of wheel. Tiananmen Square is far from here. This is just a neighborhood street.
  That is just an arm that belonged to a mechanic. That is just a leg that belonged to a marathon runner. That is just a head that belonged to a philosopher. This is just a Cul-de-sac. You'll never escape.

Summer Showers

Summer Showers

Mark Coleman

  They tore off her hijab as well as the rest of her clothes, threw her on the ground, and gang raped her. Each seemed as though assigned before hand to a specific orifice. Switching it up, so each man could enjoy another stolen pleasure.
  I watched on in disbelief. Women like these don't own rape whistles. They ignorantly think that nothing of the kind could ever happen to them. They believe that God will protect them. They are wrong.
  God still lives in the Old Testament. Wrathful. Murderous. Willing to commit filicide. Unrepentant. Lying under oath. All the stenographer has to do is type it all out, and throw New in front of the Word.
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  We made love with Serge Gainsbourg singing low in the background. The music of sex. The needle comes down. Finds the vein ready and willing. Concupiscent in fact. The barrel fills with blood, and the phonograph becomes sugary.
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  Listening to the hail do car damage and drinking margaritas. An all nude strip club. An all you can eat buffet with pubic hair in the food. A touch lap dance.
  Buying strippers cognac. Stumbling home drunk. Pissed. Pelted. The cloud formations look like cauliflower. The women all want diamonds mined for by children with missing hands.
  Looking very much like a luna moth in her green and blue getup. One of those nice girls for sure. You smell of sweaty, gyrated pussy and cigarette smoke.
  Your wallet empty. Tapped. Couldn't afford to buy another woman a drink, take her to a movie, dinner. Any of it.
  Some men use a clip with the large bills on top in a cock of the walk bid. You wished you had one of those now. Filled to the brim. Full of whiskey confidence, you decide to approach her, anyway.
  Soaked through, you stumble over and slur a few words at her rather than to her. Inquiring about her relationship status and so forth in the chopped bass growl that comes after a night like this.
   She doesn't answer any of this but to your surprise, she shares her umbrella with you. Both of you under that tortoiseshell, turquoise sky. Her hand accidentally brushes yours. You want to hold it more than anything in the world, right now.
  Sweet is the adjective that comes to mind. Not a girl throwing herself all over a stage, and nearly breaking what's left of her hymen with your limp dick, dildo, Jew nose.
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  Chalk art kids run over to the Van Gogh, and start dotting in their own stars. Throw rocks bigger than their hands up there. Taking away the rain.
  You notice that the underside of her umbrella is a simulated depiction of the heavens. It's what you'd expect to see lighted above a baby's crib or hanging in a museum. It seems to create a separate cosmos in every strand of her hair.
  It's dazzling. As stunning as any of the rest of this slim girl's natural radiance. You see that its just a light posse of fireflies. When you were a child, you used to catch them in mason jars, and watch them for hours on end.
  She walks. Looking straight ahead. Oblivious to all of this. It could be the Garden of Eden, and she wouldn't even notice the apple or the serpent proffering it.
  You're at peace with yourself for the first time in your life. All the atrocities being committed at this moment, the world over, couldn't take any of this away.
  The second hand has seized to tick. The minutes die away. The clock falls to pieces in the loss of its conception of time. It falls into the ocean of forgetfulness that steals loved ones locked away in nursing homes.
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  She speaks for the first time. "It looks like rain." You can't understand why she hasn't noticed what has essentially become a flash flood. You're walking through rivers. No garters. But no gators either.
  Noah could be waving mankind away, and this girl wouldn't notice. She would just keep up the clip clop stride or splash away until the whole of this macrocosm parted like the Red Sea.
  Then you see she means something completely different. What that is you haven't the slightest clue. She seems to know but her head is somewhere between a coma and the wall that divides the people.
  You begin to become conscious of what is going on here. This girl can't possibly have a boyfriend or a girlfriend for that matter.
  She is nothing but a child dressed up in a woman's body. Blissfully ignorant to the point of stupidity. It's almost a certainty that she is as virginal as a Madonna.
  She has yet to look at you. Has only spoken four words. It's doubtful she will speak anymore. Her greeting took the form of a gesture. A kind one but an unspoken one still.
  What she might be thinking is anyone's guess. But she must be thinking. Right? You begin to doubt even this. There's a nirvana like quality to her. Certainly, transient.
  You pass a man sleeping on a bus bench. Or are you in a park, now. The street has seemed to fallen into the same ocean as the clock. But instead of forgetting something intangible it has instead forgotten itself.
  You would like to offer the man money. But in the absence of that luxury at least a kind word. But it would seem an affront to her own kindness. Somehow.
  Besides, you're afraid this whole land that seems wholly nonexistent would complete its dissolution and she would dissolve with it.
  The man dissolves once out of sight. The deluged brown paper bagged bottle held tightly to his chest.
  A newspaper boat floats by. You read a headline that you instantly forget. You're sure it's war.
  It is not a painful process but a slow and arduous one. He can only ascertain that certain parts of himself have begun to costively dematerialize.
  You realize how attached you've become to this woman/girl/child in such a short amount of time. She's existed in a mercurial state within your heart, forever. Before you were born or even conceived, she was there swimming within you. A mermaid with precious gems for eyes.
  Thinking of mermaids you once again look at her hair. It flows as do these tributaries along this strange but wondrous path. It has a Medusa-like quality to it. Even in the absence of fireflies. It lives. It flames.
  But there is nothing there hungry for a mouse. There is probably nothing there hungry for you either. With this awakening, almost rebirth, you begin to take in the rest of her. In pieces.
  Starting with her face you work your way down until you reach her unseen/seen toes. There is certainly an almost timeless bond. But does this bond attach in any true sense?
  Is this all just a fantasy? A drunken delusion? Very unlike those delusions of the DT variety.
  You now do take her hand. Press it. She does not squeeze yours knowingly or in acknowledgement. She unmistakably exists. Her flesh is as soft and warm as you would imagine. To your astonishment she speaks again.
  "There is a place beyond this." Again, she does not elaborate but you somehow know that she is not speaking of an afterlife.
  Is the place even a place? Does the path that you are traversing lead there? You doubt and do not doubt this, simultaneously.
  You had begun to think you were walking her home. Now, you know that this is not the case. She is walking you. There is a reason she lent you shelter beneath this umbrella.
  Perhaps, someone or some force outside of herself had commanded this of her. You rationalize that this place must be an idea. Either hers or yours. You could have not foreseen its actualization. Then you again think of the place as a place.
  There is such a confusion here. Nothing is logically sound. Nothing is as it seems. Ideas cannot be walked to with a beautiful woman who will not take your arm or even your hand.
  They are possessions that not even a prison guard or solitary confinement can take away. Are these new ideas? Sentient ideas? Revolutionary? Political? Romantic? Terrifying?
  Well, certainly not the latter. Why would such a resplendent guide lead you to them if such were the case? And besides, you are not terrified.
  You have never had feelings quite like these. They seem as new as the ideas may prove to be. Feelings of tenderness. Akin to love but not love. Well, maybe that's not quite true. What else could one label your feelings for her?
  Albeit, very rudimentary you do feel that flutter of the heart the poets speak of. Your breath catches in your throat. You try to swallow it and find you cannot.
  This could be the love of your life. The one you have been waiting for so patiently. Wanting to love. To have that exuberant feeling for yourself. Selfish, sure. And you know that love should be unselfish.
  Love should be able to be willing to die for someone else. Would you die for her? Someone that you don't even know. Well, you do seem to know her. After a brief moment of contemplation, you decide definitely that yes, you would.
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  In the morning, a friend stops by. He's brought by a bottle and was going to see if you were up. It's not morning exactly but just a little before noon. He knows that you wake up around nine, and usually need a drink.
  It's as much a kindness as an act of sociability. He'll have one too, sure. But he doesn't need one. Especially, so early in the day when the sun, though it should be wide awake, is still dragging its feet into day.
  He knocks on your door repeatedly, knowing you should be home. He calls your phone. Tries your door. Your door is unlocked. He finds you in bed. Smiling in your sleep.
  He's never seen you smile like this. Never seen anyone smile like this before. Never seen anyone sleep like this before in fact. It dawns on him to check your pulse.
  The paramedics pronounce you DOA. After the coroner's inquest, it is revealed that you died in your sleep. Reasons unknown.

Apocalyptic Sex

Apocalyptic Sex

Mark Coleman

  The lowboy starts to walk towards you on its wobbly, stupid legs. Vomiting out its idiotic contents. Knickknacks that could be civil war relics hitting you in the face. Giving you black eyes and a fat lip.
  She takes off one article of clothing at a time. Making a real sexy show with the stockings. Rolling them down to her ankles in a way that could make a man have a heart attack.
  After taking them off, she throws them to you. As though they were souvenirs. Say a band's set list.
  A gray haired Tommy Atkins who survived the war without a scratch sits in his bedroom frantically making zip guns because his gun safe just took issue with him. Bringing out the heavy artillery and blowing holes in the walls.
   She doesn't so much lick her lips as run her tongue over them as though trying to get rid of some imperfection that occurred in the application of her lipstick. Maybe, the bathroom mirror hadn't been cleaned in a while. Or maybe it was just haste.
  A little girl's lunchbox tries to eat her as she's walking to school. A woman's bed jacket rises, and comes at her waving its arms and screaming. Or, maybe, just making spooky ghost sounds.
  She walks, or more accurately struts/saunters, to where you sit on the bed naked. Though, you're hard as a rock, you hope your eagerness doesn't show in your eyes.
  A teenage boy's boutineer shoots out of his tux's buttonhole and kills the prom queen just as they're crowning her.
  A bouquet of flowers clutched tightly to her chest. Now another flower embedded in her skull. Bleeding profusely.
  She looks like Botticelli's Venus. Except she's not trying to cover anything with her hair. It flows over her breasts out of its own volition. You always did like women with long hair. Even if it does tend to cover their other charms.
  A German heart-faced teen darling is doing battle with an army of dirndls. Bolos come flying like geese out of the jewels of the Earth. Sending the villagers running with their children clutched to them. Weeping on their breasts.
  As she comes over to you you think, Jesus, what an angel. And here with you for some reason. Her red bra and panties on your floor. Her dress a crumpled mass near the bedroom door.
  A car full of hooligans are playing mailbox baseball. One mailbox isn't having any of it, jumps into the car with them, and starts ripping out their throats. A boy scout watches an old lady cross the road, get hit by a car, and shrugs.
  As she comes nearer to you, it's as though she's begun to walk on eggshells. Suddenly shy, apprehensive, having second thoughts? Christ, you hope it's not the latter. These sorts of encounters are becoming exceedingly more rare.
  A Catholic's rosary coils around her neck and strangles her. An Orthodox Jew's tefillin turns anti-Semitic, and with the help of his tallit, drives his head into a brick wall. Killing him instantly.
  Your doubts seem to have been unfounded. She doesn't full on kiss you. Just brush your lips with her's then lifts her leg, foot on the bed, giving you a view of her pouting sex.
  Inviting you to kiss her there. You do so. Not so much with gusto but just a peck. The more passionate kissing will come later.
  A homeless junkie overdoses. He had a good heart but no comes to his funeral. Not even his own mother. No one mourns or even cares.
  She bats her long mascaraed eyelashes. Seems suddenly to be the coquette. You'd take her for a good girl. Full of innocence.
  Perhaps, waiting for marriage or the right man to fuck. Make love to? You can't make out any of this.
  A girl stands on the side of the road with a sign that reads, "Travillin Hungry Full of Love." No one gives her a dime. So, she leaves the sign on the sidewalk and walks away.
  This off and on thing is kind of strange. Yet undeniably sexy. She leans down and embraces you as though you were the only man in the world. The transition from slut to prude continues. Either way, you'll soon possess her.
  A child is molested by his stepfather. He grows up depressed and suicidal. He sees therapists but they can do nothing for him. He sleeps around with men. Giving them blowjobs in their cars for money to support a crack habit.
  She takes you in her mouth for about a minute or so then slowly climbs on top of you. After a bit of this you go down on her. Your hands firmly grasping her buttocks. Then she's back guiding you into her.
  This time you're on top. You massage her breasts. You kiss her repeatedly. She returns your kisses. Thrusting her tongue into your mouth.
  A vet keeps calling the hotline. Not the sex kind. He's on hold for such a long time that he gets his army issue and does what the war failed to do.
  Despite the fact that you have blue balls, you don't come for awhile. She moans like it's the best she's ever had. You want to roll your eyes or stick out your tongue. Could always just flip her the bird.
  An old man's cancer is causing him so much pain that he shoots himself in the head. Another just decides that he has nothing to live for, and after getting off work from the job he always hated, comes home and does the same.
  You finally do come. You wonder if she can feel it filling her. You're sure she can. This is what the whole act is about.
  In the end, you always feel empty or disappointed that it's over. Like a good book or movie. But, of course, it can't go on forever.
  She might sleep with you till morning. She might not. You might have breakfast or brunch. Then you will part ways and you will never see this girl again.
  His wife hears the gunshot. Comes running in. Finds him. His head lying on the table in a pool of his own blood. She becomes hysterical and starts screaming. The children cry. Not understanding. Just knowing their mother is upset. But that's just the way it goes. Life can't be all orgasms.

Detox

Detox

Mark Coleman

  I just want to find someone to spend my life with. Someone to comfort me when a friend dies. I want what others have.
  It broke my heart to see you sitting on the floor. Head in your hands, crying. Couldn't really understand what happened. Except that you hate yourself for it.
  I just sat there and ate my shitty detox waffles. Trying to think of something to say. Tried to make small talk and failed. But for some reason out of all the open chairs, you chose the one right next to me.
  I caught your name, and that was about all. Asked a guy in my room what I should do with my dirty scrubs. He said that some people keep them or I could hang myself with them. He said that earlier he wanted to shoot himself.
  Told the staff on intake that he was suicidal. Another guy and I asked who the hell says that, and then I joked about the homicidal question.
   "Every time that I come in here. I want to kill all you, motherfuckers!" We had a good laugh. If you know where to look and your timing's not shit, you can have a few belly laughs here.
 Occasionally, someone smokes a cigarette in the shower. I did it myself. Last time, the stunt was pulled they looked in everyone's pockets and rooms for contraband. A madman got dragged to the psych for going for the girls' room with his cane.
  A young DUI kid told us that he had a beer in his bag. As he was getting discharged, he said that he was going to chug it and throw the can at the wall of the facility. An older man with brain damage said he realized he had a fifth of vodka in his bag and went to the bathroom and pounded it.
  Some of us look like boxers with the damage done by falling down on our faces. I asked a pretty Mexican if she had a boyfriend. She did. A boyfriend and three kids that she just wanted to get out and see. At night, they bring out the T.V. and some asshole picks out a garbage movie to watch.
  They had a Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates, I came close to stealing. I came home to broken reading glasses, anyway. Several of us came here, just for walking down the street. The women are all pretty but heart broken. The majority of the men want to fill their souls with something more than this unbearable pain that comes with just having to get up in the morning. With very few exceptions, none of us are bad people.

Muzzle Climb

Muzzle Climb

Mark Coleman

   The delphiniums can grow as tall as they want. They're not going to hide anything. The caterpillar will always be distinguishable from the stalk of the weed.
  She stands rigid in sleepshirt and kitty heeled slingbacks. No bra. No panties. Just her underneath. Exquisite although askance.
  She has those lips you always want to press yours against. The hair you constantly want to run your fingers through. Wanted so badly to spend your life with her. Wanted to explain to her that everything would be alright. Even though, this would be a lie. Hear people speak about her only in terms of sex.
  Her sweat band discarded after tennis. A bikini on a banister back chair after a swim meet. Dangling there like shed skin.
  Your instructor just left you in the deep end. You thought you were going to drown. You feel that way now. A pool of obfuscation that mists its way into your eyes.
  The book case stares you down. The sofa swallows you. Looking for loose change in its cushions. Knowing there's none to be found.
  It was all just a college try, after all. You try to wish away the memories. Try to obliterate retention and reason. Sink slowly into ready made madness. The insanity where a different sort of angel lives.
  Sometimes, we descend to the attic and ascend to the cellar. Falling into blue skies. Rising into turbulent seas. The plane you know will never leave the tarmac. The oxygen masks that drop, regardless. A bird must have flown into the fuselage again. I think they must get sick of being that close to heaven.
  A crash is the same as a layover. Nine times out of ten. We smoke too many cigarettes and drink too many drinks in the lounge. There's an I that was buried with You. They're starting to stack the bodies because they've run out of room.
  The family plots no longer contain family members but just odd bits of consanguineous appendages. A distant cousin's head rests on the thighs of a stranger. Rape becomes a necessity of the tomb.
  Feeling like a Bolero painting, even though, you haven't eaten in days. Sitting on the floor with your whiskey. Staring at the wall. Trying to find some pattern there. There's nothing but scuff marks that seep into your heart.
  You'll never write the great American novel. Never write a short story that anyone will ever want to publish. You're relegated to obscurity. You are obsolete.
  Take a few Clorazepate. It helps, I suppose. But in such a small way that I might as well have left them in the bottle till I seized.
  I become less sure of myself everyday. Excoriating mirrors that only show how pale my life is compared to my dreams.

Fate

Fate

Mark Coleman

  I watched the laving against the sea wall through a drunken squint. The Fata Morgana was further heightened by the laziness of my eyes. It seemed that a muslin shift hid all crawling and slithering within it.
  I've had nightmares that left me more at ease than what I saw upon the Mediterranean that night beneath the mad spinning heads of the lighthouses.
  I heard a guzla and looked back. I had no change left for the street musicians who approach you at romantic, candle lit dinners. Between me and the city lights laid a beach fire. Wine drunk, the Greeks danced demented romaikas. The jugs went round and round.
  The flames illuminating their faces. From their heads appeared a confusion of goat horns. Some seemed to pick up flaming coals and throw them about as though they were nothing but poi. An insanity of light twirled and twisted there when only a moment before not even a single man had stood.
  I looked back at the ocean, and compared the two visions. The ophidian orgy raged on. Chopin up to her knees and going out.
  Choking her brilliance in rippling coils. Drowning their crazed Parana selves to make sure that she was dead. The blood surfaced in those plumes that the Coast Guard notices when it strikes them to look down.
  Caught in the pamperos of a meteor shower without an umbrella to protect me; I spun around, and met a whiter than white face tinted blue at the edges. Its eyes like sugary, shimmering lekach pierced me through with hate filled pupils. With a shrill shofar scream it sent me tumbling backwards into the sand.
  I laid there with the convulsions of a caught fish. My tormentor leaned down to better take in what must have seemed to it to be death throes. Those eyes that had been blue balling for such an event reflecting all my inner demons.
  It opened its mouth once again only to find that it had become mute. Lips like silverfish trying to form a word. This word I knew would spell out my demise.
  I had been toying with suicidal thoughts that very night only to chuck them like a bottle into that serpentine tide. Luckily, this strange being was at a loss for the vociferation that wanted so badly to leave it forever.
  Flapping together its stinging lips in bemusement, it seemed to quiver into a blur. The equivalent of scratching one's head when confronted with an impossible-to-solve-riddle.
  It laid itself full length on top of me. It dug with talon-like claws on either side of me. Ever deeper the arroyos became. I felt as though I was being buried alive in some reversed sort of way. I suppose this was all an effort to frighten me with the mortality embodied within the tomb.
  I shook to my very core, and bounced and sprung back against the hoary body in my uncontrollable fit as though this was all an innocent romp with a beauty beneath a canopy that covered even the valance.
  I could perceive a subconscious tic inside of that bobbin brain. A sort of muscle spasm that flexed its way down to the razor sharp teeth arranged in tiers along its yellowing gums. I thought of the women and girls that I had seen earlier. Their diet making it nearly impossible to guess their age.
  Becoming more and more indistinct. More and more equivocal. Perhaps its utterance, while undoubtedly shattering my very inner frame, would have proved salubrious to this fiend.
   I realized that my subjugation was the very thing that it needed. The effect of my submission to its controlling influence would have been immediate. Its contours would have rippled back into place and congealed. If I affected a stillness then all would be over. The word would destroy. Sending shock waves across every corner of the globe.
  It howled so noiselessly that I could hear the breaking of the waves in a seashell a meter away. It held its palms to its astonished face as they slowly dripped and dissolved into the scarlet waters of Lethe.
  Now, it seemed more slave than master. A pursued victim finally entangled in the all encompassing web of gluttonous fate. Anti-epicurean to such a degree that it would devour that aquiline nose, that pufferfish brow, those dwarfish feet.
 The chelicerae feeding distention. Rows of obsidian eyes chewing the soul into tiny morsels better suited for digestion. Eggs bursting open, sending tiffany offspring across the gossamer woof.
  Fighting over the incububotic/sububotic offal. Tearing and shredding bits of anima as the mother looks on in pride. The nearly minuscule monsters acting in accordance to their nature.
  The Furies screaming through the bones from which the flesh was being ripped. The sound of an ill bred bumpkin gnawing at bread and rib.
  Fate is damnation. God hides behind a cloud as the children pray for something other than starvation. For a Christmas in which they are not forgotten like the floating landfills that no one but the birds and fish see. The trash piling up inside of tykes until it grows to such a monumental stature that they end up stabbing someone behind a dumpster.
  Fate is a bitch with the grit of the human race between her teeth. Umbilical cords tangled in her bloated stomach. Her face a blotted mess of tears and disease. She is Pompeii. She is the Inquisition. She is the Holocaust. She is impotency in the face of evil.
  She turns man into skeleton on the battlefields. She gives hopeful parents miscarriages. Deformed and retarded children. She creates psychopaths, religion, jails those never proven guilty. Robs mankind of its innocence.
   Turns empathy into hatred. Sympathy into disdain. Creates homelessness, poverty, depression, hopelessness. Eats the hearts of those filled with kindness then throws charcoal into the gaping chest cavities. Takes the future and moulds it into war and famine. Laughing as it all goes down.
  Fate is a breeding ground so enmeshed in our own world that not even the most skilled mechanic could loosen the bolts that would send it spinning into its proper, fiery element. Gone like a flash in a pan to the Hell where she belongs.

Conquests

Conquests 

Mark Coleman

 Got caught with my hand in the cookie jar. By hand I mean fingers, and by cookie jar I mean your quim. We were young, and my bedroom was still filled to the brim with adolescent shit. Posters for movies that I've since grown out of. CD's of superannuated bands. VHS's full of riffraff and Riff Raff.
  Your seemingly blushing skirts and starch white panties bordered with pink, faux Valenciennes lace about your slender ankles. A French tickler at the ready. I made you laugh with an apish weather forecast on your moist, agitated state.
  Of course, I didn't really know what I was doing. My introduction to the ways of love came in the form of Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace. I later recognized the bruises on the latter's legs.
  I just sort of parted your thighs and stuck my fingers in. Moved them around a bit. Up and down. Side to side. Tried to probe as deep as I could. Though wet, I imagine you were nevertheless hamming. You were only fifteen and far more experienced than me. Two years your senior, and I'd never been bitten.
  We used to stick our fingers in light sockets or make escargot forks out of tin foil bubblegum wrappers that we'd blow out circuits with. Just for the Hell and the thrill of it. We'd compare principal referrals and brag about what bastards we were.
  You were on black tar. I was constantly drunk or stoned. Usually chucking some pills into the mix. A half brain dead friend would throw his antidepressants at me before driving to the head shop. Me grinning moronically behind the steering wheel. He would just chuckle.
  Told him I wasn't going to do drugs anymore. He got angry because he'd just bought a bag of shrooms. So, I jumped out from behind his couch at him and let out a terrible scream. He ended up crawling around on all fours thinking he was a cat. Much to the chagrin of those not in on the joke.
  I looked like I'd stuck a narwhale down my pants as we commenced kissing. My hand now just resting on your perspiring cunny. The other searching the globe of your breast. Spinning it to find a suitable honeymoon suite far from the watchful eyes of the US. Finding the location in an aureolar gland as my tongue circled your nipple; I planned out layovers, meals, and filched drink tickets.
  I laid a few flicks there then threw my head between your thighs. You, on your part, fondled me beneath my trousers. It must have felt like a lamppost hit by a baseball bat. You always acted the lady even when I mistreated you later on.
  At a certain point, the boy inevitably thinks he's a man. He files conquests into his bedposts, and shares sordid stories with his friends. He fancies himself a Lothario or Don Juan as soon as a few pubes start to come in and he has to shave.
  He thinks all women come at his command. His very touch. To his eyes the old timers are dried up and useless. Their days have passed, and now he reins supreme. And yet...
  We bring out the offspring too young. We look back longingly on what we (thought) we were meant to be. Constantly thinking just what if we had pursued the dreams that now haze and torment us, day in and day out.
  All history is written in quills dipped in booze and blood. The victors cheer their way into the unknown. Oblivion rats gnawing at their already half devoured faces. Slowly disappearing under the weight of their own triumph. A boneyard night under a starless sky.
  I think of my copy of the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden. Along with the bawdy, Victorian erotica mixed in with more serious literature (most of which I have yet to read) in the bookcase where I arrange all my books by height.
  I always beat off before I get in the shower because it will all just go down the drain anyway. Henry Miller sometimes pisses on whores in bathtubs. Bukowski usually just pines and covets. While Mailer's ex gets his goat. So he starts stabbing.
  Thompson had wives but always seemed asexual to me. But he still had a yearning for more than just unbridled intoxication. We are children built for and out of fornication but making love is a sore substitute for the other kind of love that sets the heart aflutter and, if we're lucky, tears it asunder.

Sleep Walk

Sleep Walk

Mark Coleman

  Somnophiliac with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Warhol's Sleep on simultaneous, continuous loops. A sort of cheval glass with an ocean of lust tilted between its frames. Out of that dark porthole comes barreling forth a lascivious madness. Eyes like pike congers boring into his in their unending, unendurable, sex crazed slumber.

  A pas seul around an apartment full of unwanted memories. A dreamer's dreams DOA, and the start of a misunderstood paraphilia. No cantharide was necessary as you slept with her as she slept. Her submission came in the form of a bumpering champagne flute.

  Call up the sex phone service and ask the woman on the other end to snore. She obliges but you imagine she rolls her eyes as she does so. Her lips must be vermilion, you think.  

  You imagine yourself poised over her alum tightened cunt. A sleep or cucumber mask on. Dozing off in a waiting room with a fashion magazine open to a photo of what most consider the feminine ideal.

  But you know better. It's all been photoshopped to Hell. The ideal is a Matryoshka doll living in its most Lilliputian hidden porcelain state. A crack or two down there where Kuahana blinks away his forty winks.

  A perennial sleep walk terminating at hot dog stands or strip clubs. A whiskey mac in front of you that you can't remember ordering. English faces all around the American sitting in confusion like a dumbfounded, angry, jet lagged IRA militant.

  From what you can understand you're in some pig 'n whistle off Cheyne Walk. The Shannon comes pouring into your veins as the Thames roars its way through a half aristocratic London. Monikered Lea you think of a woman you once knew who broke your heart, and promptly start a brawl.

  The blood on your face is warm and rejuvenating. You are now fully awake with the shards of someone's imperial pint at your feet.

  A puddle of piss on the floor at the Bristol. The sea lions greedily eat the shrimp tossed to them by little brats who begged and begged for cocktails with stiff, curling tails sticking out of them. Men in dresses walking up and down streets with their designer handbags made by small brown hands in sweat shops. The trolley cars pass them full of shocked, gawking mothers. Shielding their daughters' and sons' eyes.

  You look for Ferlinghetti at City Lights. He's not in. So you take a tour of Alcatraz instead. You think of Capone rotting away beneath a syphilitic mind. Yours has begun to rot away too. The women and girls swim back and forth with the peach fuzz or beardy bushes peaking out from their tight little asses. Perky tits and Crest whitened smiles. Like erotic dolphins too chipper for their own good.

  They unfasten their bikini tops in defiance of tan lines. Their bikini bottoms riding a bit low as though they were all New Jersey plumbers. They breath, eat, and sleep sex. 

  You can almost make them out through the spyglass down there on the nude beach that's supposed to be hidden by the cliffs that children fall off trying to catch a keyhole peep. They break their necks in the pursuit of knowledge as the buff darlings cavort with equally naked sailors on leave. After pension and free drinks they bat their eyelashes, and try their best to act virginal.

Contrition

Contrition

Mark Coleman

  Drinking rum with the captain, and I get to thinking of you. The high esteem that you held me in. Wanting so badly for me to let you in. Surprise myself. Hold it together with just the bottle of wine we shared at the little bistro that you loved so much. You thought that I was shaking because I was nervous. So many years knowing each other, and soon that knowledge would extend to the bedroom.   

  That manner of thinking was soon dispelled. I live in squalor with a well stocked liquor cabinet. A bit of coke residue on a mirrored table top that I'd one day smash in a drunken rage. Boxing my own ears, and crashing face first into a counter top.

  My hands are too slippery for this goddamn leather covered steering wheel. It's Denver and my hands aren't the only slippery thing. I make the machine obey only because you are in the passenger seat. You take my head in your hands after taking off my shades so I can't see. Giving that age old excuse that you want to see my eyes. After they adjust, I can just make out a bit of azure.

  Of course, I already knew you were beautiful. We grew up together. I thought one day that we'd grow old together. Night after night, passing out on you rather than fucking you. Never making love to you in a way that everyone knows you deserve. The envious pilfer scheming in the wings and arcades.

  I couldn't stand it when you slept on my arm. Could never get any sleep of my own simply because you were by my side. The warmth of your body commixing with the booze warmth on my breath. You couldn't stand it when I came home blotto waving my martyred hands around. Screaming or sussurrating depending on how many cigarettes I'd smoked that particular night.

  Saying things that I'd try to take back. Without success, of course. I might as well have pushed you into a radiator every time that I came home from the dive, hot and angry. Locking myself in my room. Alone with a bad acid trip. You beat on the door. I didn't answer. Just yelled half decipherable obscene gibberish at a phantom ship full of all my dead dreams. You thought that I was blaming you. I never corrected you. I didn't have the heart to rob you of your own nightmare. Though, I tried to comfort you when you woke up telling me that you dreamt of my funeral or just that I was dead on the curbside so many times when no shooting stars fell outside the window for you to wish upon.

  Maybe, we were too young. I don't know. All I know is that I can almost see you out there on the rooster tail from the tuna tower. An abboritional memory in the mind of a ghost or perhaps more appropriately a poltergeist. Throwing or dropping whatever I damn well please. Haunting whole households of happy families. A snake charmer conjuring the asp that killed Cleopatra out of his carefully woven basket. Shrunken heads on coat hangers grinning out at horrified spectators.

  The grade school teachers wouldn't let us use pens until we perfected our currsive. I have a pen now but can't find it so this chicken scrawl, chicken shit missive is in a lead-less, number 2 pencil that I keep having to sharpen. Writing feverishly beneath the light of a hurricane lamp in my cabin. The moon's beneath a cloud denying the late night sledding of children on a snow day.

  The lines are never perfect, now. They've become nations at war. Clashing over the territorial rights to a holy sight. Neither side is in the right. There was never any ascension there. The only things I've ever seen rise are balloons, Chinese lanterns, and bloodthirsty dictators.

  My heart's been in a meat grinder too long to ever be able to make sense of anything. So many years playing Cain to your Abel. Now the sex is never any good. I pick up whores sometimes when I'm away from my wife too long. I don't understand this seperation anxiety. I don't even like the woman that much.

 A splinter in my wrist, and a congealing trickle of blood down my face. A cantankerous longing twenty thousand leagues within me. You can't plumb that deep. Wondering whose lips yours are locked with as she goes down on me. Wishing that I could play the harmonica. Something doeful with all my soul in it that people would pay to hear. Just to have their eyes fill with tears. A flavored gas station dispenser condom on. Filling it up with ejaculate that hurts to come. 

    I'm aft looking back. Sometimes, forward only to see your face on the figurehead. This is a maiden voyage. I was the first to ever charter such a magnificent boat. They tell me as far as out here the people still sometimes suffer. The little childrens' wooden toy horses still break and they wail over the loss of their first possession. The women still leave their husbands for men with better muscle tone. 

    This could have been something else, altogether. It could have been more than reminiscences and driftwood. It is christened in the blood of fish that didn't want to die. The blood of you and me. Take my sea bag full of worthless shit. I never want to come here again. There are scales and entrails all over. I throw up into the sea from the stench and the gentleless rocking of the sea. I'd rather ride the rails to an antipode. 

  The crew laughs and hazes me calling what's half splattered on the bilge fish food in Kanaka. For some reason, I respond with a Mahalo and retire belowdecks with a clusterheadache, and a panic attack in the works. 

 Although this is my stop, I can't pull the cord because I'm twitching with nerves. Telling myself that everything will be alright after a few drinks. I have a chance to test this theory, albeit on a microscopic scale, in an enroute Port-A-Potty. I throw up on the shit stained floor. I send you this communique as I watch the vomit stain slowly warp the wood.

  On the boots that I still direct kicks with at the wall of bars where the keeps refuse me service. Looking out the portholes for a sign of Pele with the help of a landlubbing native in a lighthouse. Some of the ships we pass have rusted engine rooms. Steve Mcqueen's abandoned all of them to the "slopeheads." They run like mad dingos asking to be shoot with dusky rats waving their tails from their scarlet maws. I take a handful of Dramamine and just watch to see how it will all play out.