For the Hell of It

For the Hell of It

Mark Coleman

  Legs kicking in survival instinct against what was imposed upon him. Though, it took his own hand to bring it to fruition, his body nevertheless rebelled. Screaming for finality. Everlasting darkness. Heaven is a disgusting thought to him. Otherwise, why bother to hang here on the end of a rope. He had hoped that his neck would break instantaneously but, of course, it didn't. 

  So he writhed. Tongue lolling like a dog’s. Eyes bulging like Bette Davis's. Shards of glass in every pore. An overpowering stench of rotting vegetable matter. 

  She goes loquacious. Spitting out the words as though they were sunflower seed shells. Never having learned how to remove the seed without halving the shell. 

  The words come out strangely truncated. You wouldn't think this would be the case. She has the look of a woman who could tie a cherry stem with her tongue.

  Some sort of torch singer from a bygone era with assistants to put on her high heels and dress. Ladies in waiting. Always waiting.

  The bloat that accompanies a fatty liver. Carried about the stomach and jowls. Hunched there over a glass the bartender is slow to refill. The PVC curtains that begin to take on the smog colors of the polluted city dusk.

  She reminds you of Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Perpetually out of place. Wedded to the stage. It would be extramarital if she gave her heart to you.

  Gripping the edge of the bar. The heat of termite ridden mahogany. Tremors in the stool. The legs of both about to give out.

  Labored breathing. The light going from the eyes. The sloppily written note. Cryptic in confused cursive. A little pained nightmare of confession and accusation.

  The cigarette almost down to the filter when she finally pours him another shot. Done grudgingly and with a mocking sneer. Her eyes take him in in disgust.

  There's no pity there. Not that he was looking for any. He learned not to expect anything of the sort long ago. 

  (But, perhaps, just once something beyond this repugnance bordering on hate. She must store away smiles for someone. Some patron sharply dressed with better teeth and no lines drawn along the forehead.)

  Summer gradually turns to fall. The leaves turn with it. The doorbells will soon be ringing to be opened upon faux ghouls and goblins. 

  Pumpkins in the street. The hastily looking but carefully carved childish grins and triangular eyes gone with the flame. Tendrils sprouting from fontanel. Slowly creeping down the pavement. Disregarding right of way.

  Pileups on the interstate. Bodies ejected and run over countless times. She puts the move on you. A grip and a kiss that must be hiding something. This is done out of self preservation, surely. Surely? Well…

  He goes down when they cut the rope. Sagging at the knees. A scarecrow that was a man not long ago. Nothing but a puppet now. Nothing to it at all. Just throw some ants into the mix. Let them crawl around in the straw man. 

  She starts to argue with you. It’s so trifling but she thinks she has the upper hand. The kiss is now nothing but an (un)pleasant memory. Something you could tie a hope of reconciliation to. But no reconciliation comes.

  Home. A barrage of demands and bickering. The army marched in and the army marched out. Leaving in their wake nothing but broken dishes and broken hearts. At least, a broken heart on your part.

  He’s steadying. It is an arduous process. The shakes begin to attenuate ever so slightly. The terror belongs to the future for now. He sips his beer. The foam clings to his upper lip. He licks his chops. 

  They endeavor to read the note. The gibberish of a public school mind. Filled with the poetic sensibilities of the half-literate. There are tears on that college lined paper. Ripped from a notebook which contains other nonsensical attempts at expression. 

  He was never any good at articulating his thoughts. Never really good at anything at all. A failure from start to finish. Finality always hung over him. His life always bound to end in a self imposed period.

  The clouds are beginning to gather. It’s easiest to see the worst in an ugly person. The unsightly know this. Years upon years of stereotypes perpetuated by Grimm fairytales contributed. 

  The night darkens. The night drinkers begin to trickle in. Their faces all festivity and gayety. Women cling to them as though they were the latest Hollywood upstarts. They seem to glide when they deign to move. They seldom do but take up more space than they deserve in the corner booths where the light is suitable for necking.

  He didn’t put the gun against the roof of his mouth but instead against the side of his head. This is how he managed to blow his face off. It reeks of a parlor trick but still there it is. Hovering above a sign and a cup with a few nickels in it. 

  He’s passed by. The partygoers would rather not look at this abortion of a man. Some wear tiaras. Others crowns. They are assured of their position in the world. (Assured of deferments from any war the higher ups might throw as though they were throwing a banquet.) They want all to know. They wear designer brands you couldn’t even begin to imagine. The garlands hang from their necks where only a block down a noose would have been thrown. They are the petite Fitzgeralds of the world. They are Republican in lifestyle but try their damnedest to hide it.

  Democracy belongs to the weak. The retched fools who bought into the American Dream. Hook line and sinker. They fuck each other senseless in art gallery hovels. But make no mistake they are only slumming while awaiting the construction of palatial settings in which to hang the hippest of art. They collect to make up for their own shortcomings as human beings and artists. Their minds are toxic and must be avoided at all costs. 

  They go inside where the temperature’s just right. Where the waitress knows them and flirts not so much for a tip. More just for the Hell of it. She knows these kids. Knows what their wallets contain. The cars they drive she could not name but sees their worth through the prism of a multi-faceted diamond. A one night stand to her is just a way to brush up against a vintage Cadillac.

  She goes around and around like a Jewish kid’s toy at Hanukah. Her hair flung from their braids in reckless abandon. Just floating there like glistening scum upon the water. She sinks down on her break. The boy leans back and smiles so the whole room can see his approval. Her head moves up and down. A duck continually submerging and plunging. The contortions of his face show that he’s about to give her a piece of his mind. Straight down her throat. 

  You look at the bartender. She doesn’t look back. You are invisible here. Your favorite dive has become infested by prosperity. You don’t bother to wave her down. No gesture could be so futile. You just sit there and stare at the mirror behind the bar and try to understand how you could have been left so far behind. There’s a cockroach in your glass but you don’t bother to mention it when she passes by.

Erg After Erg

Erg After Erg 

Mark Coleman

  Whether it's the Autobahn or the Reeperbahn, you're soon to get your kicks. Speed courses. You blister your fingers on the typewriter keys. Sexual napalm sets your skin on fire. She’s all contortionist moves. A gymnast in see through lingerie. The kind with a hole in the crotch. 

  Stretching in and out. The smell of a hooker rotting too soon. Tumbling down erg after erg in the red light districts. The skyscrapers delete themselves from the skyline. Got sick of being up there stabbing snowflakes and raindrops out of the heavens.

  Wake up in a cold sweat that you mistake for warm blood. You knew a girl named Skye. All you can remember about her is a blonde peek-a-boo half shielding hazel pop eyes. Sitting on your recliner wondering at her beauty.

  Trying to wander back. Racking your mind for another clue to her incomparability. You’d think something about her figure would stand out but there have been so many whores in the intervening years. 

  The lost woman was found, and the island was taken by the military for missile tests. She wasn’t found by me, though. Some lucky fool with a steadier paycheck and a mothballed uniform is owed that honor. He lives with her out there far from the mainland. Came close to renaming her Trinity, I believe.

  From what I hear, marigolds are immune to parasites. But they’re all dead now. Something got into them and wrecked havoc. Exploded. Flowerpotted. Pedals cascading. 

  Woolf liked the waves so much she let them carry her away to a choir of angels. You stare to horizon with eyes like kelp gas bladders. Some snotty kid will surely jump on your face. Obliterate all vision. Kill the legendary at that very moment in time that it is being born. A mythical act crowning.

  You seem to recall a butterfly print. A wry smile. Always half neutral or half frown. Either indifference or displeasure always distorted her face. It was so different from the smile that you wished to place there.

  An underwater cave in the cove that is cool to the mind and the lips. Diving down to the hoop nets. Hoping to have caught something. It’s empty, of course. Shouting on the Paratrooper. Everyone else is having such fun.

  An inkfish spits in your eye, and the water won’t wash it away. Suppose it’s karma. You go out and walk along the pier. Wonder at the rockcod. It’s all a preamble to something. 

  The cormorants and pelicans circle like vultures but what they eat is alive. The bears hike to the stream for trout but find a weary traveler along the way. A broken walking stick that was fashioned after a totem pole that was fashioned after Nature. A sprained ankle. A rock slide.

  Dead children springing like weeds from the earth as the lyre birds fall out of the sky. Mimicking the sounds of the bombs they hear on the way down. Someone has to kill the children. And someone has to justify it. A paper boat floats down a gutter of blood. It’s nothing compared to what we plan on forgiving.

  Standing on the precipice looking up instead of down. An electric storm is fighting for dominance among the clouds. Scarlet lightning going up and down, side to side. The boom of thunder scares your dogs. They try to hide. But in the absence of a hiding place, they just cower against one another.

  The fear stricken eyes and the trembling bodies. Bristle pelage. You can count it all individually. A mouth full of grass seed. Dragon eggs in the backyard. Under the porch. In your hair. St. George is off for the day. Jacking off into a chalice. Making a crying, motherless child drink it.

  In the absence of pornography, you pleasure yourself to a reproduction of Rubens. The coy look backwards at someone behind the negro whom the dog has taken a disliking to. The bosom deliciously bared. The plump thighs leaving you to fill in the blanks as to what they are hiding. The crooked right angles make you want to come in your pants.

  Instead of doing this, you take out your cock and start masturbating ferociously with your teeth bared like a monkey. Baby Thailand gibbons smile out at you but all the adults are screaming. Dirty yellow fangs nailed into the roofs and the floors of their mouths. 

  Kangaroo mice jump about the fresh corpses in jubilation. They think it’s a celebration. Suburban cypress and elm uproot themselves and tear little boys and girls out of second floor bedroom windows. They can not call out to their parents. Their mouths have been sewn shut by terror. But even if they could rip out the sutures with a scream, they would only receive a beating for letting their imaginations run wild.

  Erg after erg. The hamada spreads out somewhere down below. Lost in a land of your own making. Lost in a world of your own making. A Bowles character who awaits the man who will rape her. 

  The amusements are varied. Kids measuring themselves or letting themselves be measured. Are they tall enough to ride? Of course, they are. The people in the Graviton are stuck. Helpless. The freaks look out at their audience with tired, glassy eyes. It’s always just a slight variant of the same group standing there. Night after night.

  You find yourself standing in front of the big top. Still as a statue. A bag of peanuts in your hand. Your glasses reflect the lights of the city out there. Carried to you as on a shining, polished salver by the fire in the skies. 

  The tent seems to be growing and expanding. Its shadow reaches your toes. You wish to back up but you are fixed to the spot. The shadow is a curled finger on your phalanges. Wiggling. Beckoning. Cajoling. The suspended or floating lights inside of there are both not of this world and very much of it. 

  The terrifying shouts of glee and mirth that the spectacle surely does not warrant. Despite that this should at least invite a tremble, you are incapable of shuddering. 

  There is barb wire. There are birds tangled in that barb wire. Some are already carcasses. Some are nothing more than skeletons that you’d find in an anatomical nature book. Some are still trying to fly. These are for the most part the young who have just learned how to perform new feats in the air.

  You don’t want to go in. The rabbits that played in the grass there have died at its feet. Then the grass started to turn. The Ferris Wheel looks down with a grimace at the carousel. You want to retreat back to the safety of childhood. Forgetting all the horrors that lie in that direction. 

  The deer on the surrounding hills have been affected by the malicious influence here. They are beginning to decompose by the mulberry bushes. The goats roll off their little perches on the mountains and make a mess on every rock they meet on the way down.

  There are only two options. Sparrows are raining from the sky. One narrowly misses your head. The sickening thud as the ground comes up to greet it. Your feet begin to carry you forward. The threshold looms. There will be no safety nets from this point onward. It’s not just the shadow pulling you. Something seems to be pushing you as well. A panther stocks a rattler a few feet from the entrance. Soft and soundless. Drowned by everything and everyone under that canvass. God only knows what’s inside of there. The flaps part like a curtain for an aging actor’s final bow. You step forward into the glaring lights and take yours.

Apple of Eden

  Apple of Eden

Mark Coleman

  He crawls legless through this boneyard we call a battlefield. Screaming for the lord to take him home. A home where no fists are brandished in rage. A home where perhaps there is a pretty young wife to pity him as other soldiers have. Someone who would cherish all his letters. 

  Pack them away in a chest that was once reserved for family heirlooms. Smell them on occasion in an attempt to detect the cologne and the eucalyptus sweet breath that graced the back of her neck in the dance hall that evening so many years ago. As it is, he doesn’t even have a dog who would lick his hand in joyful recognition.

  No one deems him worthy of a mercy killing. If he had feet that he could throw socks and shoes on, they would have strapped him in a chair or stood him in front of a firing squad long ago. His life has no purpose. This bleeding out was all he was meant for.

  Biting the inside of your lip at the methadone clinic. Standing in line at the needle exchange so you can put something clean in your arm, or between your toes, or in a throbbing vein in your dick as the case may be. The girl in front of you has frayed cut-off jeans that show off half of her ass cheeks. She must be wearing a thong. You want to tear it out with your teeth, bend her over the service counter, and fuck her until she bleeds.

  The grocery clerk is watching the clock. The time is not sped up due to her watchfulness. Diligence is overrated. It actually slows to the point of near nonexistence. Ringing up food that she can’t afford. Sentences and paragraphs mock her novel of starvation and dereliction. Deserted as ancient ruins that housed dead monarchs or paintings that no one bothered to restore.

  You don't know the definition of the word but you can feel it. Like a dream that tints the day. Not necessarily rosy but of some wistful color that is seldom, if ever, painted. Whether that be by nature, god, or man. 

  It sits there insulting your intelligence in a book when the dictionary has gone AWOL. Or, maybe, it stands accusing on the back flap. A word you've looked up a thousand times, but for the life of you, you can't smash together a string of its peers that would reveal its meaning.

  You hear the sullen tread up the stairs that presages the arrival of the landlady for whom you have no money. You open the cupboard and take out the bottle that was paid the rent instead. You doubt that she will be tempted by this peace offering, but it’s the best you can come up with. 

  Outside the window, a man who lost his son-in-law a week ago to the sea stops on the sidewalk to look at a poster for a missing cat on a lamppost. It frolics there. Ears perked. A ball of string between its forepaws. The untrimmed claws. The abundance of fur.

  He thinks he might look into the pet store. Find some young creature who might cheer his daughter slightly, or else, bathe itself at the foot of her misery. Being that she’s barren, all the lovemaking brought her nothing with which she could transfer the love she gave to her husband. A dumb brute is a poor substitute but he like you is at a loss for what he should do. It’s the best he can come up with.

  His eldest daughter has an attic room in his house. She sits there sewing. Slowly becoming an old maid. She envied her sister’s nights. She still does, though now, there will be no more. 

  The blue dragonflies of summer hover about the overflowing ashtray on the deck. They are not deterred by the fact that a cigarette still smokes there. They almost seem attracted to the plume it sends forth. 

  Your neighbors are chattering over their cocktails and beers. Spouting inanities that are better suited to special ed children. Peppered with obscenities that are fresh upon their lips, and which anyone with class abstains from using. Shirked as a drunken vet lying face first on the pavement. The buses passing him by. The cops sure to be called.

   There’s a girl who sits alone until midnight, every night, in the gazebo. Perhaps, this was an agreed upon rendezvous spot, and she is being perpetually jilted. Abandoned out there amongst the tired flowers. She won’t allow herself to give up because she has nothing left to hang her hopes on.

  The creek bubbles its nonsense to a bored sky in the dark of the moon. The pebbles we skipped are buried somewhere at the bottom of the lake, where as children, we fancied there laid buried treasure. We know better now when we could use it the most.

  Scraping together a little change that we will convert into liquor. Dulling ourselves in the face of adversity. The minute hand makes no more revolutions. The pictures in the locket have faded. Recollections rarely come. When they do, they come shredded as sensitive documents sometimes do.

  We try to find something to toast to. Look around the room. There’s not a single possession we like or need. This feeling extends to ourselves. All the dreams I wrapped up in you have disappeared upon waking. I know you feel the same way as you avoid my gaze. Averting your eyes in what amounts to shame. I’m ashamed at this realization too. Even though, it seems so obvious that whatever we had was bound to die. Something about this particular night seems perfect for it.

  It’s that time of night when all artificial light is imbued with some sort of mystical sagacity. Everything is pleasantly blurred in contrast to the melancholy that renders us immovable. There are no sharp edges. No rough contours. Everything has been smoothed out.

  The way that you used to smooth out your dress upon standing. I’d run a hand through my hair. Yours if it was preliminary to coition. In the doorway there with the kiss lingering on my lips. I was the one who gave it. And I was the one who took it home with me when I couldn’t sleep. The ceiling fan scattering the street lights. 

  A bar down there below this unpaid for room. The liberal pours and the loose women. Naked beneath their slickers. Something sad always on the jukebox. The seasoned barflies look intently at the mirror behind the bar. They think it must be playing funhouse tricks on them. But no, that is who they truly are. With all their accumulated years. All their lost hands. All their rotten luck. Of course, some kid who just turned 21 is sinking all the balls on the pool table. Pointing to the pockets as he does so.

  It seems so effortless for some people. It’s as though the world is at their command. You and I never really had a chance when the odds were stacked against us like this. Still there were those days when no one could see us, and we acted foolish in the most inappropriate places. Even the graveyards were transformed into playgrounds when visited by honeymooners like us. 

  You playfully pouted when I beat you to the punchline. Everyone could see it coming from a mile away. Still, I should have let you have that small victory. I understand now how important these seemingly insignificant things can be. 

  You never acted as though you were entitled to their laughter. If the joke did not land, you would simply try another. Something about a farmer’s daughter. Blinking at the tractor’s lights. Waiting for the till.

  Standing on the side of the road. Waiting for someone to take pity on a penniless hitchhiker. A fair amount of dirt under the nail of the pointing thumb. No sharpie and no cardboard to make a sign that would catch the eye with a pithy beg. The cornfields seem so grand in their simplicity. Desire has eaten its way into your soul. A worm that chewed its way in and died in the apple of Eden.

Cold Calligraphy

 Cold Calligraphy

Mark Coleman

  It all fell apart as we always knew it would. Dreamt up more gods than we could handle as we slowly made our way to hell. Tuxed up to foxtrot farther and farther downwards where no flower has ever been known to grow despite the celerity of decomposing souls. The one record everyone owns. The spattered label. The death’s-head insignia. Trademarked and cobbled into our heels.

  Your chiffon a carnation pinned to my lapel. Eyes cornflower blue. Hearts leaking. Faucets of prosaic boredom. Bored with a love gone stale from overuse. Tedious and weak the expressions of ardor become. How many ways can what cannot be expressed be expressed? No savior ever bothered to wear out his sandals here.

  The mimosa dusted monstrance holds nothing worthy of our adoration. Cannibalism belongs to tribes hidden away in their little patches of unfurrowed forest. Bulldozers waiting in the wings with femurs in their septums. Flashing buckets of viscera yet to be strewn. An alpenglow eye fixed on eradication.

  Wine, of course, is another matter altogether. Warmed to body temperature, and left in little Dixie cups on the church’s picnic layout. Next to a spread of uneaten hosts. Paltry as heaven itself must be.

  Solitary and beautiful as the flower of the crocus. Head bowed as the scylla. Not in deference. Perhaps bashfulness? I’m sure you had not been awaiting my type. But rather the type all young women gravitate towards. Dashing, twentieth century Errol Flynns. Or else gangsters. As long as they’re more Bogart than Robinson.

  With sunken hungover eyes, I took you in. You didn’t notice. Standing there like some wayward street urchin staring at your slippers. A staggering kick at a pebble as you longed on the wallflower street corner of the dance. A longing that reached back to the fairyland dreams of childhood. When all was nymphs and princes. (Eventually, the nymphs turned into frogs and the princes, attempting to slay dragons, were slain themselves.)

  The sweaty palms and palpitations. The hunger that outweighs the rumblings in the loins. Consummation must come but its arrival, at times, seems more chastisement than fulfillment. The slow courtship that holds the thrusts at bay. Jawing up this or that topic at random until it all locks up. A prisoner of silence without so much as a hum from the adjoining cell. Beaten and hosed by the murderous, Argus-eyed guards. 

  Gargoyles clinging to the steeple. Perched with wings spread. Concrete pigeons with amber inset in the sockets. The slow dawning of scarlet. Parched and miserable in half-stumble. Swearing at Notre-Dame. The admonishing facade darkening as the votives flicker about the high altar.

  Vehemence directs our supplications to a different sort of altar. A worship of the very moment. On which is laid a sacrificial future. The idolatrous hours will turn sour and wane but for the present they represent a whole. Bodies in mirthful communion. Even if it is but a slow waltz in a cheap motel. No music other than the rhythm that whiskey beats in the temples.

  Like Sati at yajna. Falling back. Reincarnation. Reconciliation. The only part that is applicable to us is a burned cupid. Mix ashes with millet and feed it all to a sacred cow. 

  You dressed as though every imagined ball was the last. The well slowly drying up. Leaving only mud and the bones of children. Children who fell in and were not deemed worthy of a search party. Lizards there. Peeking in and out of the cracks. Inquisitive but not stupid. Sensing danger, the only thing they darted out were their tongues.

  Pushed back. The pyre welcomes. The flames of love transfigured. Hate fucks in places where we worshipped. You took out your pocket mirror and rippled Narcissus. Leaving no flower to grow on the drunken pauper’s grave. 

  A flash in a pan. Taking communion in one another. I eat you. You drink me. Renunciation in sodomy and spilt seed. Semen streaming from mouth. Strange arabesques on back. Mohammedan crests. Cataracts of white obliterating clouds and thrones. Defiling great chimeras of purity. Washing our foreheads every Wednesday on the off chance that one Wednesday crucified our minds.

  You, the sweet, supple fruit. The knowledge you impart sickens me. The past immemorial. Only the scent lingers after the passage of time. If I could remember you, I would remember an innocence untarnished and undreamt of. What remains are the atrocities by which we mark the calendar.

  S&M parlor tricks. Division. The self looks on as it walks away. Transcendent jackhammering. It stretches you to the point that you become cavernous. Greedy. Diapered men beating their rattles against the balustrade of the crib. Shouting for Mother. Sure she will answer this time. Will not leave them in the hands of uncle merchants.

  Satanic deities in a whirlpool of tarot cards. Spinning through the streets as they scream in the skies. The Wall of Jericho falls.  

  We all cut the bleating throats. Taken away and presented before wrathful gods. They grow like death cap mushrooms. Infesting the fields. The Garden of Eden turned abattoir. Killing indiscriminately in the face of starvation. 

  Bringing the axe down on Nandi. Pre-teens raped in the mikveh. Writhing and screaming. Buried in tradition. Baptismal fonts spewing blood. Chimney stacks in Auschwitz sporting miters. Sabbatarian slave masters. Tombs opening. A battlefield panorama. The bombs drop. The rifles fire. The bayonets tear. The result is not thetan. It’s all so extraordinarily ordinary. 

  There are no souls to be stolen from gaping mouths. Just final kisses. Gaunt and hollow throughout. All the deflowerings amount to nothing. You laid there as I moved. Staring at a ceiling that hid the stars. The trench between your thighs bleeding. I drew back a bedraggled member. Limply dripping. 

  Performed my ablutions in a dirty, rented sink. Catching your eye in the mirror, I turned to face you. Cold calligraphy. Djinn-light on your cheeks. Question marks questioning the periods. The interminable stops that are powerless to cease or hold a second from deluge. 

   Batless eyelashes. An ocean of monotonous holocaust. The year barely out. The snowflake grazing cheek. It smarts. Standing there more lost than ever. A small girl again. In a field picking daisies. 

  I wallow away the hours away from school in search of four leaf clovers. Whether it’s the saint’s day or not. For some reason, most of us boys did. You in a book of chivalry and romance. I was reading something edifying then. Perhaps, a Horatio Alger.

 You were in an all girls’ school. Playing hopscotch at recess. Making little paper fortune tellers that you’d titter over with your girlfriends. Open. Close. Open. Close. Open. Close. Here is the name of your future sweetheart.

  I was in public. Riding down hills on my bike. Down streets past the block parties where besotted neighbors made asses of themselves. Getting in fights, more and more often. Swells of anger yet to be mollified. 

  You wearing pigtails. I had a bowl cut. Counting the pubic hairs as they began to come in. You at a chiropractor as womanhood began to pull at your chest. Learning suffering with the advent of Eve. I affected masculinity. Waiting on the nascent. 

   The first cigarette I had. Hacking on a balcony. Head spinning sideways. The first drink we both had. Spaced on cheap whiskey. Stoned into revelation. 

  You, true to your character, only slightly tipsy on fine wine. Keeping your ladylike composure throughout. Years later and this is where we find ourselves. You were there as was I. In incomplete states. Unaware of each other, and the toilsome concept of self immolation.

  Traversing paths that would converge. Yours was a flowered promenade with a view of ocean and forest. Feeding kites and seagulls bits of ration bread. Mine was showered with a manna of drugs and death. Litter in the form of needles and forgetfulness. 

  The hands that eventually fond each other. Hidden from sight. The insipid banter no longer reaching our ears. The lovemaking that brightened the nights. Until the nights darkened and fouled. Bodies that were sketched in union, now just smeared into a singular monstrosity. Undulations of putrefying flesh.

  You stand there. Naked as a babe. Ask me to show you something other than this. I lower my head in answer. Unable to remember, any longer, a time when pain and failure did not predominate. A time when all was not laggardly sinking in a remorse that the hands of the clock would turn to unbridled malice. 

  Drowning in a kiddie pool that was once an infinite sea of blue. The blue of your eyes. Those soft mirrors that I seemed to have waited my whole life to be reflected in. Like all mirrors, the pupil distorts. It did not seem to be the case at first. It seemed I had been seeing myself for the first time. The self as an ideal. The self as the self yearns to be. I wonder what you had seen in me. 

Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale

Mark Coleman

  We began to have sex. You pulled away. Not so much physically, but in an emotional way that manifested itself in your body. A physiological deprecation. It started in your eyes. A whirlpool dropping amphibian cool down your belly. 

   Your breasts turned into winter sand castles. Sculpted mud. Inside an unheated kiln, I moved. Just the tiny thrusts of an uncertain, certainly unwanted lover.

  I was determined to come if just to spite you. After Burt Bacharach, this is how you treat me? I gave you all the C.S. Lewis an atheist knows.

  The spirit you profess aloof and nonchalant as a nun in habit. Lips chapped to desiccation. Cigarette ash to the filter. Nonexistent drags. Lungs blackened by unspoken nothings. 

  The dying laurels of love make a pitiful bed. I rest my head but no one sleeps beside me. The street and field. Cold and empty. Rabbits in burrow. Cars all parked or tangled around lampposts. Both outside and inside the night is christened in virginal blood. You can’t dam the flow with your tourniquet.

  Decked this limited world of mine with all the flowers that meant something to you. A fistful of daisies. Parched sunflowers that once lit up your eyes and turned up the corners of your mouth. Such a simple flower able to add to your radiance. That natural glow that you carried through germanic countries so many years ago. Red roses with sneaky little thorns that I’d carefully snip off so you wouldn’t prick yourself. Done in private, of course, because it seemed such a feminine task. 

  Bunches of what were surely weeds wrapped up in little bows. You’d politely and carefully sniff them in the same way a sommelier would work over a sip of wine. Pensive in your consideration. The irony of a forget-me-not. Jaundiced about the pupil. I trust the lack of reflection in yours. 

  The flowers that I would adorn your head with. A May Queen half drowned in the bilious self hatred of a remorseless child. You dance. I fall behind the hedges. Not really bashful. Just unwilling and unforgiving.

  The pirouette of a music box ballerina on an unborn daughter’s grave. The tombstone looking down in indifference. Just ticking off the time in a cage of likemindedness. The stars have all gone. I embrace my own irrelevance. I will go too. Down the hangmen’s drop that no well meaning outlaw ever returned from. 

  Another vanishing act will not kill me. It may land me in a hospital bed with insolent nurses sticking I.V’s in my hand. The veins all blown elsewhere. Except where they go blue and chase each other across my chest. Pigs in wallow. Snouts abounding. 

   I tried to sail but I always confused fore with aft. The sirens belching out their once appealing tunes. They are not melodious, anymore. Glued to the rocks like fat seals. A cacophonous battle between alphorn and rainstick in throat. It comes out somewhere between a gurgle and a growl.

  You became synonymous with me. I wish it was mutual. I dreamed, last night, that the crabs were carrying all the pebbles on the beach away. They seemed so unconcerned with what it meant. Despite their hideous side-walking, they did not seem malevolent.

  Footstalks twisting caduceus. Eyes vomited upon the tile. Down the murder-hole at the waxworks. Dripping fresh. Growing. Expanding. Preparing to devour every deed done in private. Wagging tongues and beaten women.

  The faithfully still gone marionette. Playing Punch and Judy in the gallery. Cutting with surgical precision, they come down all claws and teeth. Screaming in clench. The wicket closing off the breakfast warmth. Slow splinters in pubic curls.

  Smashed together in a bed like a press. The screws spinning out. Unaided. Into the occipital bulge and temple. Making foul noise. Blood along the contours. Down nape of neck. Cysts in the socket. Knuckles branded in rage. Up and down your face.

  Crawling along the floor with a broken nose. I take a hit then aim the bottle at the knot of hair growing like an unruly tumor out the back of your head. Bring it down. Shards across the grain. In your palms and knees as you dog it to the kitchen. Stilettos in scramble. Step on a heel until it snaps. Then onto the other.

  You look more like a whore than you ever have. The mascara running with your tears as I kick you in your ribs and spit in your face. I drag you back a good five feet. Belt you. And watch you crawl again. A bachelor at the other end of the stage waves a dollar. You’ll just have to make your way across this broken glass and he’ll be yours to sell your body to for the rest of your life. The little harlot in your heart will finally be able come out and sing.

  You just stand there with a glass of water. Stare at your freshly manicured nails. A bored femme fatale behind the white rimmed shades. A bullet for every year. Another in the chamber for tonight. Wind at the curtains as I move and you play dead. It was always like this. I was a fool to think it was ever anything more.

  Always these pity fucks better suited to alleys. Hand jobs at the Drive-in. Footsy at Thanksgiving dinner. Surreptitious powder room blowjobs. Stolen quickies in filthy gas station bathrooms. The aging condom dispenser hanging on the wall. Unused. Not for lack of change. But the desire to roll the dice. Chance fate with an unplanned pregnancy and an assumed commitment to monogamy.