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.
