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.