Literary Whore

Literary Whore

Mark Coleman

  There’s nothing but full stops in the book you’re reading. Blackout, coke-fueled stop, stop, stops. Alcoholic MVP brain dead from lack of intellectual stimulation. You’re having some sort of panic attack. Spasms wrack your body. Can’t open the bathroom door. Can’t get off your boots. You know you need to relax. Sitting there flinching. Disappointment and tortured thinking. Overly masochistic self-depreciation.

   You need a drink, and some form of companionship. Wishing that you had gone to school for journalism. Sickened by your observational death. A girl in the lobby cowered by a suitcase. Ask if she needs help then immediately regret it. There is a great sadness in her eyes. A sadness that seems tired of itself.

  Meet a few stragglers from a wedding after party. A couple pour out a little less than half a can of beer from their two combined tipples for you. Smoke six cigarettes and some of their pot. They take a picture with you. A shit bored disposable camera. Meet the girls. The wedding crasher is sleeping in their bed. Straight from prison.

  Picking up road kill missed by a chain gang. The wind kicks up, and the lighter refuses its light. If it was a Pez dispenser, how much easier it would be to get what you need. Rub blow residue from a pocket mirror on your gums.

   The back of it shuns its Chinese character. The original owner was a sweetheart. You were on the verge of proposal when the romantic fissure took place. She’s gone now, and it’s all she left. Excepting a hole in your chest, and the tingle of a year and a half long embrace. The ghost of her body’s warmth haunts you.

  Madras eyes underlined by the violet half moons of sleeplessness. The full moon in the sky has its own hand in their creation. The week is dissolving in the rhinestone of remembrance. The ice keeps melting, and so you keep beast of burdening it to the ice machine down the hall. The room’s nice but no one visits you. Strangers treat you both as an old friend and a pariah.

  You lust after girls a decade younger than you. You continually sleep alone. If only a Salinger elevator operator would lend his hand. A steady intake of booze to keep the fire inside of you. Your fate is chilled. Depression eats away the segments of your spine. Loneliness refuses to be ignored. It wants your life. You contemplate handing it over.

  It’s always been rough going. You’ve been holed up in your room. A one nightstand might keep your heart from falling apart. You desire something less alienating but this absence of any form of tenderness is going to land you in the madhouse.

  Your entire shocked being needs a boost. The bump rushes up the quarter of straw. It helps. You take out your soul and look at it. It’s been making love to your misery. They make a cute couple but you wish they’d break up.

  The whore with the missing sock who will blow you but not kiss you. Saying that you don’t know where her mouth has been. Your longing doesn’t care but she turns her head away. Fell for you, and looked for you in the bars. The bartenders would inform you of her constant presence. Just narrowly missed her again.
  Maybe she just wanted to keep the promise of a birthday present in line with her trade. There doesn’t seem to be much help for people like you and her. Even in one another’s arms there would still be that unrelenting gulf. All the lights in the picture house have gone out. You didn’t like what they were showing anyway.

Melancholic Motel

Melancholic Motel

Mark Coleman

 Some mornings you wake up and your heart’s broken. Some mornings it’s not even there. There’s just a dull ache where a beat should be. Other days the sun discovers it on the nightstand where you left it beside a pack of smokes. A few crumpled dollars. A couple of quarters and nickels. Not many pennies.

  You can feel the previous night in your head. Rust fills your mouth and coats your tongue. Your saliva’s brine and motor oil. The spark plug is missing. You probably lost it in a pint glass. Your forehead’s stippled. You think of Bukowski, and remember reciting one of his poems in speech class.

  You wrote a song about her but never sang it. She never heard or even saw it.  The lyrics fell apart. Dissolved in sulfuric forgetfulness where most your valuables go. You might still love her but it’s hard to say if it’s not just mime histrionics. There’s an inscription in every book on the shelf that you wrote yourself.

  Your lusterless eyes just take in the pattern of the motel room carpet most of the time. Little mice squares litter. The yellow that the green pushes up. The lamp on the desk is curious about something. What that might be is anyone’s guess. The desk’s legs taper. Daggering into the floor.

  Your suitcase has exploded. There’s dirty laundry everywhere. The laundry machines hunger for your change. Just as the television hungers for your finger to touch the remote’s clitoral power button. The volume buttons care nothing about their state of disrepair. You hear the other sets and sex in the adjacent rooms. A crying baby somewhere.

  You’re sure there are tears but you can’t feel them. In the matchbox there remains a solitary fire-tipped splinter of wood. You drink the rest of a bottle of beer with a cigarette butt in it. You sigh and go to the bathroom. Sitting there with your head in your hands.

  There seems to be a little death everywhere in the room. It’s not the little death of a pair of lovers. Something seems to be taken away from you with every passing second. You wonder how much the prostitutes go for around here. You wouldn’t even mind if she were venereal. You just want to get away from yourself for a while.

  Time refuses to pass. The hands on the clock always seem to be in the same position. It’s as though their existence is solely for amusement. The pen is out of ink. The perforations on the notepad are dazed. It’s hard to say what’s written on the ones in the wastebasket. It wasn’t inspiration. Whatever it was the termite weeks have eaten it away.

  Your soul is desiccated. You don’t miss the moisture. Sometimes, there’s a drizzle outside. The rain mists. It gently dots the shingles. The flotillas of cloud on some exploratory excursion. The gold against their prows. The cottony mastheads against the tender blue. The gossamer thin hulls. There’s no saying how long their maiden voyage will last.

  There’s rot in your bones. Your tibia’s holding on by a thread. Your teeth have gone un-drilled for too long. There’s a Russian doll echo inside of you. The round burns too slow. Everything lengthens. Then recedes for a bit into the exhausted grey background.
  There is no expectation. This is all there is. A bed you don’t sleep in but just sit on the edge of. There are too many pillows. Not enough sheets. The air conditioner is broken. There’s a torrential sweat on your face. Maybe all those beads are really the tears you can’t feel. You’re still pretty sure that sometimes you cry.

Love Clots

Love Clots

Mark Coleman

  The metaphysical terror that comes with falling in love. Waking up with hunger pangs. A parch for her very being. The horrors come with their cold sweats and tremors. Your mind goes berserk with adversaries. There’s a conspiracy against your bliss and blithe. You see it in every eye that caresses her.

  The co-worker that has the audacity to share a joke that you’re not in on with her. Her pearly whites and his porcelain caps forming a forbidden union. The shop clerk who takes a little too long over her. Helping her select the perfect dress. (Never mind, he’s probably a fag.) An affectionate water cooler touch on the shoulder over some perfectly benign banter. The shoulder that you had just kissed, last night. Whispering sweet nothings.

  You just keep hitting the call button so you can bask in the radiance of the nurse who looks like the greatest red carpet starlet. Her heart and shine is what you really want to buy a share in. This is a world where everyone is so busy fucking each other that no one stops long enough to make love.

   Holding hands in Palisades Park. Eating gobs from the same blob of cotton candy. That sharing of pink confectionary floss almost a kiss in itself. Broken down at the top of the Ferris wheel. The passenger car swaying as you rock yourselves merrily. No fear in it. Just a glitch in a lover’s afternoon.

  Maybe, a bit of necking. Or just a tiny, teasing peck. And sometimes it’s the Gravitron. The floor drops out and you’re stuck to opposite walls. There are times the Gravitron never stops. Some children enjoy this who have never known the slightest tenderness or affection.

  The arching amateur paint strokes on your hospital gown. The raised hatch on the hideous yellow socks. The “Fall Risk” police line on your wrist. You step on the floor and an alarm goes off. Its pig squeal echoing through your head.

  They strap you down because you wouldn’t stay in bed. You don’t bother to writhe. The television that you watch and watch without the least comprehension of what’s happening on it. The morphine that brings a moment of euphoria. You stare at the ceiling. They give you a couple more shots during the night, and the world almost seems like a place worth being in.

  Then, they take you out of the audience and turn you into the human pincushion. The pinheads laugh and dance. Their chonmages making them look even stupider. The barkers there are all full of jolly and good spirit with their promises of monstrosities. But just as in Browning’s film, the midget is humiliated and heartbroken.

  The almshouse is quickly approaching. It’s façade higher than any cathedral in the world. Icarus will always fall. I will always fall. Sometimes it’s in love. More often it’s into month long drinking binges. Trekking through a blizzard, half frostbitten, for the handle I so desperately need.

  The hurricane comes, and the fishing boats descend to the depths of sea and time. Where the fish have corkscrewing flashlights on their heads, and some maniacal king, who cares nothing for you, rules. His scepter is so bejeweled that it is the envy of all the angels. (The fallen one cries his lot into the flames of damnation.)
  His throne is so golden that God wouldn’t sit His fat ass on it. The women bow down to his maleficence and power. They wrought their own chains and they are proud of them. The clot in your hand breaks into smaller clots but it still hurts. The IV’s are out, and you can smoke. But something still seems wrong.

Rosy Promenade

Rosy Promenade

Mark Coleman

   The covers to my chin, I fell into an embryonic sleep. Twirling down alleyways encased in marble-veined buttressed glass. The shops on either side displaying their polished and dusted trinkets.

  The bell jars beneath which stand rigid, obeisant praying mantises reflecting the sun’s rays. Chaperoning those swimming pool dances on the hotel room’s ceiling. Lying there in remembrance of planetarium school days.

  The delft seahorses lined on wicker rocking chairs as fragile as their seafaring brethren. The diaphanous dorsal fin fine as a square of blotting paper. The curlicue tail beckoning in foreplay come hither. The head like a miniature wolf’s from bespangled snout to starfish eye.

   Hobby horses with a button missing in their heads give up the neigh. The mauve thread fractured out of knit. Stuck in black plastic potholders padded out with Styrofoam peanuts. A little yellower than the ones in the cardboard boxes your toddler builds castles with. Dry rot on a pogo stick. 

  The ruby lipped Russian Dolls rotund with quadruplets. The carefully painted babushkas from which the central parted, flaxen hair arches as the bristling cat on the scratching post flashes its adamite embers. The logs in the hearth prodded by insolent pokers flame as the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

  A dirge howled by the hound at the foot of its master. The corncob pipe scorches as the match hits the tobacco. A long inhale. A tubercular cough soothed with grappa. The dog snuggles in closer to itself and moans. Its ears lay back on its head.

  I move past a cathedral covered in gargoyles. They sit on their haunches and grin out at empty space. Small scale Passions run through cornices. A shamrock cross accentuates the cleavage of a passerby. Sext and pious chatter.

  The candy store on my right parades its saccharine wares. Peppermint barber poles rooming with licorice sticks. Bottle-nosed strands of taffy on wax paper beside multicolored nuggets. Lemon, Chocolate, Grape, Melon, Vanilla peacock in their cases. Gumballs spiral down into the palms of girls in sundresses.

  Cokes wind up cambered straws to the pursed lips of foppish men’s dates. Eyelashes bat flirtatiously. Milkshakes in stainless steel elevator up to the flipper adorned blender. Spattering the countertop. Coquettish laughter over French fries swimming in ponds of ketchup.

  Packards outside the movie theater. The marquee missing a vowel here and a consonant there. Inside they talk fast, garbled nonsense and speechify the nuclear family. A semi-salacious poster promises licentious adventure. Excited couples rush to the ticket booth. The attendant gets a paper cut, and sucks his thumb.

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  I find a dying rose in the street, and proceed to pull off its petals. An erotic poet would find in it a different life than me. For me it has a human face. My fingers stain red. I think of lipstick and a passion drenched Malevitch square.

  The soft tangibility of blue velvet in the mind taking on voluptuous curves. The warm mound of breast from which Empedocles will never escape. The hips thrown and the buttocks tendered.

   A woman approaches in a tight fitting dress, her black satin underwear peaks out at me like a playful child around a corner. Her budding anemone eyes seek out a tenebrous horizon. An enchanting white mist clings to the orbs as it does in those blind. There’s a sort of grope in her spyglass glance.

  The ships are too far to sea to properly make out. If they were bottled, she could peruse them at her leisure. The schooner with its spruce hull and paper sails.  The Plasticene sea raging behind it. Fragments of pelagic tissue pasted to the sky.

  A truck unloading orange crates bars her way. They are piled before a farmer’s market on the sidewalk. A few rogue fruit find their ways into the greedy paws of street urchins.

  Further along the gulls cry over the boardwalk. The crabs march up and down. Their eyestalks frond swaying. Their pincers snapping open and shut. Rostrums in philosophical mull.

  I wipe my hands on the back of my pants, leaving a menstrual-esque stain. My blue-collar movements are reflected in a rainbowed gasoline puddle. I attempt a whistle but it dies somewhere between my tongue and lips. I feel like a mechanic, and I wish that I had grease on my jeans.

  A twist in my boxers makes me change my position. A crick in my neck has me gazing up at a starless sky. I move about the hidden constellations to positions I would have preferred as a child. Standing on the mantelpiece with a spur in each hand.

  Broken snow globe wintering the carpet. Tiny splinters from a calf’s femur running off in streamlets. The idyllic scene disturbed. The shepherdess displaced from her sheepfold. The ceramic Zupfe rolling end over end to the clawed foot of the couch whose cushions remember every unfaithful liaison.

  The rose in the vase has gone un-watered and has begun to wither. In some cursory manner, she has made it to the ocean. Rushing down the esplanade, crushing lavender and centaury under foot as though they were nothing but frost flowers on the lake back home.

  Down past the cracking indigo beach huts. The startled tourists beneath their umbrellas showered by the sand her heels kick up. They don’t attempt to shake out their blankets. Their silver trunks and pitch pupils shoot blistering glares at her. The sun at its meridian wishes it were the moon.

   The waves crash against rocks above which towers a sprawling, uninhabited estate said to be haunted by a suicide. An exclamation gathers at the back of your throat. Beachcomers, shocked out of their work, stare at her figure as it disappears into the white-crested waves. The tin in their hands drops back. The metal detectors nix the treasure. Only the noose has solved the pirate’s riddle.

  Someone dives in after her, coming up with nothing but large bunches of sea grapes in his hands. Women in straw hats and one-pieces begin to gather just close enough that their toes are submerged in the water. Men with cheap sunglasses about their necks on Dayglo elastic cords and sunscreen on their noses mumble reassurances through graying mustaches to their wives.

   The wives shoo them away like the swarms of flies that overtook a section of the beach where a whale decided he’d give the landlubber life a go. The woman may or not wash up. If she does, the crabs are sure to find her first. Picking over whatever the fish choose to leave them. Her features will be ruined. A small child on his first vacation raises a seashell to his ear, and listens to the sea spread out before him.

Delirium

Delirium

Mark Coleman

  Disappearing like a shut-eye nightjar on tree bark, I sank into a soufflé pillow. Dreams came barreling up from the cellar to meet me. Twining about synapse latticework. Images of death and dilapidation fluttered beneath my eyelids. Skeletal visages both human and otherwise tottered to an unlit region of my subconscious then came howling back at me.

  Dislocated jowls swayed like hanged men. Sinister pop-eyed cuts with a perpetual stench on the breath screamed indecipherable obscenities and threats at me. Fecund runes into the furrows. Buds opening in yowling prematurity. Grimoire pages browsed by the phantasmal wind. A few variegated autumn leaves spiraling their way to a dusty parlor floor. A light dash of sorcery from the French windows. An eye wide at the porthole. A fish finning it back home only to find teeth there.

  Dolls in pink crinoline skirts, their beady, little eyes throwing hateful flashes, curtseyed before receding into their recursive, stucco abodes. Shredded nighties on the carpet. Girls having precociousness forced upon them let their pussies do all the screaming. Frogging up ratlines to meet libertine acquaintances in logeing crow’s nests. Opera-glasses seeking out the ghoulish Lilliputian bosun walking bow-legged from the captain’s thorough buggering.

   A gray man in a gray suit sitting at a lunch counter with blood in his coffee mug, grins and takes a Bathory sip. The fedora upside down beside him has a daisy in the band. It makes one think of an assignation in a spring arbor. The book beside the fedora whose title is hidden must have an inscription if not an armorial frontispiece.

  Trilling birds shattering as dusk overtakes them. Pigeons giving voice to very human anguish in the bow-nets. The ruderal microscoped in their pupils. Showing little by little in the cracked façade and seismically shifting flagstones. Shadows without a source thrown haphazardly like fishing nets in a tidal wave. Mice eating ork ork laden cheddar, and promptly seizing out. Bubbling red squeaks at the floorboards and boxwood.

  The attic is full of strange, forgotten trinkets. The sagging sawhorse. The neglected rocking horse that has not known a laughing child’s embrace since close to a century ago. The medallion laying on top of a wedding dress in the cherrywood trunk. The cardboard suitcase with nothing but dust in it. The gem in the spider web. The tiara in the dark corner beside a trap that has never been triggered.

  Jellied eyes blown out the front. Tongues in formaldehyde losing their wag. Swagged out in purple. Regalia in the form of gold teeth and a cane with a chrome skull handle. Whores huddled together simply beaten in mass. Children in tricorn hats flying tricorn kites emblazoned with sickle and hammer. Agates in their pockets begging a game.

   In the street, the marbles scatter and careen in all directions. It’s not hockey, but the children are sick of playing on the sidewalk or the porches of the apartment houses where an embittered adult will kick at their humble treasures, or in a huffing fit punctuated with words like “fuckers” or “bastards” their shins which are unguarded seeing that they are still in short pants.

  Calling card jacks left on the dismembered, half-eaten boys. Letters laid out like menus mailed to their mothers. Sommelier sophistication in the cannibal. No bone through the nose just a splinter stuck in the gullet. Sweat beading the brow of a back-bent laborer. The tubers beneath taking in parasitic rot as though it were a ringed beau’s cock. A creeper cleft in two as though lightning had struck him. The skies opening up in a downpour of viscera. The breams in the angler’s bucket gape as their brethren are gutted. God shrills a cackle. This is the truth of the land He envisioned.

Heloise Rape

Heloise Rape

Mark Coleman

  She seems to think that silver fork bull is still in style, that I belong to the castrati caste with Abelard: incompetent, impotent, and incomplete. Of course, being the fool I am, I had fallen in love with her knowing full well she was of the Magdalene Laundry Order. Like the nut in a comfit, I sought the heart buried in her breast, heedless of her wanton past. (Striking out, proof-wise, the lovers once attendant upon that slippery mound of Venus. Which waned elastic in accommodation of the alpha serpents. Tightening its Mother-Nature-Documentary-Jaws against the puny axolotl.)

  Wanting nothing more than for her to be desirous of me in turn. Feel the abundance of perdition passion that was rending me asunder. (A foul, besmirched, and blood spattered Bosch revenant and gouging and prodding and tearing. Wearing my insides as headdresses and ear-hole streamers. Setting the table with my very soul, and craving in as though it was a Thanksgiving turkey.)

  A glistering pair of eyes that just take me in despite an appalling belly tacked onto my otherwise feeble form. Without a blench, knowing my worth was entombed in the fat that was mortifying my adolescent frame. Those hazel lozenges meeting me in specie to my own unwavering, unflinching glare. The curiosity innate in the tilt of a dog’s head, when you are preparing a meal, mermaiding down fathomless pupils.

  A wedding ring, in a pocket, in a jacinth-jeweled velvet box, with a band of storks repasting on snakes. The divestment (presentiment) of which seemed fairly premature. Just as a quiver on a pair of salmoned lips signals the man to a kiss, so the romantic recognition and interchangeable bat of the lashes in guinea candlelight signals a proposal.

   Affreight and bed her ticker in a crate full of straw (its constitution being such that the introduction of ice seems unnecessary); nailing it shut against organ-harvesting highwaymen, and its own possible hasty retreat and emigration. An emigration that would be sure to end in the beefed-up-and-out arms of a sultry subaltern. The harem drought dry without so much as the glistening of expelled seed on a thigh.

   Foreskin dispelled from boudoir makeup. Going back to cap baby cock. The Mother Superior hitting you across your snitch-scarred face with a yardstick, and whispering that you will be chained from the rafters and beaten. A girl bruised along her cheeks with black eyes and blood coming out of both of her mouths begging mercy. Saying she won’t tell and will pray for and bead you.

  A nail between the teeth at the ready. The cacophonous neighbor-beating-wife hammering in the stockyard. The abattoir scarlet vomited from the blistering bilge in gutsy cascade. A deluge of hoofed monstrosities square dancing, can-canning, charlestoning to an upside down phonograph dangling at the end of a hawser. Bubbling out the sister crank confession necessitated by water torture. The new plank to be walked in chorus to the shiver-me-timber good cop/bad cop shakedown.

  The stevedores contortioning in an attempt to ascertain the source of the slaughter. Knocking about the steamer-shrouded gangway with their far inferior cargo. Grimacing at the intrusion upon their relative workaday peace. Biding the knockoff and punch out. Divers decantered whiskeys, with the relaxed hues of a beige-to-bole color wheel, preening and priming at their twofold reflection while they await the off-duty rakehelling. Sailors, with their proudly presented passes, thinking they’ve earned the right to bed down with twelve-year-olds under their parents’ roofs.

  Offspring brought forth while on a tour of the Pacific Theater. Howling and bleating like Anneliese Michel. Shunning a suckle from a wet nurse as though dentata crept up from the humid, lichen-growing depths, twaining itself, and divan-reclining on the divine orbs. Licorice flavored charcoal drops before frenching an oft-written sweetheart back in some angel-less city. Ridding the breath of Munich’s rathskellers and Paris’ bordellos. The pussy stink, unwilling to be ignored, fulminates out the pores. Gunboats full of cunt-ammunition firing at the shore. The scent alone is unmistakably bald. Smells of a baby boomed infant.

  Drag it off to Union Hall to enlist against its will. Remind ‘em they were chamberers before they got one between the eyes. Stethoscope out and at the ready. Want to listen one more time. Recall all that child doctor-playing. The sunflower aroma of her hair. The stolen berry taste on her lips. The tender way in which she kissed your navel and the nape of your neck, and later put a flower in your lapel when you took a prettier version of her to the dance.

  Remembering. Wishing those days would come again. Waking up in cold sweats, and shooting morphine into collapsed veins. Coagulated night terrors browning the sheets. The pillow full of reminiscences that is painful to lay your head on. The sheep you count turning goat. Turning vicious faces to you. Overflowing with hatred.

Twisting spasmodically around damnation. Turning biped, and dragging you out of bed by your feet. The canopy parting to flame that your tears cannot extinguish. Screaming and blowing your whistle all the way down.

Diner Obssesion

Diner Obsession

Mark Coleman

  In the diner, she ran the blintze in and out of her mouth like a miniscule, tartaric dick. Momentarily forgot her Post, I guess. Her lips moist. A bit of spittle here and there. She acted as though it belonged to the largest Negro in Africa. In and out. In and out. Upon exiting, she curled her tongue around the tip. The illusion was a pretty dull one, seeing that the tip was uniform with the rest of the slender member. Yet the way she went at it certainly didn’t lack gusto. The lactic marrow would have to disembogue at some point. And I figured that some point would be sooner than later.

  She half-closed her eyes then closed them all the way. Gave a little moan. I squinted at her from the semi-blindness of alcohol overindulgence. Took a sip of lukewarm coffee that had not been heated by a top-off. The waiter also refrained from refilling our water or asking how the food was. Assuming that he already knew the answer from the ecstatic way my date was eating. Not that I had set out on a proper date with her, just picked her up in some dive on Broadway.

  Showed me Tantric sex books she had bought earlier when she was doing the rounds with her shopping. Compulsive buy that she was eager to put into practice. I didn’t have a condom on me, but decided that the situation could be dealt with when it was come to. She bent her head back, and tried to deepthroat, giving a sudden, shocked gag. Eyes grew large and watery. I imagine someone had done this to her recently. And I’d wager you two-to-one that it was before the week(end) was out.

  It was 3 am on a Sunday morning. I didn’t see myself going to church, and figured I’d see how far this would go. The eggs in front of me were starting to get cold. The bacon somehow still sizzling. The cigarette I had lit (without the paper fully catching) long dead. The coffee went from lukewarm to lukecold. Hers drowned in creamer, and fed an inordinate amount of sugar. The cook peered out the wicket then stuck his head back in. The waiter still didn’t come, so, by way of jest, I asked her how her food was. She gurgled an unintelligible reply to which I smiled with nothing but the corners of my mouth.

  I got the Tabasco then saw the Cholula. Generously dowsed my eggs then dashed a finger of pepper on them. Lifted a forkful to my mouth; my eyes still fixed upon what was happening across from me. In addition to already being cold, the eggs were undercooked, and the probably Mexican-Blend-bag-cheese was not fully melted. I tried a piece of bacon, and faired slightly better with this. It had a nice crunch to it, at least. I was washing down a mouthful with the glass of water, which at this point was nothing but half an inch of dissolved ice, when I felt her shoeless foot in my crotch. I looked down, and there were her adolescent-flower-patterned-socked-toes massaging me in dexterous, little squeezes alternated with small circular motions.

  I wondered if she intended to bring me to a climax in this manner. After all, she had no way of knowing the amount of sweat and number of thrusts it would take to achieve that aim. I’ve never been able to ejaculate in a timely manner, and so much the worse if I was wearing protection.

   Sometimes it works out, and a girl will do those nasty things she’d obstinately deny ever having even thought of, (not to mention actually have partaken in) otherwise. And there she is, in a cinch, making strange, forbidden tableaux with me on the sheets just to get the spurt out. The springs, realizing the uncouth encounter above their heads, giving diminutive chirps opposed to the full-on nest-of-mice squeaks they would let out on a more appropriate occasion.

    There are strippers out there in both the shady and the high class joints who will offer you a handjob at the end of a round of lap dances. The session drawing to a close as the music begins to fade, and you pay for yet another. Hoping against all hope that some twinkle of non-monetary cupidity, or at least real human compassion, would enter her eyes in lieu of the faux lust and expected sensuality. But alas you’re not even ships that pass in the night for she is a siren surrounded by wreckage, and you’re nothing but a lousy bit of flotsam washed up at her feet. She gives insincere thank-you’s that she make sound like declarations of love to the sharply dressed men who present her with only-a-botanist-could-identify-flowers and expensive baubles, night after night.

  So, in some remorseful fit of jealousy, you follow your itching feet out the exit with maybe a crust of pre-come in your shorts, and a bit of a bun tied on. Take out your pack and chain-smoke your way to a rooming house where the fluorescent tubes flicker in the hall, and the bulbs are all burned out in your room. Sinking into bed unable to sleep with the stages still lit up in your head, and the tassels still spinning on fresh, cameo nipples that look to be straight off of the harp strewn assembly line.

  Beating your head against the wall in half-dream, and repeating the more mellifluous of the stage names. Maybe a Melody or a Bettie that recalls a more famous Bettie sans bondage. Dressed in apricot colored and scented panties that those fortunate enough to be close to without a barrier of heavy precipitation could attest to. Say she’s straight out of a jojoba bath, perfumed and through with a time consuming toilet, and she hasn’t dressed beyond those cotton divinities to which you would willingly build a shrine, and pass the rest of your days in secluded worship.

  Maybe, she sits in front of a miniature looking glass that sits atop a dresser containing letters from old flames and postcards from a dead grandmother, and slowly brushes her hair with an azure-tinted silver hilted brush. An heirloom of sorts from a mother that works at a more conventional grind (or, maybe, still a housewife to a husband who has not aged well.) Then she purses her lips and applies a conservative amount of lavender lipstick followed by a smidgen of rouge. Maybe, she has on more than a pair of work-write-off-panties, though they can still be seen where a kimono swimming with Koi and lotus—or, and this seems the most romantic scenario, Oshidori—parts. Then again, maybe its just a simple cotton-to-silk dressing gown, and maybe, and far more likely, no such Horai nonsense takes place, but she finishes her toilet in front of some mindless soap that cliffhangs on the commercial breaks. All that babble-babble for the lonely. But you doubt she’s lonely.

  Sitting there with a dog-eared, but rich, boyfriend. Painting her nails the mellow pink that adorned them tonight with a cigarette perched in the crenel of a marble ashtray. Another heirloom? Eating cold pizza from a generic pizza box; the kind all the mom-and-pops seem to carry in Hollywood? What floor? How often does she take air if at all? Does her beau shell out a pittance more to have admirers-from-the-club-flowers in pots lynched from the balcony? Does he content/placate her with diamonds? How many facets? How often does she go to the movies? Does she get off on all that sappy tripe they force feed the fairer sex? Does she drink often? Does she have a problem with cocaine? Whose lockers are hers bordered by at the club? Do they ever have disputes? Does she apologetically decorate the interior with yellowing valentines?
  She sits there, and looks tired. She hasn’t masked the lines on either side of her mouth nor the dark circles under her eyes. She had an appointment with her chiropractor that she had to cancel because the owner called her in to cover a shift. Her back and neck ache from pole tricks. She doesn’t want to go in, but she needs the money. Some of the guys in there spend a lot. More than they can afford. Sometimes, their whole paycheck. Just for a duck and rub from an ass and a pair of tits.