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.