Detox

Detox

Mark Coleman

  I just want to find someone to spend my life with. Someone to comfort me when a friend dies. I want what others have.
  It broke my heart to see you sitting on the floor. Head in your hands, crying. Couldn't really understand what happened. Except that you hate yourself for it.
  I just sat there and ate my shitty detox waffles. Trying to think of something to say. Tried to make small talk and failed. But for some reason out of all the open chairs, you chose the one right next to me.
  I caught your name, and that was about all. Asked a guy in my room what I should do with my dirty scrubs. He said that some people keep them or I could hang myself with them. He said that earlier he wanted to shoot himself.
  Told the staff on intake that he was suicidal. Another guy and I asked who the hell says that, and then I joked about the homicidal question.
   "Every time that I come in here. I want to kill all you, motherfuckers!" We had a good laugh. If you know where to look and your timing's not shit, you can have a few belly laughs here.
 Occasionally, someone smokes a cigarette in the shower. I did it myself. Last time, the stunt was pulled they looked in everyone's pockets and rooms for contraband. A madman got dragged to the psych for going for the girls' room with his cane.
  A young DUI kid told us that he had a beer in his bag. As he was getting discharged, he said that he was going to chug it and throw the can at the wall of the facility. An older man with brain damage said he realized he had a fifth of vodka in his bag and went to the bathroom and pounded it.
  Some of us look like boxers with the damage done by falling down on our faces. I asked a pretty Mexican if she had a boyfriend. She did. A boyfriend and three kids that she just wanted to get out and see. At night, they bring out the T.V. and some asshole picks out a garbage movie to watch.
  They had a Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates, I came close to stealing. I came home to broken reading glasses, anyway. Several of us came here, just for walking down the street. The women are all pretty but heart broken. The majority of the men want to fill their souls with something more than this unbearable pain that comes with just having to get up in the morning. With very few exceptions, none of us are bad people.

Muzzle Climb

Muzzle Climb

Mark Coleman

   The delphiniums can grow as tall as they want. They're not going to hide anything. The caterpillar will always be distinguishable from the stalk of the weed.
  She stands rigid in sleepshirt and kitty heeled slingbacks. No bra. No panties. Just her underneath. Exquisite although askance.
  She has those lips you always want to press yours against. The hair you constantly want to run your fingers through. Wanted so badly to spend your life with her. Wanted to explain to her that everything would be alright. Even though, this would be a lie. Hear people speak about her only in terms of sex.
  Her sweat band discarded after tennis. A bikini on a banister back chair after a swim meet. Dangling there like shed skin.
  Your instructor just left you in the deep end. You thought you were going to drown. You feel that way now. A pool of obfuscation that mists its way into your eyes.
  The book case stares you down. The sofa swallows you. Looking for loose change in its cushions. Knowing there's none to be found.
  It was all just a college try, after all. You try to wish away the memories. Try to obliterate retention and reason. Sink slowly into ready made madness. The insanity where a different sort of angel lives.
  Sometimes, we descend to the attic and ascend to the cellar. Falling into blue skies. Rising into turbulent seas. The plane you know will never leave the tarmac. The oxygen masks that drop, regardless. A bird must have flown into the fuselage again. I think they must get sick of being that close to heaven.
  A crash is the same as a layover. Nine times out of ten. We smoke too many cigarettes and drink too many drinks in the lounge. There's an I that was buried with You. They're starting to stack the bodies because they've run out of room.
  The family plots no longer contain family members but just odd bits of consanguineous appendages. A distant cousin's head rests on the thighs of a stranger. Rape becomes a necessity of the tomb.
  Feeling like a Bolero painting, even though, you haven't eaten in days. Sitting on the floor with your whiskey. Staring at the wall. Trying to find some pattern there. There's nothing but scuff marks that seep into your heart.
  You'll never write the great American novel. Never write a short story that anyone will ever want to publish. You're relegated to obscurity. You are obsolete.
  Take a few Clorazepate. It helps, I suppose. But in such a small way that I might as well have left them in the bottle till I seized.
  I become less sure of myself everyday. Excoriating mirrors that only show how pale my life is compared to my dreams.

Fate

Fate

Mark Coleman

  I watched the laving against the sea wall through a drunken squint. The Fata Morgana was further heightened by the laziness of my eyes. It seemed that a muslin shift hid all crawling and slithering within it.
  I've had nightmares that left me more at ease than what I saw upon the Mediterranean that night beneath the mad spinning heads of the lighthouses.
  I heard a guzla and looked back. I had no change left for the street musicians who approach you at romantic, candle lit dinners. Between me and the city lights laid a beach fire. Wine drunk, the Greeks danced demented romaikas. The jugs went round and round.
  The flames illuminating their faces. From their heads appeared a confusion of goat horns. Some seemed to pick up flaming coals and throw them about as though they were nothing but poi. An insanity of light twirled and twisted there when only a moment before not even a single man had stood.
  I looked back at the ocean, and compared the two visions. The ophidian orgy raged on. Chopin up to her knees and going out.
  Choking her brilliance in rippling coils. Drowning their crazed Parana selves to make sure that she was dead. The blood surfaced in those plumes that the Coast Guard notices when it strikes them to look down.
  Caught in the pamperos of a meteor shower without an umbrella to protect me; I spun around, and met a whiter than white face tinted blue at the edges. Its eyes like sugary, shimmering lekach pierced me through with hate filled pupils. With a shrill shofar scream it sent me tumbling backwards into the sand.
  I laid there with the convulsions of a caught fish. My tormentor leaned down to better take in what must have seemed to it to be death throes. Those eyes that had been blue balling for such an event reflecting all my inner demons.
  It opened its mouth once again only to find that it had become mute. Lips like silverfish trying to form a word. This word I knew would spell out my demise.
  I had been toying with suicidal thoughts that very night only to chuck them like a bottle into that serpentine tide. Luckily, this strange being was at a loss for the vociferation that wanted so badly to leave it forever.
  Flapping together its stinging lips in bemusement, it seemed to quiver into a blur. The equivalent of scratching one's head when confronted with an impossible-to-solve-riddle.
  It laid itself full length on top of me. It dug with talon-like claws on either side of me. Ever deeper the arroyos became. I felt as though I was being buried alive in some reversed sort of way. I suppose this was all an effort to frighten me with the mortality embodied within the tomb.
  I shook to my very core, and bounced and sprung back against the hoary body in my uncontrollable fit as though this was all an innocent romp with a beauty beneath a canopy that covered even the valance.
  I could perceive a subconscious tic inside of that bobbin brain. A sort of muscle spasm that flexed its way down to the razor sharp teeth arranged in tiers along its yellowing gums. I thought of the women and girls that I had seen earlier. Their diet making it nearly impossible to guess their age.
  Becoming more and more indistinct. More and more equivocal. Perhaps its utterance, while undoubtedly shattering my very inner frame, would have proved salubrious to this fiend.
   I realized that my subjugation was the very thing that it needed. The effect of my submission to its controlling influence would have been immediate. Its contours would have rippled back into place and congealed. If I affected a stillness then all would be over. The word would destroy. Sending shock waves across every corner of the globe.
  It howled so noiselessly that I could hear the breaking of the waves in a seashell a meter away. It held its palms to its astonished face as they slowly dripped and dissolved into the scarlet waters of Lethe.
  Now, it seemed more slave than master. A pursued victim finally entangled in the all encompassing web of gluttonous fate. Anti-epicurean to such a degree that it would devour that aquiline nose, that pufferfish brow, those dwarfish feet.
 The chelicerae feeding distention. Rows of obsidian eyes chewing the soul into tiny morsels better suited for digestion. Eggs bursting open, sending tiffany offspring across the gossamer woof.
  Fighting over the incububotic/sububotic offal. Tearing and shredding bits of anima as the mother looks on in pride. The nearly minuscule monsters acting in accordance to their nature.
  The Furies screaming through the bones from which the flesh was being ripped. The sound of an ill bred bumpkin gnawing at bread and rib.
  Fate is damnation. God hides behind a cloud as the children pray for something other than starvation. For a Christmas in which they are not forgotten like the floating landfills that no one but the birds and fish see. The trash piling up inside of tykes until it grows to such a monumental stature that they end up stabbing someone behind a dumpster.
  Fate is a bitch with the grit of the human race between her teeth. Umbilical cords tangled in her bloated stomach. Her face a blotted mess of tears and disease. She is Pompeii. She is the Inquisition. She is the Holocaust. She is impotency in the face of evil.
  She turns man into skeleton on the battlefields. She gives hopeful parents miscarriages. Deformed and retarded children. She creates psychopaths, religion, jails those never proven guilty. Robs mankind of its innocence.
   Turns empathy into hatred. Sympathy into disdain. Creates homelessness, poverty, depression, hopelessness. Eats the hearts of those filled with kindness then throws charcoal into the gaping chest cavities. Takes the future and moulds it into war and famine. Laughing as it all goes down.
  Fate is a breeding ground so enmeshed in our own world that not even the most skilled mechanic could loosen the bolts that would send it spinning into its proper, fiery element. Gone like a flash in a pan to the Hell where she belongs.

Conquests

Conquests 

Mark Coleman

 Got caught with my hand in the cookie jar. By hand I mean fingers, and by cookie jar I mean your quim. We were young, and my bedroom was still filled to the brim with adolescent shit. Posters for movies that I've since grown out of. CD's of superannuated bands. VHS's full of riffraff and Riff Raff.
  Your seemingly blushing skirts and starch white panties bordered with pink, faux Valenciennes lace about your slender ankles. A French tickler at the ready. I made you laugh with an apish weather forecast on your moist, agitated state.
  Of course, I didn't really know what I was doing. My introduction to the ways of love came in the form of Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace. I later recognized the bruises on the latter's legs.
  I just sort of parted your thighs and stuck my fingers in. Moved them around a bit. Up and down. Side to side. Tried to probe as deep as I could. Though wet, I imagine you were nevertheless hamming. You were only fifteen and far more experienced than me. Two years your senior, and I'd never been bitten.
  We used to stick our fingers in light sockets or make escargot forks out of tin foil bubblegum wrappers that we'd blow out circuits with. Just for the Hell and the thrill of it. We'd compare principal referrals and brag about what bastards we were.
  You were on black tar. I was constantly drunk or stoned. Usually chucking some pills into the mix. A half brain dead friend would throw his antidepressants at me before driving to the head shop. Me grinning moronically behind the steering wheel. He would just chuckle.
  Told him I wasn't going to do drugs anymore. He got angry because he'd just bought a bag of shrooms. So, I jumped out from behind his couch at him and let out a terrible scream. He ended up crawling around on all fours thinking he was a cat. Much to the chagrin of those not in on the joke.
  I looked like I'd stuck a narwhale down my pants as we commenced kissing. My hand now just resting on your perspiring cunny. The other searching the globe of your breast. Spinning it to find a suitable honeymoon suite far from the watchful eyes of the US. Finding the location in an aureolar gland as my tongue circled your nipple; I planned out layovers, meals, and filched drink tickets.
  I laid a few flicks there then threw my head between your thighs. You, on your part, fondled me beneath my trousers. It must have felt like a lamppost hit by a baseball bat. You always acted the lady even when I mistreated you later on.
  At a certain point, the boy inevitably thinks he's a man. He files conquests into his bedposts, and shares sordid stories with his friends. He fancies himself a Lothario or Don Juan as soon as a few pubes start to come in and he has to shave.
  He thinks all women come at his command. His very touch. To his eyes the old timers are dried up and useless. Their days have passed, and now he reins supreme. And yet...
  We bring out the offspring too young. We look back longingly on what we (thought) we were meant to be. Constantly thinking just what if we had pursued the dreams that now haze and torment us, day in and day out.
  All history is written in quills dipped in booze and blood. The victors cheer their way into the unknown. Oblivion rats gnawing at their already half devoured faces. Slowly disappearing under the weight of their own triumph. A boneyard night under a starless sky.
  I think of my copy of the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden. Along with the bawdy, Victorian erotica mixed in with more serious literature (most of which I have yet to read) in the bookcase where I arrange all my books by height.
  I always beat off before I get in the shower because it will all just go down the drain anyway. Henry Miller sometimes pisses on whores in bathtubs. Bukowski usually just pines and covets. While Mailer's ex gets his goat. So he starts stabbing.
  Thompson had wives but always seemed asexual to me. But he still had a yearning for more than just unbridled intoxication. We are children built for and out of fornication but making love is a sore substitute for the other kind of love that sets the heart aflutter and, if we're lucky, tears it asunder.

Sleep Walk

Sleep Walk

Mark Coleman

  Somnophiliac with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Warhol's Sleep on simultaneous, continuous loops. A sort of cheval glass with an ocean of lust tilted between its frames. Out of that dark porthole comes barreling forth a lascivious madness. Eyes like pike congers boring into his in their unending, unendurable, sex crazed slumber.

  A pas seul around an apartment full of unwanted memories. A dreamer's dreams DOA, and the start of a misunderstood paraphilia. No cantharide was necessary as you slept with her as she slept. Her submission came in the form of a bumpering champagne flute.

  Call up the sex phone service and ask the woman on the other end to snore. She obliges but you imagine she rolls her eyes as she does so. Her lips must be vermilion, you think.  

  You imagine yourself poised over her alum tightened cunt. A sleep or cucumber mask on. Dozing off in a waiting room with a fashion magazine open to a photo of what most consider the feminine ideal.

  But you know better. It's all been photoshopped to Hell. The ideal is a Matryoshka doll living in its most Lilliputian hidden porcelain state. A crack or two down there where Kuahana blinks away his forty winks.

  A perennial sleep walk terminating at hot dog stands or strip clubs. A whiskey mac in front of you that you can't remember ordering. English faces all around the American sitting in confusion like a dumbfounded, angry, jet lagged IRA militant.

  From what you can understand you're in some pig 'n whistle off Cheyne Walk. The Shannon comes pouring into your veins as the Thames roars its way through a half aristocratic London. Monikered Lea you think of a woman you once knew who broke your heart, and promptly start a brawl.

  The blood on your face is warm and rejuvenating. You are now fully awake with the shards of someone's imperial pint at your feet.

  A puddle of piss on the floor at the Bristol. The sea lions greedily eat the shrimp tossed to them by little brats who begged and begged for cocktails with stiff, curling tails sticking out of them. Men in dresses walking up and down streets with their designer handbags made by small brown hands in sweat shops. The trolley cars pass them full of shocked, gawking mothers. Shielding their daughters' and sons' eyes.

  You look for Ferlinghetti at City Lights. He's not in. So you take a tour of Alcatraz instead. You think of Capone rotting away beneath a syphilitic mind. Yours has begun to rot away too. The women and girls swim back and forth with the peach fuzz or beardy bushes peaking out from their tight little asses. Perky tits and Crest whitened smiles. Like erotic dolphins too chipper for their own good.

  They unfasten their bikini tops in defiance of tan lines. Their bikini bottoms riding a bit low as though they were all New Jersey plumbers. They breath, eat, and sleep sex. 

  You can almost make them out through the spyglass down there on the nude beach that's supposed to be hidden by the cliffs that children fall off trying to catch a keyhole peep. They break their necks in the pursuit of knowledge as the buff darlings cavort with equally naked sailors on leave. After pension and free drinks they bat their eyelashes, and try their best to act virginal.

Contrition

Contrition

Mark Coleman

  Drinking rum with the captain, and I get to thinking of you. The high esteem that you held me in. Wanting so badly for me to let you in. Surprise myself. Hold it together with just the bottle of wine we shared at the little bistro that you loved so much. You thought that I was shaking because I was nervous. So many years knowing each other, and soon that knowledge would extend to the bedroom.   

  That manner of thinking was soon dispelled. I live in squalor with a well stocked liquor cabinet. A bit of coke residue on a mirrored table top that I'd one day smash in a drunken rage. Boxing my own ears, and crashing face first into a counter top.

  My hands are too slippery for this goddamn leather covered steering wheel. It's Denver and my hands aren't the only slippery thing. I make the machine obey only because you are in the passenger seat. You take my head in your hands after taking off my shades so I can't see. Giving that age old excuse that you want to see my eyes. After they adjust, I can just make out a bit of azure.

  Of course, I already knew you were beautiful. We grew up together. I thought one day that we'd grow old together. Night after night, passing out on you rather than fucking you. Never making love to you in a way that everyone knows you deserve. The envious pilfer scheming in the wings and arcades.

  I couldn't stand it when you slept on my arm. Could never get any sleep of my own simply because you were by my side. The warmth of your body commixing with the booze warmth on my breath. You couldn't stand it when I came home blotto waving my martyred hands around. Screaming or sussurrating depending on how many cigarettes I'd smoked that particular night.

  Saying things that I'd try to take back. Without success, of course. I might as well have pushed you into a radiator every time that I came home from the dive, hot and angry. Locking myself in my room. Alone with a bad acid trip. You beat on the door. I didn't answer. Just yelled half decipherable obscene gibberish at a phantom ship full of all my dead dreams. You thought that I was blaming you. I never corrected you. I didn't have the heart to rob you of your own nightmare. Though, I tried to comfort you when you woke up telling me that you dreamt of my funeral or just that I was dead on the curbside so many times when no shooting stars fell outside the window for you to wish upon.

  Maybe, we were too young. I don't know. All I know is that I can almost see you out there on the rooster tail from the tuna tower. An abboritional memory in the mind of a ghost or perhaps more appropriately a poltergeist. Throwing or dropping whatever I damn well please. Haunting whole households of happy families. A snake charmer conjuring the asp that killed Cleopatra out of his carefully woven basket. Shrunken heads on coat hangers grinning out at horrified spectators.

  The grade school teachers wouldn't let us use pens until we perfected our currsive. I have a pen now but can't find it so this chicken scrawl, chicken shit missive is in a lead-less, number 2 pencil that I keep having to sharpen. Writing feverishly beneath the light of a hurricane lamp in my cabin. The moon's beneath a cloud denying the late night sledding of children on a snow day.

  The lines are never perfect, now. They've become nations at war. Clashing over the territorial rights to a holy sight. Neither side is in the right. There was never any ascension there. The only things I've ever seen rise are balloons, Chinese lanterns, and bloodthirsty dictators.

  My heart's been in a meat grinder too long to ever be able to make sense of anything. So many years playing Cain to your Abel. Now the sex is never any good. I pick up whores sometimes when I'm away from my wife too long. I don't understand this seperation anxiety. I don't even like the woman that much.

 A splinter in my wrist, and a congealing trickle of blood down my face. A cantankerous longing twenty thousand leagues within me. You can't plumb that deep. Wondering whose lips yours are locked with as she goes down on me. Wishing that I could play the harmonica. Something doeful with all my soul in it that people would pay to hear. Just to have their eyes fill with tears. A flavored gas station dispenser condom on. Filling it up with ejaculate that hurts to come. 

    I'm aft looking back. Sometimes, forward only to see your face on the figurehead. This is a maiden voyage. I was the first to ever charter such a magnificent boat. They tell me as far as out here the people still sometimes suffer. The little childrens' wooden toy horses still break and they wail over the loss of their first possession. The women still leave their husbands for men with better muscle tone. 

    This could have been something else, altogether. It could have been more than reminiscences and driftwood. It is christened in the blood of fish that didn't want to die. The blood of you and me. Take my sea bag full of worthless shit. I never want to come here again. There are scales and entrails all over. I throw up into the sea from the stench and the gentleless rocking of the sea. I'd rather ride the rails to an antipode. 

  The crew laughs and hazes me calling what's half splattered on the bilge fish food in Kanaka. For some reason, I respond with a Mahalo and retire belowdecks with a clusterheadache, and a panic attack in the works. 

 Although this is my stop, I can't pull the cord because I'm twitching with nerves. Telling myself that everything will be alright after a few drinks. I have a chance to test this theory, albeit on a microscopic scale, in an enroute Port-A-Potty. I throw up on the shit stained floor. I send you this communique as I watch the vomit stain slowly warp the wood.

  On the boots that I still direct kicks with at the wall of bars where the keeps refuse me service. Looking out the portholes for a sign of Pele with the help of a landlubbing native in a lighthouse. Some of the ships we pass have rusted engine rooms. Steve Mcqueen's abandoned all of them to the "slopeheads." They run like mad dingos asking to be shoot with dusky rats waving their tails from their scarlet maws. I take a handful of Dramamine and just watch to see how it will all play out.

Birthing

Birthing

Mark Coleman

  Wrote extensively in my notebook. Then somehow the notebook went blank. Erased no doubt by some nascent, malevolent Djinn. Maybe some metaphysical conflagration took it with my heart. My eyes are always cold or hateful now. The primal therapy sessions brought out intrauterine trauma. The womb is a hostile place. The mother gives birth to death. Nigrescent conception on mattresses woven out of straw, lilac, and mortality.
  The quiff belongs to the hoopoe. Always has. Always will. And yet we put it on our own stupid, speedbag heads. Like peacocks hoping to attract a mate. Preferably those with mouths like a cichlid's. Love's a four letter word, it's true, but another four letter word usually takes its place. The word screams and moans and finally expires. And so we take to our beds and strike strange poses. Stretching and straining ourselves to Hell and back.
  Stove on about to light a final cigarette when someone knocks on the door, and you begrudgingly get up to open it. She stands there prettily wearing her tiara of rain. An umbrella clutched in her left hand as a baby might clutch at the maternal teat for a suckle of milk. Her Shelli Segal starry with heavenly dew.
  She smiles in a slightly uncertain and unfamiliar way. Mentions a smell of gas. The gas emanating from the baker's suicide machine. You ignore this, in the same way that you write off that new smile of her's. She does not seem impatient for an explanation nor particularly perturbed. You take her in your arms with a whispered "thank you." You said it so faintly that you doubt she even heard.
  She kisses you with her ruby lips. The lips you know so well no matter what shade they choose. You can still taste and feel them in her absence. The butterflies they leave all over your face. Fluttering and flaunting their delicate wings. Unlike the moths some women leave. Just dusting up your face until it's nothing but a coal miner's grey, morose mug. Her lips are slightly purpled beneath the lipstick due to the cold.
  You relish her as though it's your very first encounter. Under the skies of Hawaii. Rainbows arching their way off to the waterfalls to play with the nymphs. Promenades you walk with her stopping to stare at the anchored boats and far too blond surfers. A momentary kiss or a playful snub usually on her part. In the distance, other rendezvous and private soirées. Twilight coming on. The revelers beginning in earnest.
   Parasols up and down the beach. The sun beating down hot and steady on the sand between your sandalled toes. The vast expanse of ocean spread out before you with fish you could never dream of identifying or naming. Not to mention the flora and fauna of the surrounding thickets and forests full of the birds chirping away their unrequited love over the flute of Pan. But yours wasn't unrequited. You carried her into your suite as though you were newlyweds. Which in a since you were.
  A crude mudra dances along your whiskered cheek. Her tongue twirling about yours. Playing along a broken tooth or two. You feel the crevices of her own. Your tongue is slightly more persistent in a faux alpha sort of way. Her skin is as soft as a bap and as warm as an Indian Summer, now that she's sharing in your warmth and the fireplace's. The stove discreetly turned off as you move into the kitchen. Offer her a cup of coffee or tea. Just something gentlemanly you feel compelled to do. Despite her love of chamomile, she refuses.
  You think, my God, children really do become their parents. Whether it's in a domestic or carnal sense. And most of all in divorce and longing.
  The corps a corps begins in the familiar manner with a copious amount of necking. Libidinal and frustrated, you're afraid you'll come before your lips even touch the tiny arboretum of hair. But you don't. Your cock simply stiffens and pearls. You lick her thighs then her inner and outer labia. Parting her to tease the pillow soft, wet margins. Finally, you make your way to her clit which peaks out of its hood like a tiny toadstool.
  Her back cat arches as though she wants to brush the ceiling with her belly. The pleasure is somehow mixed with something ugly and damned. The softness is still there but a sheet of annealed glass reflects something doom laden in her romance novel stuffed mind. A great sadness overwhelms you. A flood of Khattam Shud begins to drown you just as another flood will soon fill her womb.
  You continue what she or you started, regardless. You can't remember which. All of a sudden, your mind is failing you. You're drawing blanks when only a matter of seconds before the drawings were as rich as a precocious child's coloring book. There is a fracturing and splintering here when the two of you should be united as one. In an instance, you realize that this is the last time you will make love.
  Being that this is a termination as opposed to the middle of something beautiful, a more apt word for this coarse union would be "fuck." Despite your eagerness, or perhaps because of it, it is still not something simply salacious. It is something more though that iridescence of finality would suggest otherwise.
  That face muffled by the looking glass of atrabilious emotion. A grimace gawp there soon to engulf you. Your tongue goes about its anfractuous way. Down her tunneling pleasure garden. A floral palace meant for a king. Apparently, you wear the crown for only one more night. Notwithstanding the little deaths that came before, which seem meaningless now. She takes your scepter in her hand though you know you've been demoted to some sort of prince or, worse yet, court jester.
  As you expected, after bringing moisture to her cunt, she's manouvering to take you into her mouth and down her throat. She breathes noisily and gags a bit on you as she swallows you to your untrimmed pubic hair. She acts as though she's quaffing the most exotic of beverages with her sonorous slurping. Perhaps similar to the ones in the oceanside Hawaiian kiosk like bars with silly umbrellas stuck in them.
  She doesn't neglect the glans and licks both sides of the shaft. Then you're completely acephalous again between those gorgeous lips. She eyes you inquisitively as she flicks her tongue over your urethra. You notice something else in those eyes. Almost parasitic and certainly foreign.
  With a shock, you know what is there. You've seen it in the mirror often enough. It's malice and melancholy. As though, the whole act was a small parting gift.
  She complains of tasting pre-come and ceases the whole operation. You hope hopelessly that this may be the reason for that look of her's. The most rudimentary of logic dispels this almost immediately. If such were the case then why had she, in what should have been the throes of passion during a well received cunnilingus on her person, such nastily scrawled, nonverbal messages clouding her otherwise angelic face. You remember your confusion at that smile of her's and realize that you should have let it register instead of simply brushing it away like a common house fly or, more accurately, a swarm of mosquitoes.
  She yowls tinnily as you enter her though you try to do it as gently as possible while peppering her with kisses. Without complaint that you can taste yourself. You imagine she can taste her own juices in your mouth. You find a bizarre comfort in knowing that you are assimilating yourself. You wonder if this will make you whole again. Maybe this is the key to immortality. If so, the same unending life would be granted her. To spend cradled in another's arms forever.
  Withdrawing with frequency now you rub your tip gingerly along her lips. Her lips, both of them, quiver with the shock of almost diminutive temblors. She arches her back for the second time in this ever darkening night. You glance at the ceiling to which she seems so intent on reaching then one last time look into her eyes as you once again enter her. The now placid pools drably spell out a single word: FIN.
  You recognize it due to your overindulgence in French cinema. The picture show's over even before you seed her. The theaters have been boarded up and the staff sent home or gone on dissatisfied into clerking. They look like the dead Drive-Ins that you see as you make your way through Barstow with a Big Boy thermometer still floating like some idol to consumerism in your head.
  The masses sole entertainment now are the tumbleweeds that rush down the dusty streets and bang noiselessly into the facades of the cinemas and their cross beamed windows. Casting X shadows in the noonday desert heat. Occasionally one will get caught in the spikes of a cactus. A lizard eying it with suspicion.
  All this will end in the sitting room of an abortion clinic. Anxiously waiting. The father of death as all fathers are. You are jealous and somewhat mortified by the fact that she's in there in stirrups with her petite pudendum exposed to another even if he is in a lab coat. You know this will be the case, as your morbid act comes to an end with simultaneous moans. The curtains falls. Her pupils and irises run together in remorse. She can already feel it kicking. You avert your gaze which now lies on her mouth as you pour into her, sleeveless. She won't want to keep it because she won't want to keep you. You're not sure you would either.