Le damnation de Faust
“Even as the swiftness of lightning ye have passed by the Beloved One, and have set your hearts on satanic fancies. Ye bow the knee before your vain imagining, and call it truth. Ye turn your eyes towards the thorn, and name it a flower. Not a pure breath have ye breathed, nor hath the breeze of detachment been wafted from the meadows of your hearts. Ye have cast to the winds the loving counsels of the Beloved and have effaced them utterly from the tablet of your hearts, and even as the beasts of the field, ye move and have your being within the pastures of desire and passion.”~ Baha’u’llah
The shirsh of her skirt against the stillness of the air around me makes me think. She wears a pinwheel skirt with ling pleats running the length of her shape. To my eyes, she looks like a pixie with creamy wings feathering against her bell jar curves. She is transversing the long iron arm of the bridge to where I am. Her essence makes me sweat inside of my own skin and I grow up through the stony ground of my own skin as if some wick through a waxy self. She strikes me with her eyes and we look into the menagerie of one another, as if we are heads of mistakenly separated eyeballs. I feel unpeeled, unveiled in her glances and I cannot help the electricity along the strands of sight between us. She is wearing a jade pendant on the curve of her breasts and I am lost to it. It bounces playfully with her gliding while my eyes do the same motion in the front of my skull. The sun glistens overhead, shining down against her nape and her pulse is wild in the cage of her throat. The lunch traffic jeers the pedestrians. Pigeons are stuttering along the sidewalk, through the wiry fences of table legs. There are ghosts here along the riverside streets, dissipating memories in the shop windows, wraiths of more ancient faces in and out the oversized letters there painted.
Love is the purgatory of muffins, the paradise of crisp bagels, and the hell of fresh crimped bread ends and croissants. The shop owners watch over the faces of the visitors, the merchants over one another in the satisfaction of their touchable hell. They peddle smiles in glass windows to the beautiful girls passing by and nods of gentlemanly gesture to the lads. After all, it is the responsibility of the merchant folk to make of heaven this effective reality. The men crane their necks along the canal faces smooth as stones sunning in the flood walls and jaded in the marbled perplexity of pigeon shite. The women turn their noses under the stench of fish screening from the water, posing in their perfumes with the restaurants and flowers. Love is the balloons jostling in vivacious colors over pallid women’s faces. Happy are the children when they grasp the strings and hellish when they want for it. Even their little minds suffer in the purgatory of second thoughts, I think to myself, as they run in hypnotic angles and zigzags along the sidewalk. I am certain as they grow, the steep mountains of idea will grow less unkind and yield to them as they shed the skin of faithlessness that holds them and the fear of motion that suffers in them.
The awnings have their shadowy lines with rods pushed through, expanding color over color, sunlight stabbing over sunlight. Love is nonetheless, a café where the wind is the open window to this myriad of a promiscuous scenes, causing my head to tilt in lover’s cant. I sit out front of, this cathartic café, writing love letters in a cryptolect to a woman who would no longer have me. I cannot enter inside the sanctuary of her penmanship and her blue lines now. She is no longer for the single-minded and her words are stricken from the jargon on the human heart. The scent of the bakery canoodles in my nostrils and my head foams in a hunger that effaces the thought of letting her go. This is where we met so very long ago now, in the feverish umbrellas of concrete buildings. There are brick scales along the underbelly and the alleyway. I can feel the swelter of breath on the back of neck. There is a freshness that I cannot place wherefrom on my lips pluming from the grottoes of wine glass and nectar carafe. Even if she had spoken, I would be caught outside the constructs of a sentence and the words would be frail mumbles of penance. I would have to shave a word from the back of my throat just to say anything. I am sure she is the kind of lover that would simply quote the conversations of ancient philosophers in a way only a dogmatic religion could accept. As for me, I would be left reserving her as final language in a fallacious pragma, caught in a soul sleep until judgment comes.
Her words hook me, although she hasn’t spoken, and I can feel the tines pushing without mercy into my ears. Her calves hang in her stockings as if they were bulging eyes of Koi snared in shrouds of fishnet. They wriggle when she strides against her ankles and are held in by her lean bones. There is rhythm from a cosmos in her hips when she turrets her eyes onto me. My head is helpless in their penetration. The pigeons flutter in slow motion at her heels as if release doves for the trinity followed by one more. From this constellation of nails in the park bench, my eyes are lopped off easily as dandelion heads. My sight is a dangling retrograde. My tongue is swollen as a winter doorframe. So my eyes fueled in the rage of glances and our exchange of mildly damp words, make her mine for the eternity of the next few hours that we manage to skim from the ordinary day. The clock lies with an insomniac ticking ever awake, a paraplegic hung to the wall of shadows turning away from the dying of the light.
She wears a linen blouse that is so sheer it shows her apple blossoms of breasts so perfect. I love her breasts as a worship of them, like the ancient Norsemen did of cave succubus. I could rub clay on them or off of them to make sculptures of them for human vanity to share in my repose. She always catches me peeking somehow, as if her extra sensory is alerted to my every movement. I feel her walking up against my skin. The blouse covers half of her thighs and I watch them turn over one from the other, these ginger spits gyrating through the coals of this metallic room. She knows how she kills me. A knock comes from the door. It is not a knock, more a shuffle with a knock on the end of it, as if something has fallen. I cannot think straight with this headache. I effuse in the caginess of my boxer briefs and billow toward the door. I should have known I would receive a package today. I could not think of anything except Melusine now.
“Artaud?” the postwoman asks in a manner befitting a tramp, not the proper sinner like my Melusine. She was striking for a postal service worker. We had spoken on occasion and I believe her to be sweet on me, although for the sake of anything holy I cannot place why. “Artaud?”, the last voice calls out again before I can hear the gruff shuffle of boots descending the steps and fading off to a blackness somewhere else.
She is still talking however I cannot hear a word spewing from her greasy mouth. I manage to brush her intrusion aside with prevaricated language that she accepts and dutifully yields.
With the door closed, my hand pulls the window drape back by its hip roll to peek at the postal woman’s arse. These convicted eyes stare a little too long imagining the sweeping of her hips as if golden reeds in the sensual wind of our motion. As they examine the canvas in mail carrier hips, Mel’s hands reach around my waist into my elastic waistband. My head bobs limp on the spinal cord as she drops the bell jar shapes of her hands into the band. I feel her breath warming against the blades on my shoulder. Her hands massage in slow, deliberate circles of kneading and my body becomes a coffyn easily molded. She has small baker hands that squeeze tightly. A moan simply falls out of my lips.
“You like her don’t you?” she aspirates in my ear. She lets her words linger a bit on my lobe. “We could have her. We could tie her with our shoelaces and you could watch me ravage her. We could pour delectable sauces over her bones and seductively lick them clean. See how much I love you? See how much I want you in me? “
I am rarely surprised by the words Melusine constructs sentences out of and her choice of them is always direct and bold. My body stiffens with sweet language as if it was some aphrodisiac and she knows she can play me this way. Just as I was thinking about turning around to defend myself, her nails scratch grooves into my thighs. I go numb. She has delicious red spades for fingertips and I am soft as loam in her hands. The box, think about the package. I am in a sort of love, what else could I do except subvert to her whims. I am as useless as any other man would be when confronted with such a devilish apparition. I allow her to swaddle me for the ones she can no longer touch. For the little digits she misses so very much and that I hold dearer than she knows. When she leaves, she flings my old button-down across the leather arm of the chair, and smiles saying she can no longer write me. She winks and says to keep my eyes on the mail slot in the door for her posts. I shiver in gooseflesh as I cannot wait to receive whatever she would send.
Weeks go past and the shakes take over, the grass grows too tall to sift through the mower and the flower heads are held fastened to the ground by frail green strings. The trees are coughing in the lateness of the season, spitting up orange and red on themselves. There are a few bugs left marching in the tenements of grassy beds as the hoariness begins to stubble out. This skin feels rubbery these days with splotches and purpleness in ways inhumane to the atomic body. Nonetheless, I can only watch the spiders from my glass, licking their lips and packing for warmer days. My skin is cinder-like and a scoriae of infections and I fear I will not receive her words in time. My legs wander off to the terrace in varying degrees of purging with the weight of this bag of bones on my back pushing my eyes downward. I scorn the bumblebees in the framed wall, the mulatto trashman with his mild and silent wave, their faces my bent eyes will no longer allow me to see. This world is breathing just outside the glass. If there is a place any further away for it to retreat, I beg it please don’t go.
Her first letter arrives by post today. I must have some defiantly mad, wandering eye as my eyes seem sewn closed despite the midafternoon sun warming my face. They rearrange things into view with some effort. It is almost as if her eyes were clipped to mine, her white paper an animal lead and me a weakly trained oaf. I want that letter, I need that letter. These letters are unsolved pieces of a broken heart. They are tiny galaxies forming inside of me where a woman should be. I feel as if I am creating a star in me, a burning growing hotter and trying to keep it in control. What will it say? I wonder aloud. The Mozart drowns out the sound so if I speak anything at all, even he will not hear them. His allegro dances louder into this romantic fool’s head. I am moronic for these notions and I fully accept the fate lain before me, however they exist nonetheless. I should call them ‘romonic’ instead. It suits. I never really had a successful love. I only know the ones that either leave or cheat in the blindness of wandering to someone else’s lover, so the simple notion of a woman loving me for what she knows is searing, explosive. Why do the hearts that cleave from the chest ramble in haste at the urging of grace to find new green? I’ve had the greatest sex of my entire existence with one lover, the greatest arguments with another and the most arrogant ignoring with yet another. True, there are times I hold them and caress them, same as they have with the reflection of me. I have not always been so awkward as a lover as I have been penitent and unjust as a relation.
She writes this letter in her old language. I open it and it becomes illegible to me. This is as foreign as the books she carried that day. There are little characters that I can recognize as Asian however that is the extent of my linguistic skills. Why would you send me a letter in Chinese? When we spoke, she knew I didn’t speak any language but English and Spanglish. She sent me this thing knowing full well that I cannot read it. That shoots an ache into me making warble of my equilibrium. I have waited for months for any word from her, any contact and this is what I receive. You’re slicing me into little pieces my bunny. I have to know what they mean. There was a softcover book as well as a small candle. The book is Some Prefer Nettles as it is captioned in English, although written entirely in Japanese. It is titled Tade ku mushi. It is also in a language unbeknownst to me. I scour the internet for a translation and after two weeks of gluing scraps of printed words from a translation website, I give up and buy the damned English version. Turns out it was about a hairy tit. The crooked language fetters my eyes and my hands tremble in the idleness of the keystrokes. My shadows will remain captive in this motionless place as long as it pleases the justice. Ah, this is madness!
I smile at the cover of the envelope of this new post, making mental love like liquid fire and glide into the carpeted den through the foyer. There is a hunger of questions in me and senseless answers in this letter of how I should live and directions to follow on the slowness of dying. This white paper casket is filled with my bones and the ink smudges on organs. I know the impatient vein that yearns to be plicked is one postage stamp away. I live in the present, the slow motion moments of when starving lovers must eventually meet. There is not much of an appetite anymore and the cans of beans mock my eyes from their cylindrical spaces in the cupboard. The cupboards are dusty in their wooden skeletons from the lack of food no doubt. The windows are darker now with reflections of bony face, in a veil of jaundice skin and eyes sunken to egg crates or rings that have suddenly lost their jewels. Were anyone to see me, to surely read the lines of distraction across this face, there is no doubt they would no longer see the man in the seediness before them. The once round orbs that flanked the once lean and fastidious nose are now dry wheat sacks, with the nose no longer sprayed in the sanctity of acknowledging fragrance. The vibrant flowers outside tapping against the window are husks of straw nowadays and the grass seems to no longer sing in the grievous of early winter wind. They who filled wild in the spring green leotards, leaping past trees in their young appetites are now only held alive live to remain patient for the secret translations of next season’s intimate heart. My hands try to remember how to treat the envelope as they massage the corners that have been dog-eared through its travel overseas. The hands always feel the solace before the severed head.
I could never throw the books away, or any of her gifts. I could however I couldn’t due to the ache in my ropy knuckles, the raw bones washed smooth as stones in this affliction. That is what someone who is separating from the very self says. There they lay, strewn as fat as irrecoverable cats along the rim of the wooden dining room table, and there along the wooden masked mantel over the fireplace. In hast a few are shuffled over the toilet tank that can be read in the drunken stupor of bowel movements. If this conjoined memory of mine can manage a solitary moment it is with her there in the stall, in our penumbra and aloneness. My eyes fantasize about our nakedness, and writhe like those Koi, now in orange towels by the tub, by the shimmer of scaly candlelight. The wicks are low lit as ignis fatuus over this foggy sensation of thick-headedness in my skull. These pallid hassocks for fingers pour two crystals of red wine and float rose petals as a votive in the bell jar on the nightstand. Sandalwood bath salts arouse the air over the gaping wounds of pipes and carpentry that is this house. There is a palmetto lonely and slipping further down into the porcelain surrounding of the tub. Its legs sprawl in fumble, resume the scratch toward the crest and the white wave of slipperiness washes it back down even further. The dumb thing shuffles off to the side to try another slope of equal grading and there is a laughter that chides from my mouth. A giggle hangs like dry spittle on my lips then as the bug careens down the side of the tub, it falls out over the tongue and spills onto the world kicking and screaming.
Her quiet shape leads me to autumn circles of the pond, to the leaves frozen in late season and with drifts of bloated hands she guides me closer to the edge. There comes a glow up through the murky water, which gives way to the dark shape rising beneath. Inside the bare cupboards, a mousy infestation weaves its tiny red eyes in and out of the shadowy waves. It rolls its eyes in the dark like a pixie wandering in a white paper bell jar. The counter holds up my shape so that the mouse can see through me, the real me and forgive me. I suppose I owe both of us that much.
She creates a craving in me, and she says has to have me from the inside, completely and wholly without ever having speaking a tangible word. My pulse is a heartbeat away from the ice forming on the radiator so I read a letter to keep my pulse warm. Letters from her are more than a kiss along the seal, they are mingles in my soul. Another giggle extorts in the remembrance of our silent orchestras in the dark, our stolen maneuvers from the shadows where we lay separate by lambent graves. Each wet seal of the stamp is a tangible, speaking purse of lips between the absences of lovers. I miss her already. A true love letter from a woman is best written to the man she is betraying. My fingers would come to know that the peel of a layered time slowly burns back to the ashy rinds of the human lust from whence it comes.
Her breath rushes the mouth of the envelope in gulps of freshwater over me and I am cooled in the ebb of thoughts my eyes have yet to share. Choking in the washing, my lungs are set afire in the sighs that escape the gluey lips. The ears of the soul hear her laughter lingering on the caramel flavored straw we still share at the café. I stare for long instances about the envelope, measuring the wrinkles, the stamp and the postmark with acuity. Will she reveal herself anymore here? A piece of her has fallen away from her mouth and into a post, traversing the wide girth of ocean between us. In this hour of the wolf, we sit. My eyes gaze through their jaded lens and wonder when our electric bodies will at last rest. Mel, in her dress dripping from her, like melted ice cream, her licorice red lips and her poured molasses eyes, sits across the keyboard, with her legs folded from the hip. Neither of us speaks aloud. The air condensates on her glass as she sips her tea in small breaths. She exists I think with a sigh. Our eyes may have plea-bargained from across the centuries, however in this moment, we meet. It is as if through the angular momentum of our past insoluble lives, we have formed the center of a star in this very white hot moment of now.
I do not know how I arrived to know her, yet I do. My imagination suggests that we met on a Caribbean Oceanside, with her silvery breasts teasing me in Europa’s fierce moonlight. She sees the shadow of Zeus, looking out over the sand. Her hips lure him, swaying as white as fertile cows in fields of India. There is a bungalow, with cross-hatching shade and the walls are aching with insomnia. There stretches between the sea and an armament of the stars a plaster shape of two lovers. The form changes to the softness of a felt black bull and comes silently to her feet.
My lover Coniglio, I feel exhausted in my days and feel pinches of
a knife in my midnight underbelly. So much that I can no longer
talk to the people I pass or work with. I long to be touched just once
more by your hand. Maybe in some strange existence, you will
have sent me a postage with your fingers inside? I would exchange
these toes for your kindness. You must come back, come back.
I swear to be kinder if you would only answer quickly. My time
Is short and I cannot remain past evening.
Ever, Melusine
A sigh drips heavy as syrup. A cock leaps as if a straining tiger through the paper cage. The brevity in her words is irrelevant. It is a phantasmal anagram that is our relationship. Standing along this wide precipice of a gaping chasm is the panting breath of a lover quelling up into flared nostrils. These eyes read the puzzles aloud, in private, in glints, over toast and coffee, and with the thrush of the remaining blood coursing in me. What little time that is left is going to be spent, prefers to be spent in the hollow crux of her letters. The shut-down had started and according to the doctors who verily prod at my bones, there is nothing personified of the bitch that is hope. She has run her course, her eyes sunken in shame of not answering my prayers and in defeat she is striding the back of a magnificent bull to another life. What is left here, in clothes turned inside out, burying blades in the ground, blade facing up is a mad, penitent lover. Being no longer able to defend myself, I can only succumb to the sandalwood scents and the rose hips in the glade of the tub. What else is there in the curve of dying arms?
My sweetest Lute Mel, come lie in the curve of me and rest now. Rest in
what touches I have left. Whisper to my ears that I am yours, bite my
cheek because so I know you are near me. I feel you sucking on the red
gumballs that are my eyes these days and rolling them back into my own mouth
so I know our lips have struck. I fear that our time is thinning and when
your husband returns, I will sell the bulk of my clothes, to rid my senses
of you. The post is readying your package with Styrofoam and my fingers. My
last touches must be of your cheeks and your thighs.
Je Taime, Artaud
There is very little red in my cheeks these days and I wonder if the blood in my fingertips will remember me when they are with her. I am faint as a wolf whimper in the distant pine and as opaque as concrete mortar. My insides are turning to outside. When I puke, I swear they are rhinestones along the porcelain rim of a great chalice. In silence, my eyes see her figure in the fresco with Saints at the feast of Christ. The plaster in the apartment is older than yellow now, much too old for this sickness. It bulges in wet surges around the cornice over the windows. The paint is no longer the tone of wasabi green first strained in the paint buckets. There no need to tend the place where there has not been a visitor in months. The end of a writer is slow as rot in the skull, as rusty as nails wedges between toes. The swirls of room light become faded and wispy thin, as me I imagine myself looking. All my head can think of is her body. All these eyes can see is our moments in a bungalow, burning low but still lit somehow. Melusine, my Eucharist, I say, my most precious. These trembles are worsening however I can still tell the difference between the morphine and the memory can’t I?
The chinky flap on the post pocket door makes a familiar jingle. This toad of a heart inside my chest leaps into the stillness of the apartment air. I think of a night of gathering fruit in woven baskets or frayed hemlines of her flowing linen dress. She comes to the doorway, in the shape of O, blindfolded and breathing heavily. Her nostrils flare and her breasts red as roses on thorn bushes. She comes to meet me but we do not touch one another. We force ourselves not to. We are two combustible ends in a room of fuel and electricity. Instead, we encircle the other, eyes in a lock and I retrace her toes with ghosts of fingers. I allow her hands to take a switchblade, a pig gutter, to my buttons and seams. They come a part in loose scrolls of what used to be clothing. My head spins in a dizziness that no other lover has bound to my thoughts before or since our meeting. We are two naked apparitions, her in her linen veil and me in my wretched skin.
Her fingers make motion to plick the mushroom head of my penis, stirring an ache in my lap. Still, we did not touch. My eyes chase the shadowy curvature of her ears, to her eyes, down the pouting points of her mouth. These eyes remain locked behind the visions as if they were convicted cowards, never moving. They watch the crème wash over her shoulders and linger in a spider web in taut spots of a lover. This excites me. Fingers tremble as her back arches in the slight chill of the room, crème against warm skin. These finger bones play her back like fingerless white keys along a piano. I ease up behind her, a raging cock probing in the wet air between her thighs. Our skins are far too thin to touch. I could explode in the intoxicating cognac of her spilling the wetness from the rim of her onto my cock. The closer we become, the tauter the strings become, pushing against our opaque forms. I reach for an apple in the basket on the nightstand. It’s as if the apple has the only color in the room and glistens brilliant as street lamps in the Rosse Buurt. Her lips pull around the apple in a trained elasticity and I moan haplessly. She takes the time to playfully tease the flushes of skin along the core of the apple for my pleasure. There is a crack showing blackness in the guts of the wall. The white shell of this hollow room is frail as skin and I feel something in my bones ache. This plaster between us cannot last.
I hold my distance from the envelope, if for no other reason than for the chasteness of the moon, slowly drawing its drapes in the bungalow night. I smell her sweet neck and know I have my nose against her. Somehow, someplace she holds my nostrils close to various places on her body. I melt in the aroma of her over me as if her letters are candles of her hips and thighs. She sits on my keyboard again with her legs wide as rose petals. She touches herself, head hanging back in the blackberry strands of her hair. Her jaded eyes blossom open to me, her licorice lips twist words I cannot make out. She moves her mouth in her old language so that I cannot hear her. My eyes steal glimpses of her nakedness and I move between her thighs to meet her. There is a bunny in a wolf’s mask atop the desk, in tenements for heels that rise high as her arse. Her scent reaches up to meet me. This is a lover’s life, a silent seduction in the chambers of our separating worlds.
At first, our words rouse shapes into letters without the word love, and although neither of us will ever express the sentiment, I find lucidity in the thinking that we are madly so. We never penetrate the veil surrounding her marriage and the frailty of my condition. We have become content in the letters we write between us, the bits we package and receive via postman. We exchange letters with every ounce measured, every gram of limb examined and quantified. This is the penultimate cremation of a lover’s self, to give freely and wholly with no remorse. There is no sadness or reprieve in the taking of one’s flesh and presenting it as canang sari to the gods for which we thank for generosity and grace. I give my hands freely in a basket with white rice and colorful palm leaves. I no longer need them if I am to be without her to touch.
She responds to my letter, with a bamboo tray woven and including the fingers from her right hand with her toes. The tray is strewn with Frangipani flowers in brilliant yellow petals, arranged with five orbed, berry-like toes. The digits look plastic and purple although alive with color back dropped by the clipped buds. My eyes quell up with this gesture from my lover. The fragrance of the Frangipani plumes silently in the room and lasts for days. I smile and think I will make a soap of the digits so I can bathe in her while I can.
Some days, in the pangs of hour-less nights, I swear I can feel the tender rush of thighs or the moistness of her vagina shivering over me. There are phantom limbs where she sits as if never stolen by grace, cupping the ripeness of her apple breasts, despite my whole hand unrecognizable. I know that it is a farce to think we can go on, because there are only hot flashes now digitizing at the ends of my white bandages. I can feel the lukewarm palms that cup her breasts, her nipples twisting between their tips. I can form the relative shape of the cupping motion, with my eyes closed, except on the one hand. I touch myself in the lonely corners of the apartment and I keep my eyes closed in the shadowy fantasy that becomes her innervate body.
My sweet, my satanic fancy, I can only think of us making masterful
and bloody love. My drizzle is your ganache. My red
lap seeps in our loving pulse. I bleed on you my lover. I drizzle
these tainted fingers and tuck them between my thighs. Rock me
to sleep my my silent tiger, whoosh your tail against my pierced
labia and tuck yourself into me. There is where we were born,
millenniums ago and there is where you will find the lensatic
needle to find me. No matter how the reflection alters the mirror,
no matter how queer the limbs attached will be, ours is fever red.
With blazing breath, Melusine
She knows how to love me and I fall to the sheets exhausted with every inch of fever she possesses. She is an outline on Monday that blows every word out in a fire ball across my keyboard come Saturday. She is vain imagining, a stalk tall as the midafternoon I know as truth. I stutter rampant into the mirror at a ferocious stranger staring back out to the room, alabaster white in nakedness with a smirk across his lips. His glint side to side like minnows caught in a black fishbowl. I roar out loud in laughter. My eyes drill diamond spikes into the glass and I can no longer see with acuity. I feel her straddling thighs smooth as eggshell. She climbs on to all fours atop my writing table. Her hair is draped over her shoulders and she tosses it about as if fine linen makings of a scarf. The wispy tips of her hair rush the air as if a thousand hummingbirds onto my exposed nipples. I write free of clothes these days, free of distraction, free of consciousness. Her face comes through the pearl drops of rain ticking against the window now. The pavement is a slick black tongue lapping in the wooden hollow mouth of window. My eyes watch the rain bounce to and away from the glass like crickets in a jar. The days fall to a hushing darkness and sleep comes in waves of stale drugs.
There is a Pan Yuliang nude that moans and moves when there is no one there, and is tacked as ingrates to the wall for inspiration. They tangle in the water of writhing arms, not being able to make out the legs from the torsos. These desperate, tired eyes watch their movements as they bathe along the warm summer stones with the waterfall weeping as the willow. I know that the nothing that is there is the same as it always has been. Still I see the full figure of her shadow on the wall behind them. She whispers baby as only she can, stretching arm over arm to the Jasques Brel vinyl I have spinning on the record box. Her eyes explode with the momentum and a passion and my cock is a phantom gorging her. I watch the tilt of her arse sway like waves breaking away and toward me. I can smell the jempiring on her skin and the must from her wetness. She is ripe with a distress that has to be taken. The letters are less frequent and still no one knocks for me. My door stands still and quiet as a casket hinged upright. The wooden fringe and the copper lock keep me.
She never mentions her husband in her letters and I never ask. It was how we have existed all these months. I awake to her ataxic trembles in my skin. My eyes oscillate to keep rhythm. We exist, her and I, two rights in the space time continuum, to bend the stars with the natural affinity of us. She rearranges her figure atop my table again, where she sits directly in front of me. I stammer over the chair that plays tricks and moves when I am not paying it mind. All I see is her face, round and pale as a moon. She sits with her legs crossed then slowly she pushes them open with her hands, resting her feet into the arms of the chair I steady myself into. I reach out with a phantom touch to place my fingertip on her nose ever so gently yet land against her high cheek. She locks me in and I allow her hips to display at my eye level and I notice a pearl of a piercing that hanging from her clitoris. I survey her every chance I can, being a man hapless and blurry with inoculating love. I measure the circumference of her breasts, the length of her thigh muscle and count the freckles along her clavicle.
After what seems like years, I have to know that she exists as we never leave the room and the flowers are now wilted. What is a mind that plays games and dances in the broad arm waves of a monkey? She has clear and sure knowledge that I am a tangible bag of bones, yet I am ever skeptical of her reappearing to me. I am growing frail, my eyes near cataract now and my legs fail to do their work beneath me. I spend my days restless as a lover to her, knowing that surely I am of little satisfaction to a woman fine as she is. I may have been good looking enough in my youth however the seclusion of my writing combined with the onset of this obsession, left me vulnerable and acting mostly as an oddball. I wouldn’t fit in the local bar circles, meaning her friends who did on rare occasion want to meet me, would think of me as an invalid source of man. They would certainly mock me as the loner with the pint and I suppose they would never consider whether I have a functional penis or not. I am off limits to the debauchery of bar wenches now, answering to the beckoning of Melusine.
The last letter comes today. My veins boil in gasoline and my body aches. My legs are strained and thinner than when the first letter arrived so long ago. I feel the surge again in my lungs and the breath growls in my head. She will bound right up as a fairy does in the moats of Scotland, introduce herself and we will be inseparable thereafter. There are no more digits to give and perhaps she knows I have nothing more to give. Perhaps in that fresh idea, she has taken a new lover to exchange parts with. No, no, no… of course not, she has sent me this letter hasn’t she? I am her tiger and she remains my congilio. That’s how a system of sound works, she would say. I have given everything to love her. My hands have been cold without the warming kindles at the nub. My face smells of camphor and bandage gauze tinged of almond extract that is hardly noticeable. My pot belly and flabbiness has eroded to bony ends of strawberry bursts. I see lesions on my face and neck and wash them daily with soap from her hands.
We can offer the other no better truth than a valid excuse as to why we choose to interrupt our infinity to cross quantum affinity in this way. I was flattered in the earliest stages after our bungalow days and hold myself dumbfounded with fever in these latest. She tells me she has become arranged with another man. She is relocating to the southern parts of Spain. I did not recall if I knew the city. She writes that she ever loves me and requires a last piece of me to hold in the hallowed bell jar of our romance. I didn’t ask anything more, I didn’t need to. My time is phosphate and this woman inflames my bones like cheap matchsticks. Our letters have become the only solid form of our accretion we will now ever see to fruition. I know what I must do so that she can be free and love him as she has loved me. I cannot allow her to suffer this way. What part of me is what you seek my lover? What part shall I remove in order for your ears to hear what I speak here now? My head is spinning in the green of the wall now and my temples thrum in a rush that is new to me. I see now the pallid mask in the lavatory glass is righteous in the knowing that it can fulfill the last wishes with the cosmic rights to a body quickly turning away. I pen my last letter, curving the letters over in the air. I believe the night wind is on me as I see a faint light on the wick. My eyes are dimming and my heart settling, calming to hands making ready the postal.
I miss you my beautiful lute. I miss your taste that I never have tasted. I
miss your toes that I am guilty of rolling on my tongue until they became
too rotted to pleasure my taste buds with. The ripeness of jasmine
was replaced with the decay and eventuality of intemperance. I am sending
you my heart so that can feel the rightful way a lover should.
Consider this gift the last marvels of explosion this cosmos could muster and
in its decay the reminder that I will not be much for much longer. I am
losing strength in the altitude of not having felt you or quenched my flame
in you in far too long. You have my fingers as wicks and so too these eyes
as windows to the stars, so we may forever make love beneath the same brilliance.
Fading into You, Artaud.
As I lick the salmon tipped flap of the envelope, I bow my head in the privacy of my own body. I imagine reproducing every oral sensation that her and I have managed all this time. There has been no one come to my door to check health, life or postal of me. I will leave the jar of this place and fetch the courier come tomorrow morning. I am weary now and my dreams fuck in screams of French jazz and slow gyrating trumpets of Miles Davis. She did not know me in her beginning, nor I her; however as abandonment reminds me, we know one another through submission. There are no greater questions than when death muffles the pinging echo of a last pulse in an ear. There are no white lilies marking the gravestone of this withered shape. Eyeless and without fingers, I am lain quietly to rest in the chasm between her thighs. She has become midnight, the hour of the wolf, with her low lamp into the bogs of my fatality.
In that one room bungalow, the moon so fierce, where we had made bars out of coconut trees, we will meet one last time in our human sleep. She in her deathly corset will remove a gutting knife from her pocket and slide the blade skyward to expose the silver. Her breasts will tease in virgin glints and I will rouse in her salty air. Do this in remembrance of me. This is my blood, my covenant to thee. My eyes are too blurry to rearrange shapes however I can still hear the piano speaking in Franz List’s Feaux Follets. This is Le Damnation de Faust. We will never need language so it is quieter now. She moves into my space, never touching my skin, as is the way we always make our love. There are flicks of fireflies ebbing along the hillside outside the window. The walls are moving in a warble with time, the clock tells me so. The hinges of the windows are gone now I think and the stars shine bright for me. They remind me of piano keys and her atop of the glossy rain slicked mantel. I can make out the sea almond trees shirshing again and shimmering like roof tile as if we were just meeting. There is a rustle in the brush from the open arches of the window at the foot of the canopied bed. I see a shape forming from the black hill and think of Europa. I see her dazzling ribbons of hair cursing in the wind like cattails and I know my lover comes to me. I see her sandy hips against the plaster of this fading bungalow. I see the armament of the arms forming over the horned points of the stars. I am erect.
There comes a plick against my wrists and I swat the mosquitos away. I smell the tainted carbon of lover’s blood. A chill dances along the keys of my spine and I shiver in the knowing the water has risen to meet me. I open my shuttering eyes one last time to see her waist in front of me, lying on her back, with legs opening as a lotus flower. She calls me to rut her like a swan to seed her as a bull, to take what is rightfully mine. I can sense her in the air as tangible as the day she struck my leg with her dress hemming. It was the only time we would touch, the only crescent of our voice, the only blow to our rusting trumpet. We would never touch again in the light or the darkness, in the realm of make-believe nor in the constructs of human fucking.
I lie bleeding out in the sweaty sheets we never made love in. I hear the slowing, fine thumps of a metronome, giving release to the chasm from which it came. I freely lower my head, with tongue speaking in her mystical language. Liszt’s piano drowns in the thick waters of the brook. In her shade-blackened vagina, I long to tuck my last hand in between her lips, feeling for the heads of the Koi. One reaches its head up to meet me and I cup my hands around its apple curves and surge into the falls rushing between her. I can taste her now as if she herself is a bakery. I am wet from her; succumbed to the compass points she has anagrammed in the stars for me. The searching begins again with the dying of one rhythm and the release of the other. In the last untwining of me along the canopied bed, witnessed by that godawful paraplegic clock, I listen to the letters of her envelopes falling like rain along the tin roofs over the bungalow. I know that they need no answer. I know the best of a woman’s love letters are written to the man she so purely betrays. There comes a knock at the door.
Palabra.
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