Prose Pt 1

At least she keeps the place clean. And looks so pretty preening herself, for me. And sometimes even by artificial means that go wasted on me. My taste was never so pervasive. I tell her I need that unbearable reality. That beauty requires no paraphernalia. And I've told her before, but I still suspect she doesn't believe me.

She looks down on me from her stool scowling as she brushes her perfect hair. She is still angry that I set her, very expensive, hair extensions on fire and then tried to flush them down the toilet.

She says, "You ought to think more of how people define you. You reject the most natural vanities out of some absurd spite. Yours is the greater depravity in nonsense...and pretense against any obvious social cadence. And from you, who scowls presumption with the gumption of pure justice."

I tell her the make-up that she just finished painting on makes her look like a whore--then we make love. Later, as she rest her head in my lap, she plays with my hair and chest and pressed her other hand under my thighs. The while she's been staring intently at me, cooing intamately something I don't bother to hear.

Looking at the oak tree out the window as the sun is setting I speak, "I might not go to that party tonight. No. I am in the mood for wine and the brooding seclusion of the waterfront."

"But everyone is going to be there!" She persisted.

Object of Desire

I noticed her because her feet never touched the floor.

Airs of a pose in motion.

Yellow flames engulf her face.

Eyes caress me with the soft blueness of knife-steel.

I grab her in my arms, as the winners greedy fingers snatch dollars up from the pooltable.

She is mine now.

Is she worth keeping?

The Wayfarer in the Town

I had been on my way nigh on three weeks when I arrived at a loud little town. The buildings all tall, with pointed ceilings and the ways all wide and clear. The men must have all been off at work because only women peopled the streets. As I gawked I was shocked to notice that all the women who passed seemed to be identical people, ad nauseum. Each face was painted to feign sameness with the rest. Each women’s hair all tied and died alike and it was really very boring there. I was all set to leave with out even getting supplies or even a shower. I felt deceived; this hamlet was to be my momentary reprieve from hermitage.

Just before I left the gates to the long way, I saw a woman whose face shone among all the others. With a kind of natural, revolutionary beauty that was entirely unembellished. Her frailty was severe to the point of vanity. She was clearly the model by which the other women had mutilated their faces and bodies to emulate. She created by merely existing: beauty’s own pretense.

I tried to tell her why she was different, what that meant, “Heaven-sent to show such heights exist.” But she seemed perplexed and eventually vexed, as I spoke faster to coax some understanding. She finally broke my flow saying,

“Why the hell are you so damn dirty?”

Babes in the Woods

He strides in airs of vague defiance.
She looks on in complete silence.
The lovers travel far
with dreams of walking among the giants.

They're in the wood, between the ways,
where shadows lie broken by sunrays
and the breeze wispers of the decadence
of fire-light nights and sleepy days.

They walk as if they dwarf the trees
and the sun shines jealously on the spot.
For they seem to him a brighter hot
even still the night may freeze.

She shivers in the darkening cold
and, stealing a bit of warmth, takes hold
of his arm
until she is wholly consoled.

The night gets darker and the way, stranger.
Still on their path they firmly stay.
They did not know the well worn way
may lead them headlong into danger.

But that they feared more than all other
things that cut and those that smother.
That they feared worse in the wild wood:
none's more than their fear of one another.

Bad

When I was younger I was myown beloved.
But I was bad to myself.

So I loved my friends and I loved their friends
but I was bad to them.

So I went to live in hermitage
but everything I didn't kill went
away.

And there was nothing.
It was good.