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.

Narcissus Reduced

You don't know sweet woman
That you have humbled me;
See when I thought I'se struttin'
I was really drunk and stumbling.

Yet you lie next to me
With velvet, vermilion skin.
How could you not see a fool
When my disguise is so thin?

You are pleasure beyond indulgence,
And glory beyond wealth
To demand the love of a man
Who loved only himself.

You don't know sweet woman
That you have humbled me
And when I close my eyes
You are all that I can see.

Prose

for Rael

I would like to meet people who lack depravity and gravity. This crowd is so wickedly static. And I will surely burn in the heap with the rest, unless I go alone. But this girl unfurls her curls, like chains, and my cries of elated disdain resound as I'm bound down. She laughs at me, as I reel in knotted steel. Tension spreads across us like the dissemination of her redwine tears across the wet cement. We hide knelt beneath a street light. The moon beams white indignation upon us. We cannot see the stars. Tar catches at her heels as she leaves me in the rain, to breathe.
And she will die in Estonia.
And I will die in America.