So that was it. Bottom line, he had the most delicious neck. Well worth putting my own on the chopping block for. You see, for all the reflection, calculation and contemplation, the feelings of hollowness, of being tethered, it all came down to the exquisite mysteries, the delirium engendered by that special neck. I am somewhat of a connoisseur. Don’t tell me you still don’t get it about the neck ? Well Terry’s, for example, is thin and prehensile. Like a vulture’s, crooking his head forward of his ramrod straight shoulders. As he fixes you with his beady eye, disconcertingly staring up into you from below. Or perennially half-turned in the front seat of the car, cleaving me and Damon apart in the back (and craftily scoping Lawrence peripherally). A vulture’s neck is devoid of feathers, since it is habitually projected deep into the bloodied carrion and the bird would be unable to preen itself clean. Being far too rapaciously acquisitive to co-operate with others of its species, thus bare stays the neck. See, I told you the neck was a sound diagnostic resource to the inner workings. Everything passes along it between the brain and the central nervous system. You’d have no beautiful musical strings, were the neck not between the tuning pegs and the body for you to finger. Oh and Damon’s ? Damon’s was like a tree stump, (how had I overlooked that at the outset ?) and ultimately, I was not a hugger of trees. Terry was though. He always cupped his hand round a man’s pycnic neck, rather than round the shoulders. Ever poised to wring it if required.
It's not merely that the neck is the decorative stem of the egg cup that cradles our brains. The end of the trunk road that signposts north to all facial expressway emotions. The neck is a picturesque landscape worth navigating in its own right. Damon’s neck however, was monotonous. Relentlessly undifferentiated. Invulnerable. A stout oaken beam. Without the gnarled cortex of bark. No salient of any Adam’s Apple, as if he’d swallowed apple, serpent and all, and smoothly adsorbed them into his plasma. Yet, he made the adam’s apples of other, lesser men, dance up and down as if he were a fairground try your strength stall owner, but no one ever got close to ringing his bell. Nor did he display evidence of tension- loaded carotid arteries to the side, again uniformly plastered into the all-over integument. Nothing and everything to get hold of. My hands would feed themselves up the broad holds without pause. Merely to grasp his face for kissing, or as he hoisted me up, in order to fold me appropriately to his elevation.
The scraggy scruffs of the youths here also fail to inspire, or ignite me as they ought. No matter what the physique, their fuzzy necks appear scrawny. The boney protuberance at the crest of their spine, seemingly hitching up their precocious bodies to their outsized predatory crowns. Neck as clothes hanger, in a permanent coat-check awaiting collection by matching ticket. They all cast their eyes down, rather than look you in the eye. It’s as if their stalks can’t bear the contemptuous weight. Back home either they cup their heads in a hood, or prop up their stance by ramming hands into trouser pockets as ballast. Here on the beach, bedecked only in shorts and trunks, they are all at sea. The skin only scrubbed by the clumps of downy hair, that breaks up any possible diaphanous vista stretching across their matchstick vertebrae. The ski runs are too brittle for me to trial an excursion. There is nothing giddily vertiginous to elicit my ruttishness. The only black runs present, are perspiration trails.
Homegrown foreplay on these foreign shores bypasses the neck entirely. Not for the want of trying. I turn my back on the youth du jour and run my hands into my hair, gathering it up for them. An open signpost to the top of my spine, but they presume it’s an invitation to reach around for my breasts. It’s so dispiriting. The neck is a de-erogenised zone. An off-the-beaten-track sort of site, bereft of interest or benefit. Outmoded by the one-stop-shopping at the cornucopia of the abdomen’s CBD. Crested by tit and fanny one-stop shops. The boys make straight for these pick and mix romper rooms. In regressive infantland, the neck is supplanted by the breast. A multi-faceted, one-way transaction. Actually, forget the multi-faceted aspect. I list for you below the entire panoply of mammary manouevrings at the cavalier hands of my young corsairs out here. I won’t include those tongue, face and penile impressions, for they are just far too chronic to dismal.
Nipple Clamping:
1) The nipple played as if strumming a guitar. Isn’t it all synthesizers and samplers these days ?
2) The nipple plucked as if plying rosary beads. ‘Forgive me Father for I know not what I’m doing’. Or counting on an abacus, an additional twenty-three more sweeps and he can move on to the next magnitude of landmark flesh
3) The nipple kneaded as though crumbling a lump of hash, rolling it and licking it sealed. All that’s misssing is lighting it up and passing it round.
4) The nipple tweaked as if tuning a radio. Both rapidly becoming a relic. The transistor and the wireless nipple that is. Is that a better reception now ? Usually a precursor to the breast being wielded like that other dinosaur, the manual gearstick
Single Breastwork:
5) Working away at the breast like it’s a scratchcard. You lose again you mug !
6) The pinch and twist, like trying to open a recalcitrant bottletop. I implore you, don’t try and use your teeth !
7) Flicking the breast like you were slicing through a rack of suits. That’s the problem with darned metrosexuals from London !
8) Shooting craps, or at least shaking the dice, eternally. Did he just blow on them for good luck ? Gambler's fallacy. Just roll the damn things already !
9) The executive gripmaster, for the man too busy to work out. Multi-tasking, his other hand is probably doing miniature starbursts on the labia
10) Pint in a straight glass please. He’ll cup it around the rim with reverence, but he won’t sup at it
Double-D Clutch:
11) The mountaineer. Clambering up the abdomen with his tongue, outstretched hands feeling for the next secure hold. He finds them and grips like clampons. Like he’s clinging on for dear life. Eventually he scales the twin peaks and hoves his head over the pinnacle with a stupid, self-satisfied grin. Alternatively is the East/West Face ascent, whereby each hand is a mountaineer coming at either peak from the side and meeting at the top of their respective summits (and waving idiotically at each other into the bargain)
12) The push-me, pull me. As if they’re playing the church organ, like some old spinster
13) The handlebars, as they ride me like a bike. Oops, bit of a dip there, careful, some camber coming up. Have you passed your proficiency test ?
14) The cymbals. Why do boys do this with such glee ? They don’t make much of a noise. Still, marginally preferable to those trying to drive them up into my jawline, like a radical new botox treatment. Cheek by jowl indeed
15) Putting the hands on each cup and just holding them there, like they’re warming up by a fire. Prelude to rubbing them vigorously together like emery paper. Still, this is one up on the hand as shamois leather, working over a particularly ingrained smear perceived somewhere on the breast
16) Punch and Judy without the puppets. That’s definitely not the way to do it
17) You knead me like dough. I need you like a hole in the head. If I knew you were coming, I’d’ve baked you a cake
You get none of this palaver with the nape of the neck I can tell you ... How many was that, sweet seventeen ? Presumably for my own double-page spread in a redtop, I would be required to produce a round score ? Tit Bits - the twenty boob jobs of sex ! Oh, is that a fact ? You may come over all hoity-toity, but bottom line, this is one field where we’re all hewn from the same rock. You can dress it up any whichway. Okay then, we'll tailor it for a Broadsheet. Instead of an Agony Auntie, I'll present myself as a sexologist. I do have a degree you know ! Well no, but I’ve been privy to enough fumbling and bumbling out here to counsel our misguided and lost generations. Try this for size if it's arch theorizing you're after. Between the sheets, I can adapt to any style you may care to solicit.
Adolescent sexual adventuring. Mapping of the other, that terra incognita of the opposite gender. Maiden voyaging towards imagined corporeal landscapes. Setting sail provisioned only with rumours, speculation and riddled nuggets, stitched together into a phantasmagorical, idealised mappamundis. Bearing unknown continents with suspiciously scalloped coastlines. Giving on to unscaled hinterlands, of nooks and crannies, crevices and valleys, grottos and cataracts, all indeterminately disproportionate. The conjectured rivers, crudely resembling biological drawings of the sexual plumbing. The unknown interiority, replaced in the cartography of afflatus, with the grotesques and the monsters of delirium. And their seaborne cousins, the behemoths and hydras, the gogs and magogs of the deep. The watery oceans themselves, framed with gargoyles exhaling the trade winds and jet streams of natural impulse and cherubic trumpeted peer pressure. Hazardously determining negotiation of choppy currents, tempests and swells, as the sexual wayfarers seek to plot their course.
And on to the Odyssey itself. More buckled and less swash. For the coves, the epic hazards of sirens and harpies, the blushing scarlet of female equivocation. On the distaff side, the monomaniacal one-eyed giants, with their cyclopean periscope on the main prize. Then there are the tides treacherously running you aground. Or stilling you in the Doldrums, snagging you with fibrous sargassum. Can you steer your circumnavigator-cum-surveyor to fill in the contours ? With your sextant and compass, can you cincture the whole ? The azimuth and the altitude. The hidden depth of the third dimension. To produce a more realistic lie of the terrain ? To populate the great unknown antipode, dismissively tagged ‘Frigida Inhabitabilis’ ? What chance, when casting off from crude sketches of your own unexplored interior ?
See, they come here, the ignorant, the rudimentary, to a long-established sea-faring nation, much like our own. Additionally, one that has extensively charted both the mental map and the physical geography, with its philosophy, its cosmology, its science and statuary. Yet these greenhorns, these horny toads, these brigands and opportunists, depart these shores with a scurvied treatment of sex and a reedy, featureless atlas for the future. Oh and in all likelihood, also a STD. Judging by the number of prescriptions I’ve had to seek.
Showing posts with label Brits abroad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brits abroad. Show all posts
Saturday, 21 June 2008
Friday, 30 May 2008
Sex Tourism (A,B & E5)
All my speculations out here have led me to comb my very own paltry ambition. For now I yearn to devise the ultimate cocktail, one apposite to my sojourn here. A tipple where the constituent parts maintain their integrity, until the catalytic addition of a sheet of ice. Rather than it melting, the chemical properties combine so that all the coloured liquid strata are frozen solid. A sort of inverted tequila sunrise. I’ll call it ‘When Hell Freezes Over’. Well, if Damon can fritter his time in pursuit of a family crest when he has no descendants, then I must also be free to piss away my life in alco-chemical investigation. The barren quest of transmuting gold into base metal. Or my once grand lifestyle into a much shittier one. Needless to say, I have not as yet succeeded in my winnowing of the vital admixtures, (though I am taking great strides in decanting my own vital juices). But I remain faithfully wedded to my task. Same again barman. I didn’t quite lick the specific viscosity of that last combination.
Thank you for your concern kind sir, but I have little place for sentiment. I’m a gangster’s moll remember. Or rather a gangster’s quondam moll to give me my true non-status. No room for sentiment at all. Where would I store it ? I left everything behind when I took flight. With no alternative but to make a go of this and turn native, it was imperative to surrender all of myself on entry at customs. They handed me back my Englishness unstamped, sight unseen. Nothing to declare and yet everything to declare. Stopping on green and going on red. Driving on a different side of the road here. Or being driven, since my fabricated identity didn’t run to a driving license. So I don’t get around much. And unsurprisingly enough, I haven’t been able to restock with souvenirs of a life out here. Boiled down artefacts of ruined temples and straw donkeys/asses/mules/ whatever the local drudge of choice, wearing moth-eaten straw hats. I declined. If you had to go in for this sort of thing, presumably you’d be after a keepsake rather than a memento mori. I merely have to consult a looking glass for one of those.
Such is the way of the world, one man’s laugh lines around the eyes, is another woman’s crow’s feet. And mine used to be more akin to raven talons, plucking out peepers bulged by receding skin. Scorched flesh pulled so tight before terror’s disfiguring tyranny, that the contours of my skull become clearly delineated. Death’s skeletal spectre pounding on me from within. Broadcasting like a malevolent lighthouse, bent on dashing any salvation on the rocks. But now thanks to my ethanol botox, the skin around my eyes is puffy. See, I only drink to reinflate. Did you know, the Arabic word, kohl, is the root of our term ‘alcohol’ ? A cosmetic powder derived from antimony sulphide, for darkening the rims of the eyelids and thickening the eyebrows. Think Egyptian hieroglyphics. Muslims, forbidden to drink, distilled cosmetics instead. We ran with it and went deeper than surface appearances. Inspissation. Or pissation anyway. Antimony itself, means “an enemy of solitude”, (referring to its occurence with other elements in its salts). Never a truer defintion of alcohol either. The alchemical symbol for antimony, is the same as that used in biology for the male. A veritable enemy of solitude indeed ... I could go on for ever unravelling these connective threads, but I’m all tied up with a correspondance course in kabbalah at the moment ...
I have virtually nothing to my name. Least of all my own real name. No brush for hair or teeth. No dentist either for that matter. Health insurance, ha ! No mirror. No wardrobe. I get by on a single bikini for the season, which I rinse out each night in some boy’s hotel room sink, before climbing into his package-deal bed. I don’t even have any shoes, so my seasoned feet have taken on the unforgiving aspect of the land here, being all hard and cracked. Believe me, you don’t want a massage with me walking on your back. As you can see, I do own a pair of sunglasses, also a summer wrap for the evening and for its pockets to carry any money I come by. Things get a bit awkward during my period, since tampons are the one thing I can’t snaffle from any half-board bedmate. I may use my scanty money to purchase them, but then being strapped for a handbag, during the day I have to bundle up the box in my wrap and carry them around concealed. Don't want to tip them the wink now do I ? I spend as much time in the sea as I can at such times. Trusting to the gentle lapping waters for exsanguination, rather than the human sharks back on land.
The only possession of worth I had in this world, was a bottle of duty-free perfume, grabbed as I was spirited through the departures lounge by Terry. A little something of my old life. A promise of what in my new one ? An exotic location ? A reinstatement of classic feminity ? Promulgating the promise of a heroine or temptress ? They know all about them in Hellenic Greece, but theirs neglected to employ fragrances among their arsenal of enchantments. Would they even heard of such designer brands out here ? But my fingers never entwined themselves around it’s bulb. Never insinuated a drop upon my earlobes. Never even extracted it from its packaging. Too unnerved on arrival, wholly concerned with melting away, rather than skywriting my presence. And though eventually landing confidently on terra firma and planting myself a new life here, one finds artificial scents redundant in this land of muggy heat and parched appetities. As even humble deodorant amply demonstrates, any sprayed particles plug your saturated pores. But they get tugged at from the inside, as the sweat droplets heave and writhe in their bid for freedom, eventually dehiscing and abducting the hapless fragrance with them. You may as well smear yourself in olive oil. Ultimately, nothing can subdue the aroma of griddled flesh and poached sex. Sunny side down. I secreted the unopened box into the baggage of a bridegroom-to-be out here on his Stag as I took my leave. My double-edged gift to his Bride. Not only does perfume get mothballed, but make-up is de trop too. Either the strong glare directly blanches out all colour perception, or people take to wearing polarized lenses which filters out all the harmonious wavelengths of your facial Kosmetos. There is no need for subtle enhancement in this environment (augmenting only by two cup sizes would qualify under that banner).
See, the kids here, they’ve been duty-free shopping too. Not the duty-free they buy on their return to Britain, to see them through the autumn, or as stock presents for their parents. Since there’s also the duty-free they buy on the way over. Those gifts for imaginary Greek friends and exchange students they never had. Beware Greeks receiving gifts ? Hardly. Beware Brits embosoming them. Salted away, such retained offerings will stoke their week-long bacchanalia, effectively subsidized by government tax credit. And what I realise, is that pickled in ethanol, they possess no budding vitality to mock me, but rather they are drawn to the stench of my own rank decay. That they themselves are my fuming torment from home, pursuing me here. Greenbottles (and white/transparent/ gold, whatever their brand of choice), this time rather than blue. Each titanium areospace aerosol that lands on the runway, squirts and sprays me with its territorial miasma. Atomisers accelerating already dissolute particles, bombarding and hurling themselves at my corruption. Daily I bathe in their spittled debasement of me. My venality at purchasing a bottled bouquet, in order to intromit some fragrance into my fresh life. I hear the Eurocrats are mobilising to torpedo duty free within the Eurozone. Gets my vote, if I had one.
English Channel jestam, Aegean flotsam. Shipwrecked castaway. Without a friend in the world and a pack of hunting dogs on my tail. I fought eyetooth and hungnail to survive. To get this far. Once I emerged from my pupae of circumspection, I imagined I would gradually reinhabit my life. To foment this, I needed to maintain scrupulous superintendence over my newly regained body. Instead she unclasped herself to the bland blandishments of juvenile palpations. A corpus vile for rathe anatomical dissection. A corporeality therefore, that at a stroke, reassigned me my wraithlike state of dispersion.
As my hearty young cockswains push off back for home, I am left to hug myself hugging the Doric shore. For what else do I have to anticipate but this constant neap tide, that shackles me at anchor, yet carries off my would-be rescuers ? They come to party with this Helen, not repatriate her. My new economy of avaricious, bulimic sex, fillets the previous library regimen of protective, self-nourishment. I am a hollowed out wooden horse, with no surprise gift inside. I am a law of diminishing and diminished returns unto myself. So now I merely dance inattendance upon melanoma (lack of sun block), or AIDS (lack of condom), or cirrhosis (lack of restraint).
Thank you for your concern kind sir, but I have little place for sentiment. I’m a gangster’s moll remember. Or rather a gangster’s quondam moll to give me my true non-status. No room for sentiment at all. Where would I store it ? I left everything behind when I took flight. With no alternative but to make a go of this and turn native, it was imperative to surrender all of myself on entry at customs. They handed me back my Englishness unstamped, sight unseen. Nothing to declare and yet everything to declare. Stopping on green and going on red. Driving on a different side of the road here. Or being driven, since my fabricated identity didn’t run to a driving license. So I don’t get around much. And unsurprisingly enough, I haven’t been able to restock with souvenirs of a life out here. Boiled down artefacts of ruined temples and straw donkeys/asses/mules/ whatever the local drudge of choice, wearing moth-eaten straw hats. I declined. If you had to go in for this sort of thing, presumably you’d be after a keepsake rather than a memento mori. I merely have to consult a looking glass for one of those.
Such is the way of the world, one man’s laugh lines around the eyes, is another woman’s crow’s feet. And mine used to be more akin to raven talons, plucking out peepers bulged by receding skin. Scorched flesh pulled so tight before terror’s disfiguring tyranny, that the contours of my skull become clearly delineated. Death’s skeletal spectre pounding on me from within. Broadcasting like a malevolent lighthouse, bent on dashing any salvation on the rocks. But now thanks to my ethanol botox, the skin around my eyes is puffy. See, I only drink to reinflate. Did you know, the Arabic word, kohl, is the root of our term ‘alcohol’ ? A cosmetic powder derived from antimony sulphide, for darkening the rims of the eyelids and thickening the eyebrows. Think Egyptian hieroglyphics. Muslims, forbidden to drink, distilled cosmetics instead. We ran with it and went deeper than surface appearances. Inspissation. Or pissation anyway. Antimony itself, means “an enemy of solitude”, (referring to its occurence with other elements in its salts). Never a truer defintion of alcohol either. The alchemical symbol for antimony, is the same as that used in biology for the male. A veritable enemy of solitude indeed ... I could go on for ever unravelling these connective threads, but I’m all tied up with a correspondance course in kabbalah at the moment ...
I have virtually nothing to my name. Least of all my own real name. No brush for hair or teeth. No dentist either for that matter. Health insurance, ha ! No mirror. No wardrobe. I get by on a single bikini for the season, which I rinse out each night in some boy’s hotel room sink, before climbing into his package-deal bed. I don’t even have any shoes, so my seasoned feet have taken on the unforgiving aspect of the land here, being all hard and cracked. Believe me, you don’t want a massage with me walking on your back. As you can see, I do own a pair of sunglasses, also a summer wrap for the evening and for its pockets to carry any money I come by. Things get a bit awkward during my period, since tampons are the one thing I can’t snaffle from any half-board bedmate. I may use my scanty money to purchase them, but then being strapped for a handbag, during the day I have to bundle up the box in my wrap and carry them around concealed. Don't want to tip them the wink now do I ? I spend as much time in the sea as I can at such times. Trusting to the gentle lapping waters for exsanguination, rather than the human sharks back on land.
The only possession of worth I had in this world, was a bottle of duty-free perfume, grabbed as I was spirited through the departures lounge by Terry. A little something of my old life. A promise of what in my new one ? An exotic location ? A reinstatement of classic feminity ? Promulgating the promise of a heroine or temptress ? They know all about them in Hellenic Greece, but theirs neglected to employ fragrances among their arsenal of enchantments. Would they even heard of such designer brands out here ? But my fingers never entwined themselves around it’s bulb. Never insinuated a drop upon my earlobes. Never even extracted it from its packaging. Too unnerved on arrival, wholly concerned with melting away, rather than skywriting my presence. And though eventually landing confidently on terra firma and planting myself a new life here, one finds artificial scents redundant in this land of muggy heat and parched appetities. As even humble deodorant amply demonstrates, any sprayed particles plug your saturated pores. But they get tugged at from the inside, as the sweat droplets heave and writhe in their bid for freedom, eventually dehiscing and abducting the hapless fragrance with them. You may as well smear yourself in olive oil. Ultimately, nothing can subdue the aroma of griddled flesh and poached sex. Sunny side down. I secreted the unopened box into the baggage of a bridegroom-to-be out here on his Stag as I took my leave. My double-edged gift to his Bride. Not only does perfume get mothballed, but make-up is de trop too. Either the strong glare directly blanches out all colour perception, or people take to wearing polarized lenses which filters out all the harmonious wavelengths of your facial Kosmetos. There is no need for subtle enhancement in this environment (augmenting only by two cup sizes would qualify under that banner).
See, the kids here, they’ve been duty-free shopping too. Not the duty-free they buy on their return to Britain, to see them through the autumn, or as stock presents for their parents. Since there’s also the duty-free they buy on the way over. Those gifts for imaginary Greek friends and exchange students they never had. Beware Greeks receiving gifts ? Hardly. Beware Brits embosoming them. Salted away, such retained offerings will stoke their week-long bacchanalia, effectively subsidized by government tax credit. And what I realise, is that pickled in ethanol, they possess no budding vitality to mock me, but rather they are drawn to the stench of my own rank decay. That they themselves are my fuming torment from home, pursuing me here. Greenbottles (and white/transparent/ gold, whatever their brand of choice), this time rather than blue. Each titanium areospace aerosol that lands on the runway, squirts and sprays me with its territorial miasma. Atomisers accelerating already dissolute particles, bombarding and hurling themselves at my corruption. Daily I bathe in their spittled debasement of me. My venality at purchasing a bottled bouquet, in order to intromit some fragrance into my fresh life. I hear the Eurocrats are mobilising to torpedo duty free within the Eurozone. Gets my vote, if I had one.
English Channel jestam, Aegean flotsam. Shipwrecked castaway. Without a friend in the world and a pack of hunting dogs on my tail. I fought eyetooth and hungnail to survive. To get this far. Once I emerged from my pupae of circumspection, I imagined I would gradually reinhabit my life. To foment this, I needed to maintain scrupulous superintendence over my newly regained body. Instead she unclasped herself to the bland blandishments of juvenile palpations. A corpus vile for rathe anatomical dissection. A corporeality therefore, that at a stroke, reassigned me my wraithlike state of dispersion.
As my hearty young cockswains push off back for home, I am left to hug myself hugging the Doric shore. For what else do I have to anticipate but this constant neap tide, that shackles me at anchor, yet carries off my would-be rescuers ? They come to party with this Helen, not repatriate her. My new economy of avaricious, bulimic sex, fillets the previous library regimen of protective, self-nourishment. I am a hollowed out wooden horse, with no surprise gift inside. I am a law of diminishing and diminished returns unto myself. So now I merely dance inattendance upon melanoma (lack of sun block), or AIDS (lack of condom), or cirrhosis (lack of restraint).
Saturday, 10 May 2008
A,B & E (4)
If the sun heats up the sand, to such a level of discomfort you can barely walk on it, why doesn’t it do the same to the metal insertions in people’s bodies out here ? That would really give them something to cavort around for. And do tattoos absorb or diffuse ultra-violet light ? Would it not function like matt paint ? I can’t find anything about it in books. I only ask, since I’m troubled by the ins and outs of whether they apply sun cream to their cuticular respray jobs. Doesn’t seem right somehow. Right in the sense of fitting. They should further immolate for their art. Of course, if the ink provides it’s own sun screen, then the quandary does not arise. There again, it might be rather hard to spot a melanoma against a tattoo canvas. Like pentimento. But if you think about it, and every day out here on the beach, such is the ubiquity of body pictorialism on pallid flesh, I cannot but help chew on the subject, the cell machinery must have already been stirred into mutinous action. To heal the subcutaneous breech of rapier needles. Endlessly knocking its head against a steel curtain. I know how it feels.
Tattoos. In theory, I welcome the urge to own your own body by shaping it to your own design. To draw upon your skin as a canvas. To render yourself-portrait of one’s own devising. But tattoos on girls just doesn’t sit right with me. Call me old fashioned, call them ladettes. (Actually, call them pneumatic hermaphrodites, so all-embracing is their adoption of male tropes). But there again, it isn’t even just the blemishing of feminine flesh that rankles. All of them, male and female alike, exhibit such a paucity of inspiration and verve. Is that really how they envision themselves ? How they elect to daub themselves ? Take the overabundance of Celtic symbols. Alright, some may be genuinely extracted from Caledonian, Irish and Welsh stock and thereby wish to underscore some notional heritage. But the bulk are Anglo-Saxon, basking in constipated extirpation of those very stirps. Therefore I’m convinced no matter where they hail from, all sail in brackish witlessness as to the origins of these geometric interweaves.
Do they identify themselves with the heroic tribal resistors of the Roman Legions, or with the later anchorite Christian scribes ? Smart money’s on the tribal illiterates rather than the illuminati. Yet how ironic, that an artform dripping in twining interdependence, should be adopted by a complexion of youth, so comprehensively alienated from meaning altogether. Symbols too knotty to pierce, only become held as significant, through being accepted by a sufficient clump of adherents. Rubber stamped, so whither individuality ? They hanker after the uniqueness of their personal branding, yet en masse they contrive the selfsame classification palette. A lost panoply of ancient tribes, paid tribute by a modern tribe that does not wish to be bound together at all, but yearns to assert personal virtuosity. To have a secret, special meaning reserved only for their mind, a cribsheet written on their skin. Unfortunately, all the pat answers have flowed into one another and become a tangled mess, leaving them without an inkling.
Spirals that seemingly have no beginning and no end, (depending on the proficiency of the tattoist at concealing them, oh yes I’ve traced this many a night), as representing connection to the cosmos and recycle of life. Yet these non-believers renounce the afterlife totally. Whirling sigils and heraldic beasts, guardian family spirits, when they have pretty much repudiated family also. And what of the warrior caste they align themselves with ? I don’t see them undertaking too many heroic quests, though in fairness they are often to be seen bearing a fallen comrade from the drink-sodden field of battle. If the ink were green rather than black hued, then they would be solemnizing their skin with the exalted vine. Which at least would be more legible.
So yes, I’ll opt for their regressive association with the primitive, rather than scholars and holy men. Superstition over abstruse thought. (To them an everlasting light is a zippo lighter, while most are blessed with the creative spark of wet matches). Each fibril of knotwork, another anodized briar branch of reinforcement. A decorative razor wire they have welted to their skins. Serving as a ‘keep out’ to any warm-blooded trespass beyond the surface and to caulk any seepage of character from within their own metallic prison. Amulets against self. But all of that fades to a most bruised black, compared with the porcupine hide of piercings !
One can accept the sight of antic flesh on a beach. In fact you expect it as the local Olympian pursuit round these parts. Sprinting into or out of the sea; discusing with a plastic frisbee; beach volleyball or playing paddle-bat tennis; Greco-Roman wrestling between lovers on sun beds. These are legitimate ogling wobbling opportunities. 5.9 for artistic impression and all that. I'm here myself with more than half an eye on a gold medal slow-dance partner for tonight. But then it’s anything but a knockout, as your attention is snagged by the detail of a ring or chain, performing its own whipping and pinched version of the dance of exhuberance. Jesus ! A case in point ! Look at the state of that, emerging from the sea like it’s been salvaged. She’s going to have her own eye out if she hits top speed across the burning sand. For on those unfortunate occasions, when due to concupiscence, drunkenness or extreme flashback, I am forced into a canter, well let’s just say it’s no bad happenstance that I forever sport my sunglasses. But she’s got metal extensions that swing like a flail. You see those bolts in her brow there ? Not quite Frankenstein’s Monster, but so long as her mate has some jump leads handy, he ought be able to get her out of bed and started of an afternoon, once she’s flown back home to her life of graphic underemployment. In my day, office workers just used to starve themselves and paint their nails of a lunch hour. Now these fatted calves seemingly go and hand over good money to be skewered.
Maybe it’s not so pronounced at home, I mean given the climate, flesh is nearly always trussed up behind fabric. Out here it's all on show and I’m telling you, it’s absolutely rife. A particular one night only, stand-up comedian of my brief acquaintance, regaled me with an anatomical sketch of his previous night’s mooring. To what end I couldn’t fathom, but I did listen with a certain appalled raptness. Unsure as to which of the two protagonists was more despicable. She with her cloven hoof predilections, or he for telling intimate tales out of school. Was I to be relayed in turn, to schmooze the following night’s selected audience member of participation ? As what, someone more soft and yielding than last night’s human pin cushion ? Soft and yielding ? Uh-uh, he was going to be a mite disappointed on that front. Nevertheless, circumspection was called for, as to what I broached with that loose-lipped lad. Could’t be making a clean breast of things, as had my antecedent. If that's not a contradiction in terms, seeing as according to him, her breast was disfigured by all manner of metal probes.
The estrogen egghunt didn't end there. Apparently, she was also the proud possessor of twin labial piercings, tied off in tiny, white balls as might affix corkboard pins. Memo to herself, or signpost landing strip navigation lights, for any intrepid night pilots ? Gliders rather than dive bombers one might hope. ‘Enamel or ivory ?’ I innocently inquired, for if I have to put up with an imposition of taste, then I insist on going with a full flavoured flow, rather than a drip feed of information. But of course, my dead-eyed witness couldn’t enlighten me further. His insipid sapidity unable to register any new sensation, despite presumably not having orally partaken of either material before. Rather, he informed me his tongue delightedly played with them for a seeming eternity. A ‘wicked’ sensation of licking a woman’s ‘balls’, no matter how shrunken. Freud would have had an orgasm. The target buoys bobbed up and down, among the roiling waves of her sex and he kept losing contact. She seemed pleased enough with his fingertip searches for them anyway, so perhaps there was some design to her self-stapling. I queried whether it wasn’t like having a pair of tiny eyes scrutinising him, or worse, just the whites of lifeless orbs ? Even more accursed than that, he conceded. Once it had gradually dawned on him that in fact, they rather resembled two beads of, well ejaculate. That somehow he was embarked on somebody else’s sloppy seconds, which crash landed him immediately. And yet the sexual metallurgists will protest til they’re blue in the face, that it only heightens sexual pleasure. More like vagina dentura if you ask me !
Behold another one, with wireless bra and wired breast. There with the tray of drinks buttressed against her sternum. Oh, double bubble and squeak ! For I spy a tattoo rippling beneath her costume, where she might cradle a feeding babe. If an infant wants to watch an animated cartoon with its supper, stick it in front of the TV like any normal Mum. This way, he’ll likely get indigestion, motion sickness and a squint all in one. Surprised she needs to utilise her hands to convey the alcohol. Surely she could just run a chain through her evidently pierced nipples and secure the tray across her cleavage ? More than likely, the overpriced drinks will be the most precious issue they’ll ever come into contact with. No, no ! She’s the clincher ! That one fellating an ice cream cone yonder. Also at her site of honeyed suckling, is to be found the bitter aftertaste of mummy’s noxious metal ringlet. The fleshy areola must have been sent packing, for a permanent metallic tenant. So the only possible lability, is not the hormonal brewing of milk, rather the tarnishing of cheap gold. Verdigris. What does it say about their own mothers ? That umbilical tie clamped and snipped at birth, cutting them adrift of their life-giver, how they now spike and padlock their own navels to return the deed with spite. Oh for a giant magnet to hoover them all up and drop them down in say Cephalonia, or Lesbos even.
Ah, who am I to chide anyway ? Or even to ‘scarify’, yes indeed, thank you. Sand gets everywhere don’t you find ? Even in your bloody cocktails ! It’s soft underfoot and to lie on, but when it adheres to you, it’s surprisingly gritty in those unmentionable places it seems to burrow down towards. You cannot escape sand, it perpetually returns you to the current disposition of your body. That’s why I find it surprising that having chosen these idyllic sandy beaches, our Icenic clan opt to recall the sensation of repudiated littoral shale back home, by stabbing their flesh with all sorts of aculeated insertions against their skin. Between a rock and a hard place. As a little girl, I lived in a soft place. A very, very soft universe. Once with Damon, ostensibly I still had around me all the trimmings of a soft world. Silk hangings, cushioning obsedian fortress walls. So in fact it turned out to be a very hard place indeed, attested after we had reciprocally tried boring through one another, only to recoil concussed. And now, out here, among the indeterminate sand, the conundrum is that it is neither quite hard, nor quite soft. And so I am lost for the present constitution of my body. These spikey metalheads give me no pointers either. So hard and unyielding on the surface, yet utterly ductile beyond. Who am I to cavil if they’ve voted with their mammaries ? I’ve pensioned off my womb through my own choices long ago.
Tattoos. In theory, I welcome the urge to own your own body by shaping it to your own design. To draw upon your skin as a canvas. To render yourself-portrait of one’s own devising. But tattoos on girls just doesn’t sit right with me. Call me old fashioned, call them ladettes. (Actually, call them pneumatic hermaphrodites, so all-embracing is their adoption of male tropes). But there again, it isn’t even just the blemishing of feminine flesh that rankles. All of them, male and female alike, exhibit such a paucity of inspiration and verve. Is that really how they envision themselves ? How they elect to daub themselves ? Take the overabundance of Celtic symbols. Alright, some may be genuinely extracted from Caledonian, Irish and Welsh stock and thereby wish to underscore some notional heritage. But the bulk are Anglo-Saxon, basking in constipated extirpation of those very stirps. Therefore I’m convinced no matter where they hail from, all sail in brackish witlessness as to the origins of these geometric interweaves.
Do they identify themselves with the heroic tribal resistors of the Roman Legions, or with the later anchorite Christian scribes ? Smart money’s on the tribal illiterates rather than the illuminati. Yet how ironic, that an artform dripping in twining interdependence, should be adopted by a complexion of youth, so comprehensively alienated from meaning altogether. Symbols too knotty to pierce, only become held as significant, through being accepted by a sufficient clump of adherents. Rubber stamped, so whither individuality ? They hanker after the uniqueness of their personal branding, yet en masse they contrive the selfsame classification palette. A lost panoply of ancient tribes, paid tribute by a modern tribe that does not wish to be bound together at all, but yearns to assert personal virtuosity. To have a secret, special meaning reserved only for their mind, a cribsheet written on their skin. Unfortunately, all the pat answers have flowed into one another and become a tangled mess, leaving them without an inkling.
Spirals that seemingly have no beginning and no end, (depending on the proficiency of the tattoist at concealing them, oh yes I’ve traced this many a night), as representing connection to the cosmos and recycle of life. Yet these non-believers renounce the afterlife totally. Whirling sigils and heraldic beasts, guardian family spirits, when they have pretty much repudiated family also. And what of the warrior caste they align themselves with ? I don’t see them undertaking too many heroic quests, though in fairness they are often to be seen bearing a fallen comrade from the drink-sodden field of battle. If the ink were green rather than black hued, then they would be solemnizing their skin with the exalted vine. Which at least would be more legible.
So yes, I’ll opt for their regressive association with the primitive, rather than scholars and holy men. Superstition over abstruse thought. (To them an everlasting light is a zippo lighter, while most are blessed with the creative spark of wet matches). Each fibril of knotwork, another anodized briar branch of reinforcement. A decorative razor wire they have welted to their skins. Serving as a ‘keep out’ to any warm-blooded trespass beyond the surface and to caulk any seepage of character from within their own metallic prison. Amulets against self. But all of that fades to a most bruised black, compared with the porcupine hide of piercings !
One can accept the sight of antic flesh on a beach. In fact you expect it as the local Olympian pursuit round these parts. Sprinting into or out of the sea; discusing with a plastic frisbee; beach volleyball or playing paddle-bat tennis; Greco-Roman wrestling between lovers on sun beds. These are legitimate ogling wobbling opportunities. 5.9 for artistic impression and all that. I'm here myself with more than half an eye on a gold medal slow-dance partner for tonight. But then it’s anything but a knockout, as your attention is snagged by the detail of a ring or chain, performing its own whipping and pinched version of the dance of exhuberance. Jesus ! A case in point ! Look at the state of that, emerging from the sea like it’s been salvaged. She’s going to have her own eye out if she hits top speed across the burning sand. For on those unfortunate occasions, when due to concupiscence, drunkenness or extreme flashback, I am forced into a canter, well let’s just say it’s no bad happenstance that I forever sport my sunglasses. But she’s got metal extensions that swing like a flail. You see those bolts in her brow there ? Not quite Frankenstein’s Monster, but so long as her mate has some jump leads handy, he ought be able to get her out of bed and started of an afternoon, once she’s flown back home to her life of graphic underemployment. In my day, office workers just used to starve themselves and paint their nails of a lunch hour. Now these fatted calves seemingly go and hand over good money to be skewered.
Maybe it’s not so pronounced at home, I mean given the climate, flesh is nearly always trussed up behind fabric. Out here it's all on show and I’m telling you, it’s absolutely rife. A particular one night only, stand-up comedian of my brief acquaintance, regaled me with an anatomical sketch of his previous night’s mooring. To what end I couldn’t fathom, but I did listen with a certain appalled raptness. Unsure as to which of the two protagonists was more despicable. She with her cloven hoof predilections, or he for telling intimate tales out of school. Was I to be relayed in turn, to schmooze the following night’s selected audience member of participation ? As what, someone more soft and yielding than last night’s human pin cushion ? Soft and yielding ? Uh-uh, he was going to be a mite disappointed on that front. Nevertheless, circumspection was called for, as to what I broached with that loose-lipped lad. Could’t be making a clean breast of things, as had my antecedent. If that's not a contradiction in terms, seeing as according to him, her breast was disfigured by all manner of metal probes.
The estrogen egghunt didn't end there. Apparently, she was also the proud possessor of twin labial piercings, tied off in tiny, white balls as might affix corkboard pins. Memo to herself, or signpost landing strip navigation lights, for any intrepid night pilots ? Gliders rather than dive bombers one might hope. ‘Enamel or ivory ?’ I innocently inquired, for if I have to put up with an imposition of taste, then I insist on going with a full flavoured flow, rather than a drip feed of information. But of course, my dead-eyed witness couldn’t enlighten me further. His insipid sapidity unable to register any new sensation, despite presumably not having orally partaken of either material before. Rather, he informed me his tongue delightedly played with them for a seeming eternity. A ‘wicked’ sensation of licking a woman’s ‘balls’, no matter how shrunken. Freud would have had an orgasm. The target buoys bobbed up and down, among the roiling waves of her sex and he kept losing contact. She seemed pleased enough with his fingertip searches for them anyway, so perhaps there was some design to her self-stapling. I queried whether it wasn’t like having a pair of tiny eyes scrutinising him, or worse, just the whites of lifeless orbs ? Even more accursed than that, he conceded. Once it had gradually dawned on him that in fact, they rather resembled two beads of, well ejaculate. That somehow he was embarked on somebody else’s sloppy seconds, which crash landed him immediately. And yet the sexual metallurgists will protest til they’re blue in the face, that it only heightens sexual pleasure. More like vagina dentura if you ask me !
Behold another one, with wireless bra and wired breast. There with the tray of drinks buttressed against her sternum. Oh, double bubble and squeak ! For I spy a tattoo rippling beneath her costume, where she might cradle a feeding babe. If an infant wants to watch an animated cartoon with its supper, stick it in front of the TV like any normal Mum. This way, he’ll likely get indigestion, motion sickness and a squint all in one. Surprised she needs to utilise her hands to convey the alcohol. Surely she could just run a chain through her evidently pierced nipples and secure the tray across her cleavage ? More than likely, the overpriced drinks will be the most precious issue they’ll ever come into contact with. No, no ! She’s the clincher ! That one fellating an ice cream cone yonder. Also at her site of honeyed suckling, is to be found the bitter aftertaste of mummy’s noxious metal ringlet. The fleshy areola must have been sent packing, for a permanent metallic tenant. So the only possible lability, is not the hormonal brewing of milk, rather the tarnishing of cheap gold. Verdigris. What does it say about their own mothers ? That umbilical tie clamped and snipped at birth, cutting them adrift of their life-giver, how they now spike and padlock their own navels to return the deed with spite. Oh for a giant magnet to hoover them all up and drop them down in say Cephalonia, or Lesbos even.
Ah, who am I to chide anyway ? Or even to ‘scarify’, yes indeed, thank you. Sand gets everywhere don’t you find ? Even in your bloody cocktails ! It’s soft underfoot and to lie on, but when it adheres to you, it’s surprisingly gritty in those unmentionable places it seems to burrow down towards. You cannot escape sand, it perpetually returns you to the current disposition of your body. That’s why I find it surprising that having chosen these idyllic sandy beaches, our Icenic clan opt to recall the sensation of repudiated littoral shale back home, by stabbing their flesh with all sorts of aculeated insertions against their skin. Between a rock and a hard place. As a little girl, I lived in a soft place. A very, very soft universe. Once with Damon, ostensibly I still had around me all the trimmings of a soft world. Silk hangings, cushioning obsedian fortress walls. So in fact it turned out to be a very hard place indeed, attested after we had reciprocally tried boring through one another, only to recoil concussed. And now, out here, among the indeterminate sand, the conundrum is that it is neither quite hard, nor quite soft. And so I am lost for the present constitution of my body. These spikey metalheads give me no pointers either. So hard and unyielding on the surface, yet utterly ductile beyond. Who am I to cavil if they’ve voted with their mammaries ? I’ve pensioned off my womb through my own choices long ago.
Friday, 18 April 2008
A, B & E (2)
Present company excepted of course, but I find revenge is a dish best served flush across the bloke’s cranium. Well, the Greeks are all for cracking the crockery. So when in Rome and all that. Besides, they were the first ones to craft an art form from vengeance. No wait a tick, it was my second husband Damon, who really elevated it to Olympian heights. The final word in retribution. Where they look in his unblinking, guillotine eyes and heed there’s no coming back at him. Nipping any escalation in the bud. A la thalidomide.
See ordinarily, revenge is the furthest thing from my mind. You can sail into my island sound and behold any of the Wonders of the World, ancient and modern. Hanging gardens laden with fruit; all the mystery of the Sphinx; even the Temple of Artemis, virgin goddess, if that’s your package. Let my clitoral Pharos Lighthouse guide you in. I’ll take you there. I am anything you want me to be. Except a victim. Attempt to gain any other method of docking and vengeance is mine saith this lady. For, though propelled by all things anal as he undoubtedly was, Damon never, ever brought his work back home with him into our bedroom. (A change is as good as a rest as they say). Yet the same could not be said for that bloke George, from this so-called cradle of European civilisation. I don’t know if he was trying to get his revenge in first, or he was just missing his goats back out on the hills. But that final night together I was not having it. Any of it. The restored me, blackballed from myself, was to be the only one disposed to fuck like a man, and I was highly capable of fighting like one to keep it that way. A revenant from my long-abandoned past. To Damon, revenge was a vindication of his rule of law. Mine is just vindictive. A sudden, spontaneous surge from the seething cauldron. A kicking out against the pricks. A hen party with my witchy friends Nora Pinephrine and sisters Mel and Sarah Tonin. Modern day Graeae.
Alright, with George trying to cast a new intagliated relic, henceforth to be called the Corfu shroud, by drilling my face into a pillow, I’ll own that the notion of revenge didn’t spontaneously leap, surge or combust. I mean our consubstantial faculties were otherwised engaged. What with the trial of sequestering oxygen from already inundated muscles, which explained Nora’s dereliction of dragon-slaying duty and Sarah’s noble yielding, while Mel bless her, just raised the drawbridge. And lowered the portcullis. ‘Vagina dentata’ ? Oh please, not you as well ? What is it with you men - Oh really ? Do I look like I’m smiling on the other side of my gritted labia ?
Damon with his daemonic energy was a marathon man. Fortunately George, despite being native, was no Spartan. Silly sod just collapsed on top of me and passed out. A deadweight pinning me to the bed. Sowing our once lush field with slabs of stone. Like some smooth deathmask being pressed down over the gnarled cortex of our relationship. Thus interred, with my face chafing to bits on the stubble of the floral mattress, the cicatrix of revenge began to sprout. By dawn that next morning, I had what you could term, an almost fully-fledged, scion of a notion. And I ain’t talking about no olive branch either. (See how easily I morph in and out of the various cultures ?) I was most definitely going in for a spot of haughty culture on Mr Fetid Cheese, lying there bombed out on Ouzo. There’s graft that takes and then there’s graft that don’t, as my Damon was fond of saying.
The piggy little smile on George's bovine face didn’t exactly mitigate his cause, but I was already half-way through my husbandry. Still, I did pause momentarily, to wonder which little love ewe had parted George’s lips. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And thus another percolation of garden soil described its path from my fingers, like a grated (dead-)stock cube. This goose is cooking George’s gander. Let him soil his own bed for once. I say garden soil, but of course all I had recourse to, were the potted plants in his third floor apartment. A thin, powdery loam, like all the earth in this scorched land. I recollect scanning my cull of cracked and upturned earthenware, back through the bedroom, along the hall and past the living room, all the way back to the bathroom. Some still cupped their blooms bereft of plot. Others had already lost the will to live, limply prostrate on the carpeted desert. The dessicated marrow of life trodden into the pile beneath my frenzied perambulations. My very own slug trail. I got out the dustpan and brush, but was able to cull very little, so deeply was the soil piledriven into the warp. Reverse mining. Lead-lined, radioactive revenge. An aptitude that had lain as an untrodden seam, until I’d met a quarrier like Damon. Just can’t deduce, if it was tapped through the shared aspiration of the good times, or the lonesome desperation of the bad.
No time for recriminations, I hurtled pell-mell around the apartment in search of fresh supplies. Yet even now I cannot recall the precise moment of epiphany, when I stood stock still in awe at my own prowess, before fouettéing into the kitchen. (Ballet, another throwback from my nice little girl incarnation). Flinging open the cupboard and there she stood, in all her shiny reflective glory. Entrée, an industrial size, catering tin of coffee, or what passes for coffee in these parts, but which I believe to be the slag collected from inside the walls of all the pottery kilns in this clotted country. The dimensions were appropriate, given the magnitude and frequency of hangovers the coffee was intended to countervail. He’d obviously pilfered it from his internet café. Well now my friend, let’s put it back to work. Slag to slag, cull to cull. Skull to skull.
I can’t even remember going back into the bedroom, I must have glissaded there. Back to gorgeous, glabrous George and the sleep of the dead. Glance over to the bedside table. The digital figures on the alarm clock, indelible bright red, burn into my mind like the eyes of a salivating Cerberus. Soon, soon my lovelies. I picked up another of the long-stemmed roses from on top of the clock and carefully laid it on the surface of the soil mound, so that the flowerhead almost corniced his chin. Three others intertwined on the pillow, skullcapping his valerianed pate. He looked so peaceful. Without a care in the world. A slight adjustment, and I gently prodded the stem back down into the earth, until only the flower was visible. Yes, just so. As I turned for the coffee cache, my arse must have clipped the table, as the cackling flibbertigibbetry of two empty bottles seared through my whole being. (Did I not mention, I was jetéd headlong from the ballet for being too tall, too plump and too clumsy, once my distending twin orbs ineluctably realigned my gravitational pull ?). I shot George a frantic look, but he was in a parallel universe, where the only report delivered by two empty bottles of ouzo was a ‘must try harder’. I steeled myself back into the present and gathered up my whole body in order to regain it. The clock blinked a bloodhsot eye as it outlined a new digit, licking its lips in anticipation. I carefully knelt down to the coffee tin and began to lever off the lid with my nail working the groove. Keratin versus cheap metal, a patent mismatch of impatience. The lid took a dive as I frisbeed it away. I hurriedly gnawed the sundered frangible, scarcely noticing the sensation of blood welling up beneath the denuded cuticle. And then it struck me.
Saying it with flowers by all means, after all I had bought the roses two days ago in a foolish, one-sided proclamation of love. Yet while the garland and the one under his chin were spot on, the composition would have looked just ridiculous with flowers popping out all over the earthen mound itself. For this jarred horrendously with revenge’s nihilist nub. Instead, such iconography rather lent itself to George being laid out in state, before his big send off. It bestowed on him a fecundity that went against the grain. Other than the chin strap, I deadheaded the other eleven roses. Thus wreath became a crown of thorns. No, that doesn’t count you see. Not my symbology. I don’t believe in god. But a yet higher power.
Almost time to spill the beans, but hey George, you’re a really lucky guy. Damon would have had you spilling your guts. Sans aesthetical tableau too. A ripple of coffee granules slid down my palm and on to the burgeoning barrow. (I’ve sinced discovered, that ‘barrow’ has an additional arcane meaning of a castrated pig, what more need I say ?). Ersatz coffee made for an ersatz topsoil, ironically of thicker substance than the real thing below. The idea of brewing the kettle briefly flittered behind my eyes, but one of the heads of the chronological Cerebrus flicked out its tongue and haltered my attention. I’m lacking the element of time. Another ripple and gentle cascade in response by the mound. Then another. And another. Til the receptacle was drained. George was just about sufficiently shrouded, up to his neck in it you might say. I patted the coffee into the configurations I required, before gently threading each trepanned rose stalk into some strategic salient, thorns primed to press the flesh. Dug in, and out of sight. Cameo-flaged, in order to carve my relief on his body. The siege is about to be lifted. All eyes on Chronos now, I didn’t want to make a mess ... Of my delivery. This was the big one, when all three LED digits would absail down the clock face and usher in the coup turning twilight into a new dawn. Here it comes. George, oh Georgie-boy ... Wake up and smell the ro- uh, er coff -
Coda. The unchained melody of quavering voice and rasping alarm. Calling forth a minutely tremorous upthrust in his torso, enchaining a pas de deux sur la pointe for thorns and skin. The downdraught, a pas de chat, a cat’s cradle clawing criss-cross over a man’s membrane. A hundred tiny ploughs foraging furious furrows, in his to be hopefully forever, fallow flesh. Fashioned in an iron maiden of my own devising. Soft spun of tissue, but hard of heart and spine within. The balled fist inside the velvet glove, with just one broken fingernail casualty. The imprint of a good hiding. Some flower re-arranging of his features. I planted one on ‘im. Delicious ! George you old fraud, you never were an oil painting. But now I’ve applied some craquelure to attribute you some authenticity. One great big desquamation mark ! There’s some punctu(r)ation for you. Hey sieve face, riddle me this. The only thing you are going to be able to pull from now on, is your own perforated sprinkler ! Fizzog lit up like a Belisha Beacon’s gonna warn all the little girlies to stop, look, listen and then look again. And then safely cross to the other side of the road. Mourning glory ! After my night of the long knives. Or tiny stabs. One slug of ouzo too many, led me to slug that slug of a boyfriend. Well not slug him so much as pour salt in his wounds. Shrivel his manhood. His night of the short, sharp surgical scalpel. This blow-up doll, puffed herself up and stuck it to him. Psss. Down he went. Chronic deflation and devaluation of the drachma. Damon taught me all about rates of exchange. No tete-a-tete-anus, just a straight right jab for lockjaw. Where’s your vagina dentata now, my Ionic man? Self-impaled, hoist on your own petard. You were the one armoured up to the hilt. Torso dentata, chained male. I’ve extirpated you from the tyranny of invulnerability. You’ll have to wear it on your skin from now on. I’ve planted a little canker and it’s taken root. So now you know what it feels like. What it fucking feels like George. Shit ! My cup so runneth over that it’s completely drained. The price you pay, for a bit of idle divertissement.
Of course the seamless gloss of it all only comes from considerable contemplation, long after the event. Sat at bars like this, devising cocktail-fuelled mnemonics. A reconstruction purely in words, a reportage, since the pictures had flashed by far too quickly for me to even catch a glimpse. (In fact, having sown the wind, I didn’t hang around to reap the tornado. As appears to be my wont). I can recall almost everything about the preparations, but the eruption was so rapid, so explosive, that recollection slips through my synapses, my own colander head. Damn. Let me at least dine out on it a little while longer. A liquid lunch.
I wish I had choreographed it all out in advance. Then all the witty barbs I’ve since projected, could have perpetuated the onslaught. A sort of unfolding radioactive poisoning, after the initial mushroom cloud type of deployment. Maybe a treasure hunt of little ditties placed throughout his apartment, just to keep pricking the scabs, tipping the heaped scales, for that bit longer. Closet conference to have read: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Forehead’s receding, you dress like a pimp.’ Bathroom meditation: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. Always said you were anal, now flushed you down the loo’. Kitchen corkboard, affixed with pins: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Get some other scrubber, dirtying her hands in your sink’. Bedtime reading: ‘Roses are red, violence black and blue. To the pisshole in your prick, figured to add just a few’. You simply never think of it at the time do you ? Just as well really. Doesn’t even scan properly. All this is purely embellishment anyway. After all, in the final execution, I mixed my bleeding metaphors didn’t I ? ‘Wake up and smell the-’, oh never mind. All that remains now is the perhaps misguided notion that in extremes of weather, be it hot or cold, the little red scars will angrily rear their heads all over George’s flesh and remind him. Just remind him. Of what I don’t actually know. Of some woman’s empty handed revenge. Or empty-headed. There again, you don’t really get variegation of temperature, or anything much, down here in Corfu.
See ordinarily, revenge is the furthest thing from my mind. You can sail into my island sound and behold any of the Wonders of the World, ancient and modern. Hanging gardens laden with fruit; all the mystery of the Sphinx; even the Temple of Artemis, virgin goddess, if that’s your package. Let my clitoral Pharos Lighthouse guide you in. I’ll take you there. I am anything you want me to be. Except a victim. Attempt to gain any other method of docking and vengeance is mine saith this lady. For, though propelled by all things anal as he undoubtedly was, Damon never, ever brought his work back home with him into our bedroom. (A change is as good as a rest as they say). Yet the same could not be said for that bloke George, from this so-called cradle of European civilisation. I don’t know if he was trying to get his revenge in first, or he was just missing his goats back out on the hills. But that final night together I was not having it. Any of it. The restored me, blackballed from myself, was to be the only one disposed to fuck like a man, and I was highly capable of fighting like one to keep it that way. A revenant from my long-abandoned past. To Damon, revenge was a vindication of his rule of law. Mine is just vindictive. A sudden, spontaneous surge from the seething cauldron. A kicking out against the pricks. A hen party with my witchy friends Nora Pinephrine and sisters Mel and Sarah Tonin. Modern day Graeae.
Alright, with George trying to cast a new intagliated relic, henceforth to be called the Corfu shroud, by drilling my face into a pillow, I’ll own that the notion of revenge didn’t spontaneously leap, surge or combust. I mean our consubstantial faculties were otherwised engaged. What with the trial of sequestering oxygen from already inundated muscles, which explained Nora’s dereliction of dragon-slaying duty and Sarah’s noble yielding, while Mel bless her, just raised the drawbridge. And lowered the portcullis. ‘Vagina dentata’ ? Oh please, not you as well ? What is it with you men - Oh really ? Do I look like I’m smiling on the other side of my gritted labia ?
Damon with his daemonic energy was a marathon man. Fortunately George, despite being native, was no Spartan. Silly sod just collapsed on top of me and passed out. A deadweight pinning me to the bed. Sowing our once lush field with slabs of stone. Like some smooth deathmask being pressed down over the gnarled cortex of our relationship. Thus interred, with my face chafing to bits on the stubble of the floral mattress, the cicatrix of revenge began to sprout. By dawn that next morning, I had what you could term, an almost fully-fledged, scion of a notion. And I ain’t talking about no olive branch either. (See how easily I morph in and out of the various cultures ?) I was most definitely going in for a spot of haughty culture on Mr Fetid Cheese, lying there bombed out on Ouzo. There’s graft that takes and then there’s graft that don’t, as my Damon was fond of saying.
The piggy little smile on George's bovine face didn’t exactly mitigate his cause, but I was already half-way through my husbandry. Still, I did pause momentarily, to wonder which little love ewe had parted George’s lips. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And thus another percolation of garden soil described its path from my fingers, like a grated (dead-)stock cube. This goose is cooking George’s gander. Let him soil his own bed for once. I say garden soil, but of course all I had recourse to, were the potted plants in his third floor apartment. A thin, powdery loam, like all the earth in this scorched land. I recollect scanning my cull of cracked and upturned earthenware, back through the bedroom, along the hall and past the living room, all the way back to the bathroom. Some still cupped their blooms bereft of plot. Others had already lost the will to live, limply prostrate on the carpeted desert. The dessicated marrow of life trodden into the pile beneath my frenzied perambulations. My very own slug trail. I got out the dustpan and brush, but was able to cull very little, so deeply was the soil piledriven into the warp. Reverse mining. Lead-lined, radioactive revenge. An aptitude that had lain as an untrodden seam, until I’d met a quarrier like Damon. Just can’t deduce, if it was tapped through the shared aspiration of the good times, or the lonesome desperation of the bad.
No time for recriminations, I hurtled pell-mell around the apartment in search of fresh supplies. Yet even now I cannot recall the precise moment of epiphany, when I stood stock still in awe at my own prowess, before fouettéing into the kitchen. (Ballet, another throwback from my nice little girl incarnation). Flinging open the cupboard and there she stood, in all her shiny reflective glory. Entrée, an industrial size, catering tin of coffee, or what passes for coffee in these parts, but which I believe to be the slag collected from inside the walls of all the pottery kilns in this clotted country. The dimensions were appropriate, given the magnitude and frequency of hangovers the coffee was intended to countervail. He’d obviously pilfered it from his internet café. Well now my friend, let’s put it back to work. Slag to slag, cull to cull. Skull to skull.
I can’t even remember going back into the bedroom, I must have glissaded there. Back to gorgeous, glabrous George and the sleep of the dead. Glance over to the bedside table. The digital figures on the alarm clock, indelible bright red, burn into my mind like the eyes of a salivating Cerberus. Soon, soon my lovelies. I picked up another of the long-stemmed roses from on top of the clock and carefully laid it on the surface of the soil mound, so that the flowerhead almost corniced his chin. Three others intertwined on the pillow, skullcapping his valerianed pate. He looked so peaceful. Without a care in the world. A slight adjustment, and I gently prodded the stem back down into the earth, until only the flower was visible. Yes, just so. As I turned for the coffee cache, my arse must have clipped the table, as the cackling flibbertigibbetry of two empty bottles seared through my whole being. (Did I not mention, I was jetéd headlong from the ballet for being too tall, too plump and too clumsy, once my distending twin orbs ineluctably realigned my gravitational pull ?). I shot George a frantic look, but he was in a parallel universe, where the only report delivered by two empty bottles of ouzo was a ‘must try harder’. I steeled myself back into the present and gathered up my whole body in order to regain it. The clock blinked a bloodhsot eye as it outlined a new digit, licking its lips in anticipation. I carefully knelt down to the coffee tin and began to lever off the lid with my nail working the groove. Keratin versus cheap metal, a patent mismatch of impatience. The lid took a dive as I frisbeed it away. I hurriedly gnawed the sundered frangible, scarcely noticing the sensation of blood welling up beneath the denuded cuticle. And then it struck me.
Saying it with flowers by all means, after all I had bought the roses two days ago in a foolish, one-sided proclamation of love. Yet while the garland and the one under his chin were spot on, the composition would have looked just ridiculous with flowers popping out all over the earthen mound itself. For this jarred horrendously with revenge’s nihilist nub. Instead, such iconography rather lent itself to George being laid out in state, before his big send off. It bestowed on him a fecundity that went against the grain. Other than the chin strap, I deadheaded the other eleven roses. Thus wreath became a crown of thorns. No, that doesn’t count you see. Not my symbology. I don’t believe in god. But a yet higher power.
Almost time to spill the beans, but hey George, you’re a really lucky guy. Damon would have had you spilling your guts. Sans aesthetical tableau too. A ripple of coffee granules slid down my palm and on to the burgeoning barrow. (I’ve sinced discovered, that ‘barrow’ has an additional arcane meaning of a castrated pig, what more need I say ?). Ersatz coffee made for an ersatz topsoil, ironically of thicker substance than the real thing below. The idea of brewing the kettle briefly flittered behind my eyes, but one of the heads of the chronological Cerebrus flicked out its tongue and haltered my attention. I’m lacking the element of time. Another ripple and gentle cascade in response by the mound. Then another. And another. Til the receptacle was drained. George was just about sufficiently shrouded, up to his neck in it you might say. I patted the coffee into the configurations I required, before gently threading each trepanned rose stalk into some strategic salient, thorns primed to press the flesh. Dug in, and out of sight. Cameo-flaged, in order to carve my relief on his body. The siege is about to be lifted. All eyes on Chronos now, I didn’t want to make a mess ... Of my delivery. This was the big one, when all three LED digits would absail down the clock face and usher in the coup turning twilight into a new dawn. Here it comes. George, oh Georgie-boy ... Wake up and smell the ro- uh, er coff -
Coda. The unchained melody of quavering voice and rasping alarm. Calling forth a minutely tremorous upthrust in his torso, enchaining a pas de deux sur la pointe for thorns and skin. The downdraught, a pas de chat, a cat’s cradle clawing criss-cross over a man’s membrane. A hundred tiny ploughs foraging furious furrows, in his to be hopefully forever, fallow flesh. Fashioned in an iron maiden of my own devising. Soft spun of tissue, but hard of heart and spine within. The balled fist inside the velvet glove, with just one broken fingernail casualty. The imprint of a good hiding. Some flower re-arranging of his features. I planted one on ‘im. Delicious ! George you old fraud, you never were an oil painting. But now I’ve applied some craquelure to attribute you some authenticity. One great big desquamation mark ! There’s some punctu(r)ation for you. Hey sieve face, riddle me this. The only thing you are going to be able to pull from now on, is your own perforated sprinkler ! Fizzog lit up like a Belisha Beacon’s gonna warn all the little girlies to stop, look, listen and then look again. And then safely cross to the other side of the road. Mourning glory ! After my night of the long knives. Or tiny stabs. One slug of ouzo too many, led me to slug that slug of a boyfriend. Well not slug him so much as pour salt in his wounds. Shrivel his manhood. His night of the short, sharp surgical scalpel. This blow-up doll, puffed herself up and stuck it to him. Psss. Down he went. Chronic deflation and devaluation of the drachma. Damon taught me all about rates of exchange. No tete-a-tete-anus, just a straight right jab for lockjaw. Where’s your vagina dentata now, my Ionic man? Self-impaled, hoist on your own petard. You were the one armoured up to the hilt. Torso dentata, chained male. I’ve extirpated you from the tyranny of invulnerability. You’ll have to wear it on your skin from now on. I’ve planted a little canker and it’s taken root. So now you know what it feels like. What it fucking feels like George. Shit ! My cup so runneth over that it’s completely drained. The price you pay, for a bit of idle divertissement.
Of course the seamless gloss of it all only comes from considerable contemplation, long after the event. Sat at bars like this, devising cocktail-fuelled mnemonics. A reconstruction purely in words, a reportage, since the pictures had flashed by far too quickly for me to even catch a glimpse. (In fact, having sown the wind, I didn’t hang around to reap the tornado. As appears to be my wont). I can recall almost everything about the preparations, but the eruption was so rapid, so explosive, that recollection slips through my synapses, my own colander head. Damn. Let me at least dine out on it a little while longer. A liquid lunch.
I wish I had choreographed it all out in advance. Then all the witty barbs I’ve since projected, could have perpetuated the onslaught. A sort of unfolding radioactive poisoning, after the initial mushroom cloud type of deployment. Maybe a treasure hunt of little ditties placed throughout his apartment, just to keep pricking the scabs, tipping the heaped scales, for that bit longer. Closet conference to have read: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Forehead’s receding, you dress like a pimp.’ Bathroom meditation: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. Always said you were anal, now flushed you down the loo’. Kitchen corkboard, affixed with pins: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Get some other scrubber, dirtying her hands in your sink’. Bedtime reading: ‘Roses are red, violence black and blue. To the pisshole in your prick, figured to add just a few’. You simply never think of it at the time do you ? Just as well really. Doesn’t even scan properly. All this is purely embellishment anyway. After all, in the final execution, I mixed my bleeding metaphors didn’t I ? ‘Wake up and smell the-’, oh never mind. All that remains now is the perhaps misguided notion that in extremes of weather, be it hot or cold, the little red scars will angrily rear their heads all over George’s flesh and remind him. Just remind him. Of what I don’t actually know. Of some woman’s empty handed revenge. Or empty-headed. There again, you don’t really get variegation of temperature, or anything much, down here in Corfu.
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