Peter Doherty.

The Stress of Longing.

Freddy was a fusion.
The rags around his minds were torn patchwork quilts of youth cults, forgotten grooves, visions and unprintable politics, with the odd bloody bandage of High Art and an aesthetic to grind away the gap between deep black dub & Oscar Wilde. Because Freddy was a deep black Oscar - his life was his gift, his bomber jacket buttonhole was his anarchy - Black as heaven he was and he lived next to my terrible Auntie Lucy 2 floors up on the White City Estate, in a tenement that reclaimed the colonies for the Hammersmith & Fulham benefits agency. From the window of the kharzi you could see QPR's ground, and for reasons not yet understood Freddy, as a child would squat on the sill groaning with the roars from the left.
Freddy was a fusion. His beliefs a jamboree, a carnival of post everything neo nothin or next to nothing thought. He'd talk about Plato & Malcolm X, the French Revolution & Welsh devolution, Notting Hill, Riots, Chas & Dave & Marx & Earl Spencer. He knew a lot about nothing in particular, & a little of the particulars about lots of things.
Freddy was a fusion - he took me to church, took me joyriding - speeding out of our ears up the A40 - he'd whisper 'All's Quiet On the Western Avenue' not audible above the Val Doonican or the Speed Garage - the sweat & sour smoke of his perennial pipe pumping out the OLD HOLBORN & HONOLOLOU HERBS perfume - clouding, rearranging - brains...

Freddy was a fusion. He said he was. "I'm a fusion' he'd grin, slyly. And it was amusing enough for a while, but all the while Freddy was losing touch with what he could have been, or should have been. King.

I hadn't known him at school, he was a little bit older, a but cool, but we cemented our funny friendship in that wilderness between leaving that school & first real jobs.

Freddy said that this wilderness should ideally last a lifetime.

Now he appears lost for a lifetime - gone into some river of one of his minds he couldn't let go - where is taking you, I would ask, my lips pressed white together. He fell from the sky, never to land - never a sound: just words 'Every blues song in the world has the answer - I'll tell you in the morning.

The boy stood on the burning deck
It was half past nine on Friday
His braces snapped, his trouser fell
He wasn't very tidy

Baring his straight white teeth, letting me note down the results of his experimentation, his fusions.

She Was A Corner Street Girl.

She was a corner street girl, wrapped in faux fur and enduring winter nights with a flick of her faded hair. In the street lights she looked perfect, all untouched and Barbie-flawless. The dim orange blaze of the corner lamp and the sudden blue flashes of traffic made her shutter and flicker in and out of the scene, like a film reel ghost.

She’s there then she’s gone, just like that.

But in the stark, judging light of the day folk she looks more like a withered flower. Still pretty, but you wouldn’t pick it for the vase. Her eyes are bloodshot blue and are lined with smudged black and lashes tired from fluttering all night long. Her lips crack open with every movement and every fibre of her winces at every crack.

Her smiles are grimaces. Her hair is lank and seems to sigh and sag with her as she deflates in front of me.

“I was never good with mornings.”

She takes a sip of her coffee and doesn’t even notice there isn’t any sugar in it. The café is full of people but in the morning they’re always ‘just leaving’. Her fingers are lined with tiny bruises which correspond with the ones on her legs and neck, she notices me staring and grins and her whole mouth bleeds;

“I’m a spotted leopard, but you know, I can change my spots.”

I ask, why does she does do this? She grimaces.

“You really wanna know?” I don’t nod but I shake. I shake all over.

“Because it means I can be whoever I wanna be, I can be a different person every night, and when I get tired of being that person, I can change. Nothing’s ever permanent, not even this,”

She draws her sleeve back and there’s a huge bruise in the vague shape of a hand on her forearm.

“A souvenir from playing Tiffany. But no one ever has breakfast at hers.”

She looks at me, past me, past the street corner where I found her and past the bridge across the river. She goes all around the world with that sad-grey gaze and when she gets back I already know it’s somebody else looking at me.

“You know how I told you that no one ever leaves me?”

Yeah, I remember. She was Catherine Hepburn and she smelt of a hangover. Her voice was three notches higher then whoever this is.

“It’s because I always leave first. And, anyway. It’s never me that’s leaving, is it? It’s always someone else. You can’t leave someone you’ve never met.”

Oh, contraire. People do it all the time.

On buses. In streets. Out of buildings. In airports and off ships.

People leave each other behind every single day without knowing it and every single day 6.97 billion hearts are broken, one by one.

“So, all those people, they never get to leave me, because I leave as soon as they look at me, before we shake hands or speak a word. I leave before they even know I’m there.”

Most people do.

“And in the morning, when they do go, they’re not leaving me behind, no. They’re leaving Cindy or Louise or maybe Wendy to pick up what the night forgot to take with it.”

I feel kinda sorry for her. Whoever she is. That would mean you were avoiding who you are, avoiding being yourself just so you don’t get hurt.

“Yeah, so?”

She flicks her hair and her voice is so confident but somewhere in the back of it I hear the girl I picked up all those nights ago who I fell in love with. I want to pull her out, put her back together and heal the bruises and make her stay. I want to tie her down and reconstruct her.

I tell her you can’t run away from yourself forever.

She smiles, differently, to the side.

“No, sweetie, you can’t.”

And she’s gone,

“Just one night at a time.”

---------------------

- Mikee Sto Domingo.

Amy Hempel.

The Harvest.

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn't see my legs. I remember knowing that I shouldn't look, and knowing that I wouldlook if it wasn't that I couldn't.

My blood was on the front of this man's clothes.

He said, "You'll be okay, but this sweater is ruined."

I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after injections, I knew there was pain in the room — I just didn't know whose pain it was.

What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

The five days they didn't know if they could save my leg or not I stretched to ten.

--------------

The lawyer was the one who used the word. But I won't get around to that until a couple of paragraphs.

We were having the looks discussion — how important are they. Crucial is what I had said.

I think looks are crucial.

But this guy was a lawyer. He sat in an aqua vinyl chair drawn up to my bed. What he meant by looks was how much my loss of them was worth in a court of law.

I could tell that the lawyer liked to say court of law. He told me he had taken the bar three times before he had passed. He said that his friends had given him handsomely embossed business cards, but where these lovely cards were supposed to say Attorney-at-Law, his cards said Attorney-at-Last.

He had already covered loss of earnings, that I could not now become an airline stewardess. That I had never considered becoming one was immaterial, he said, legally.

"There's another thing," he said. "We have to talk here about marriageability."

The tendency was to say marriage-a-what? although I knew what he meant the first time I heard it.

I was eighteen years old. I said, "First, don't we talk about dateability?"

The man of a week was already gone, the accident driving him back to his wife.

"Do you think looks are important?" I asked the man before he left.

"Not at first," he said.

-------------

In my neighborhood there is a fellow who was a chemistry teacher until an explosion took his face and left what was left behind. The rest of him is neatly dressed in dark suits and shined shoes. He carries a briefcase to the college campus. What a comfort — his family, people said — until his wife took the kids and moved out.

In the solarium, a woman showed me a snapshot. She said, "This is what my son used to look like."

I spent my evenings in Dialysis. They didn't mind when a lounger was free. They had wide-screen color TV, better than they had in Rehab. Wednesday nights we watched a show where women in expensive clothes appeared on lavish sets and promised to ruin one another.

On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask them how he felt, he would say, "924-3130." Or he would say, "757-1366." We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime.

There was sometimes, on the other side of me, a twelve-year-old boy. His lashes were thick and dark from blood-pressure medication. He was next on the transplant list, as soon as — the word they used was harvest — as soon as a kidney was harvested.

The boy's mother prayed for drunk drivers.

I prayed for men who were not discriminating.

Aren't we all, I thought, somebody's harvest?

The hour would end, and a floor nurse would wheel me back to my room. She would say, "Why watch that trash? Why not just ask me how my day went?"

I spent fifteen minutes before going to bed squeezing rubber grips. One of the medications was making my fingers stiffen. The doctor said he'd give it to me till I couldn't button my blouse — a figure of speech to someone in a cotton gown.

The lawyer said, "Charitable works."

He opened his shirt and showed me where an acupuncture person had dabbed at his chest with cola syrup, sunk four needles, and told him that the real cure was charitable works.

I said, "Cure for what?"

The lawyer said, "Immaterial."

------------

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

The accident happened at sunset, so that is when I felt this way the most. The man I had met the week before was driving me to dinner when it happened. The place was at the beach, a beach on a bay that you can look across and see the city lights, a place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it.

A long time later I went to that beach myself. I drove the car. It was the first good beach day; I wore shorts.

At the edge of the sand I unwound the elastic bandage and waded into the surf. A boy in a wet suit looked at my leg. He asked me if a shark had done it; there were sightings of great whites along that part of the coast.

I said that, yes, a shark had done it.

"And you're going back in?" the boy asked.

I said, "And I'm going back in."

-----------

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I'm going to start now to tell you what I have left out of "The Harvest," and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.

There was no other car. There was only the one car, the one that hit me when I was on the back of the man's motorcycle. But think of the awkward syllables when you have to say motorcycle.

The driver of the car was a newspaper reporter. He worked for a local paper. He was young, a recent graduate, and he was on his way to a labor meeting to cover a threatened strike. When I say I was then a journalism student, it is something you might not have accepted in "The Harvest."

In the years that followed, I watched for the reporter's byline. He broke the People's Temple story that resulted in Jim Jones’s flight to Guyana. Then he covered Jonestown. In the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle, as the death toll climbed to nine hundred, the numbers were posted like donations on pledge night. Somewhere in the hundreds, a sign was fixed to the wall that said JUAN CORONA, EAT YOUR HEART OUT.

In emergency room, what happened to one of my legs required not four hundred stitches but just over three hundred stitches. I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

My lawyer was no attorney-at-last. He was a partner in one of the city's oldest law firms. He would never have opened his shirt to reveal the site of acupuncture, which is something that he never would have had.

"Marriageability" was the original title of " The Harvest."

The damage to my leg was considered cosmetic although I am still, 15 years later, unable to kneel. In an out-of-court settlement the night before the trial, I was awarded nearly $100,000. The reporter's car insurance went up $12.43 per month.

It had been suggested that I rub my leg with ice, to bring up the scars, before I hiked my skirt three years later for the court. But there was no ice in the judge’s chambers, so I did not get a chance to pass or fail that moral test.

The man of a week, whose motorcycle it was, was not a married man. But when you thought he had a wife, wasn't I liable to do anything? And didn't I have it coming?

After the accident, the man got married. The girl he married was a fashion model. ("Do you think looks are important? I asked the man before he left. "Not at first," he said.)

In addition to being a beauty, the girl was worth millions of dollars. Would you have accepted this in "The Harvest" — that the model was also an heiress?

It is true we were headed for dinner when it happened. But the place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it was not a beach on a bay; it was the top of Mount Tamalpais. We had the dinner with us as we headed up the twisting mountain road. This is the version that has room for perfect irony, so you won't mind when I say that for the next several months, from my hospital bed, I had a dead-on spectacular view of that very mountain.

------------

I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn't believe it.

On the day of my third operation, there was an attempted breakout at the Maximum Security Adjustment Center, adjacent to Death Row, at San Quentin prison. "Soledad Brother" George Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old black man, pulled out a smuggled-in .38-caliber pistol, yelled, "This is it!" and opened fire. Jackson was killed; so were three guards and two "tiertenders," inmates who bring other prisoners their meals.

Three other guards were stabbed in the neck. The prison is a five-minute drive from Marin General, so that is where the injured guards were taken. The people who brought them were three kinds of police, including California Highway Patrol and Marin County sheriff's deputies, heavily armed.

Police were stationed on the roof of the hospital with rifles; they were posted in the hallways, waving patients and visitors back into their rooms.

When I was wheeled out of Recovery later that day, bandaged waist to ankle, three officers and an armed sheriff frisked me.

On the news that night, there was footage of the riot. They showed my surgeon talking to reporters, indicating, with a finger to his throat, how he had saved one of the guards by sewing up a slice from ear to ear.

I watched this on television, and because it was my doctor, and because hospital patients are self-absorbed, and because I was drugged, I thought the surgeon was talking about me. I thought that he was saying, "Well, she's dead. I'm announcing it to her in bed."

The psychiatrist I saw at the surgeon's referral said that the feeling was a common one. She said that victims of trauma who have not yet assimilated the trauma often believe they are dead and do not know it.

The great white sharks in the waters near my home attack one to seven people a year. Their primary victim is the abalone diver. With abalone stakes at thirty-five dollars a pound and going up, the Department of Fish and Game expects the shark attacks to show no slackening.

------------

Minimalism at its finest.

George Gordon Byron.

LARA: CANTO THE FIRST (EXCERPT), published 1814

XVII

In him inexplicably mix'd appear'd
Much to be lov'd and hated, sought and fear'd.
Opinion varying o'er his hidden lot,
In praise or railing ne'er his name forgot;
His silence form'd a theme for others' prate;
They guess'd--they gaz'd--they fain would know his fate.
What had he been? what was he, thus unknown,
Who walk'd their world, his lineage only known?
A hater of his kind? yet some would say,
With them he could seem gay amidst the gay;
But own'd that smile, if oft observ'd and near,
Wan'd in its mirth and wither'd to a sneer;
That smile might reach his lip but pass'd not by,
None e'er could trace its laughter to his eye.
Yet there was softness too in his regard,
At times, a heart as not by nature hard,
But once perceiv'd, his spirit seem'd to chide
Such weakness as unworthy of its pride,
And steel'd itself, as scorning to redeem
One doubt from others' half withheld esteem;
In self-inflicted penance of a breast
Which tenderness might once have wrung from rest;
In vigilance of grief that would compel
The soul to hate for having lov'd too well.

XVIII

There was in him a vital sign of all:
As if the worst had fall'n which could befall,
He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurl'd;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shap'd
By choice the perils he by chance escap'd;
But 'scap'd in vain, for in their memory yet
His mind would half exult and half regret.
With more capacity for love than earth
Bestows on most of mortal mould and birth,
His early dreams of good outstripp'd the truth,
And troubled manhood follow'd baffled youth;
With thought of years in phantom chase misspent,
And wasted powers for better purpose lent;
And fiery passions that had pour'd their wrath
In hurried desolation o'er his path,
And left the better feelings all at strife
In wild reflection o'er his stormy life;
But haughty still and loth himself to blame,
He call'd on Nature's self to share the shame,
And charg'd all faults upon the fleshly form
She gave to clog the soul and feast the worm;
Till he at last confounded good and ill,
And half mistook for fate the acts of will.
Too high for common selfishness, he could
At times resign his own for others' good,
But not in pity, not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That sway'd him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would, in tempting time,
Mislead his spirit equally in crime;
So much he soar'd beyond, or sunk beneath,
The men with whom he felt condemn'd to breathe,
And long'd by good or ill to separate
Himself from all who shared his mortal state.
His mind abhorring this had fix'd her throne
Far from the world, in regions of her own:
Thus coldly passing all that pass'd below,
His blood in temperate seeming now would flow:
Ah! happier if it ne'er with guilt had glow'd,
But ever in that icy smoothness flow'd!
'T is true, with other men their path he walk'd,
And like the rest in seeming did and talk'd,
Nor outrag'd Reason's rules by flaw nor start,
His madness was not of the head, but heart;
And rarely wander'd in his speech, or drew
His thoughts so forth as to offend the view.

XIX

With all that chilling mystery of mien,
And seeming gladness to remain unseen,
He had (if 't were not nature's boon) an art
Of fixing memory on another's heart.
It was not love perchance, nor hate, nor aught
That words can image to express the thought;
But they who saw him did not see in vain,
And once beheld, would ask of him again.

I don't really create emotional states, y'know what I mean? I just take note of the apocalypses that occur in everybody's souls and I sing about 'em again and again, every night. That's all.

-- PD.

Inertia.

He is a bird cage unto himself. He is neither here nor there, though he is felt everywhere. He's deficient but stubborn. Just so damn stubborn. The kind of stubborn that gets you into craptastic situations like this.

I cough, though that doesn't register in his pigeon-like mind. “Raph, I don't think this is a goo-”

He stutters awake and looks at me as if I took away his coveted crumb. “Oh come on. Really? This was your idea after all.”

So goddamn stubborn.

“Oh, really? So when I told you that, no, I didn't want to go on a midnight casual stroll in the woods for a place that is not only impossible to find, but, y'know, doesn't even exist, I was actually saying hell yeah, lets get killed tonight? You're insane.”

An all-knowing smile blossoms upon his granite lips and he slips further into the night, tangling himself into its shadows.

Stubborn asshole.

I try to find my way back to him but all I am met with is withered willows and carved names. There's a “Johnny loves Bonny” and a “Karen was here 1987”. Johnny-who? Karen-who? No one's gonna know who you are. There's a million Johnny's and Karen's glorified on these pieces of bark now. The key to immortality is surnames, people. It's all about the Bellford and the Valvert and the Kurkovich.

There is a light in the distance and I think it's him, but I know he didn't bring a flashlight. He's much too proudly spontaneous for such trivial needs like that.

“Raph!” I call, but nothing answers. Nothing but an owl's hoot and he's not stupid enough to catch some mythical disease and become a shapeshifter, so I bring in the big guns. “Raphaello Fernando Gale!”

“Don't call-”

The voice jumbles to white noise as I sprint over to the source. What I see makes me wish I didn't eat that taco beforehand.

I swear I never thought I'd look this myth in the eyes. Or rather, in the mouth. In front of me lies a cave, rocks crumbling inwards so that the entry seems obscured. Really like a wrinkled mouth, crumpled up in an attempted whistle-forming maneuver. The light, so glazed and lemon green before, now shines a brilliant ripe orange from an ancient oil lamp post on the side.

This is the anti-bermuda triangle twist. The stuff you never see coming. That just slap you over and over for your denial. You stubborn bastard.

“Hello? Anyone there? I do believe we have arrived, but if you want to take a few seconds to aimless stare into place, then do go on. Tell me when you're ready to apologize.”

You know what else slaps like nothing else? Flawed logic.

“Apologize? Me, apologize?”

“Mmhmm.” He avoids my glare and starts whistling some old Charlie Brown number.

“What for, pray tell?”

At this he redirects his blue eyes - dark and ominous in the night – to my bewildered ones and begins. “For starters; no one calls me that. Ever. The time's too late for revolutions, so stop before you make that a habit.”

Really? I roll my eyes. It's always the same argument. He's had it in for his name since the beginning. As early as his birth, his mother reckons. Though you can't trust everything that woman says. She's as drunk as a low-life mall Santa on Christmas on her good days.

When she gave birth to Raph, she was literally tearing the linen beneath her, she was so in need for a hearty bottle of scotch. On seeing him in her arms, her first words were; “I need a double malt. Now.”

His name came to be when a nurse came to take him away. “What are you going to call him? He's got the most beautiful eyes...” and his mom, she replied, “All babies have blue eyes from birth. They only begin to change colour later. You learn that in high school, for goodness sake. Before they screw with you and tell you you're not good enough to know what they know and you are freaking reprimanded for knowing too much.”

Dejected, the nurse - following hospital protocol - left without a word, but not before the inebriated woman slurred finally, “His name will be Raphael, Raphaello Frenando Ga...” before she knocked herself out.

It would come to be a rusted cross on young Raphael's head. He hated the italian painter. He wanted to be someone more mysterious, more powerful. Someone to be admired. He wanted a name like Apollo, the embodiment of romantics. At least that's what he told me. Stubborn scalawag.

I look at him, waiting for him to continue, not disguising my disinterest.

“Secondly, you called this a – oh what was it? – a 'waste of precious free time better spent on more constructive pursuits'. Yeah. That was it. Insulting, to be sure. And finally, I proved the impossible and therefore the epithet 'insane' no longer applies. Y'know, you really shouldn't fling such hurtful words about. My soul bleeds, James, when you do such things.” Here he throws himself at me, laughing at the faux tragedy of his dramatisation.

“James, Jamesie,” his eyes sparkle as if he's sniffed some brown recently. Really, I wouldn't be surprised, the reckless fool. “Look, it's just like in the books.”

He points his crooked index finger to the cave and then stabs it into my chest. “It's just like in the books. Don't you see?” His eyes widen. “It's a sign.”

I laugh, though it sounds more like an exclamation of spite, than anything else. “Seriously, man. A cave in which poets have died writing their finest work? Nature's revenge on the cleverness of man? You believe that?”

“I live that, James.” He replies cryptically. Ever the lover of ambiguity.

“What do you mean?”

“C'mon.” He motions with his hand to follow and all I can think is; I'm walking into my grave.

We start walking in and it smells like death.

“This is so stupid. This is stupidity at its height. I should've told mom I loved her. I should've stashed my journals before the inevitability of the scavenger hunt for lasting souvenirs after my renouncement from this world occurs. She's gonna find them and think; my son was a real nut. A real freak. Not worth rememberin-”

“James, you're rambling,” a voice ahead of me rings of a calm. A stark contrast to my nervous mumbles. “Seriously. Chill, man. We're almost there.”

“Where? How do you know where we're going?”

“I told you. I live this, James.” I still can't fathom what he means by it. He doesn't turn around but keeps walking into the void. Stupid, stubborn son-of-a-gun.

We walk in silence for another minute. And then another. And another. It feels like my nerves are hardwired on end and I start getting impatient.

“Raph, are you sure you know wher-”

But he cuts me off. “Here we are.”

I am hit with thousands of blinding lights. White flickering polka dots fill my eyes and I get dizzy and fall down on the unforgiving rock of the mammoth clearing.

“James, no need to knock yourself out, man.” I see stars. Literally. The ceiling of the cave gets to a certain diameter of surrounding rock and then explodes, allowing a lookout to the sky. A dish served better cold. A dome of beauty, really.

I feel Raph lay down beside me and sigh. I still feel lightheaded from the fall. “Hey Raph,” I manage.

“Yeah?”

“Why don't you like your name? What's it about Raphael you don't like? I mean, really?”

There's quiet for a long time, and I'm almost about to hit him for the thought that he'd fallen asleep when he answers, “Did my mom ever tell you why she named me 'Raphaello'?” He makes a face as he says the name.

“No.”

“Do you know what he was famous for?”

“Uh... his frescoed 'stanze' in the Vatican, his depictions of the Virgin Mary, amongst other religious characters?”

“No. I mean in the heart of it all. Raphael was a man of perfection. His every work was idealised – his chins in perfect proportion with face, his eyes an artist's ideal distance apart. He was a man of method. He knew exactly what was perfection and what was flaw. His world was black and white. Mom, being the trailer park kid that she was, where everything was a flaw... well. She wanted the white. She wanted the perfection. She wanted something good. In calling me that, it wasn't some subconscious slur. It wasn't her drink talking. It was her. She was hoping that if she called me 'Raphaello', maybe I'd be some sort of straight lined perfection she never had. Suffice to say, I was a disappointment. Never goes a day without that being acknowledged. And I hate that. I hate the concept of perfection in a world that is devoid of such things. That's why I hate Raphael.”

I just lay looking at the stars and feel him relax and gaze at them with me. After a while, I break the silence. “Perfection does exist, y'know.”

“Where?” His whisper sounds choked on his feeble hope.

“The stars are perfect.”

“No they're not.” He replies, his voice sounds drained, a plug has been pulled out. “They're just burning chemicals and lumps of jagged rock. Imperfect.”

“Only when you look at them up close. Raphael wasn't perfect. It's the creativity that oozed out of his skull that was the genius perfection. Raphael wasn't perfect. His life was in shambles. He was an orphan from the age of eleven. Raphael wasn't perfect.”

I'm mumbling again, but Raph is quiet and doesn't seem to mind. “Besides, you write, Raph. You're kinda like Raphael too, except you paint perfection in words.”

At this he smiles and we lie there content, among the ruins of lyrical genius, the cleverness of poets receding, yet burning under our skin.

“Besides,” I whisper. “Perfection is subjective.”

I smile at him and he rolls his head to look at me and, after some time, smiles back.

“You stubborn bastard,” he says.

Isabelle Eberhardt

Voluptuous Corruption

(from Infernalia, 1895)

In the nocturnal silence, the dismal, oblong hall, faintly lit, vaguely slept.

From the infamous tables, from the grimy, befouled floor, mounted a dull, insipid odor -- an odor of human entrails, of clotted blood, of splattered drugs...

In this perfume of misery, in this dolorous salon, upon two slabs, two cadavers dozed, covered by bright white sheets, sinister vestments of terror.

Close to the naked wall, wall of hospital or prison, of asylum or barracks, beneath his lamentable drapery, a man reclined, eyes closed, fixed forever in his from-now-on eternal indifference. Very young, twenty years old perhaps; the profile of a milk-white statue, very soft, blanched lips barely smiling on the livid face, a smile from beyond the tomb...

In the corner opposite, an outspread woman, she too, beneath the miserable shroud.

An image mystical and pure, in her pale transcendental beauty of a martyr...

Beneath the bluish shadow of jet black hair, a motionless pallor, flesh voluptuously radiant in the coldness of death, a stranger henceforth to inflamed kisses and ardent embraces.

The rigid form peeped from the infamous veil, flaunting the curves of its perfect figure...

And over this sinister realm of shadowy death, the flickering flame of the gas threw its cruel reflections.

In the dense, ponderous silence, in the nauseating odor, both of them young and beautiful, the nameless cadavers slept their sleep of astonishment...

They still had kept their human form but, in the mortuary hall, they counted for naught, they were naught, expunged forever from the lists of the living.

Wretches crushed by destiny, laid low by vice; travelers forgotten in an hour, they had washed up here, stranded. Tomorrow, under the frigid scalpel, cut into strips, shamefully skinned, picked apart, entrails bared, they would be shown to other young men, to young women, avid to live, to learn, to love, their organs torn open, sliced to ribbons, bleeding remnants of the bodies which were, no doubt, their only wealth and happiness during lives of sordid abjection.

They were going to expose their final misery to the sublime indifference of the sun -- to the sun in its eternal joy...

What did it matter!

In the grand enigma of eternal Becoming, who would regret this blood, this life, this sacrificed flesh?

And all of them who, tomorrow, were going to soak their hands, young and warm, in this icy blood, in this mutilated meat, afterward would go try to assuage a little the pain of their pitiful brethren, would try to appease one day the great howl snatched by incessant Becoming!

Then they, too, would come to roll, suddenly inert and glassy, in the same Nothingness without form, without duration, without name...

And so forth, forever...

They lay awash in the strange effulgence of the feeble light...

Close to the miserable couch where the sallow woman slept, a student, night watchman at the clinic, stood stiffly.

He stared at her carnal envelope, seared by a dreadful desire.

His pale face, with anguished black eyes, convulsed with icy shivers.

With all his will, with all his youthful energy, he resisted, struggling against the sinister beckonings of neuropathic compulsion.

But, unable to flee, he stood fascinated, immobile; languishing, flagging instant by instant, fallen prey to a shocking natural beauty, heart brimming with disgust...

He felt himself drained of force, powerless in the face of the hideous embrace which he madly desired.

And he would soon surrender...

His suffering was intolerable in this pitiless night...

His virility revolted against the abominable coitus; his will took flight...

And he remained motionless, forehead drenched in sweat, fists clenched tight...

He felt strong and fine; he was quite young and altogether male. And his pride balked at the thought of this funebrial simulacrum of love which, so many times before, had dragged him into the ineffable abysses of voluptuousness.

Sickened, he beat back the obscure phantasmagoria born from his compulsion which, tonight, appeared in the face of this woman his eyes watched without modesty, and unblushingly devoured; the face of the horrible chimera whose gelid form, triumphant beneath the limp drape, debased him, degraded him, rendered him vile.

He strove with all his energy, with all the numbed, half-conscious, but still-living chastity which was in him, to restrain his delirious desire until it could be transferred to the possession of a living woman -- no matter whom...

But all the pictures conjured up by memory, under violent force of will, were pale and impersonal... while that which he viewed before him -- the corpse -- her young flesh simmering, whispered to him, sighed and quivered, and he buckled in a swoon.

The blush of shame, in the face of downfall, mounted to his cheeks... he despised himself, he loathed himself in this tortured hour.

His gaze glided over the contours of the funereal drape. He knew, and he looked askance.

But he wanted to see, to look at reality, invincibly.

To this desire, he gave in, wrestling all the while against the other, which he knew to be morbid and infamous.

With his violently trembling hand, he lifted the drape and regarded the lamentable nudity which sprawled before his lewd and insolent gaze.

Then he felt himself sinking, with one long shudder, into the depths of the triumphant flesh...

He fell upon the chalky cadaver, gripped by a savage thrill, mournful, painful, teeth clenched, wincing, shivering in his horrible fever...

Once taken, he no longer felt her coolness, but only the spasms of ultimate voluptuousness.

With all his strength, he clasped her, clutched her to him again and again; she felt alive, burning, crazy under his caresses, and he clung to her palpitating flesh, lascivious and soft in its mellow heat of passionate love...

He let out a furious rale of voluptuosity, the cry of triumph, the grand hallelujah of all-powerful, all-conquering neurosis.

Enraged, the pure, savage male, he thrilled all the more as he felt her come alive, throbbing under his mad caresses.

He pressed her violently, until it hurt, his lips upon those of his phantom-lover, of the insensate decedent.

Once again, the same voluptuous shudder shot through the entire length of his body.

His head, with eyes enlarged by rejoicing, rested languidly, tenderly, upon the breast of the deceased.

And she, distant, inanimate, insensitive to the ardent caresses of this male who had possessed her in spite of death, remained always outstretched, face turned toward the ceiling drowned in vague shadows.

Her dead eyes remained shut, without joy and without pain, in this monstrous coitus; she recumbed more passively than any lover ever could, beneath the potent shudder of the living being.

At the pale rise of the fine spring morning, on her couch of blood and love, the departed and her lover lay peacefully, reposed in sleep: she, ever tranquil, already flown toward the shadowy unknown; he, destined to revolve a few more years within the impersonal turbillion of eternal Becoming...

Translator: Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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If you look beyond the necrophilia, it's beautifully poetic.

------

It was you and me, and a deep blue sea.

Not really, but let's pretend. Just for effect.

We'll rip apart the withered doors of the pickup. Throw the dashboard through the windshield. Feel the water run up, drowning our sorrows and last glances. We'll submerge and our scattered remains will show no signs of bloodshed. We'll be the lost corpses of art, lying in dry sand. Leftovers that Evapora's grasp was too weak to fling to Heaven. Our joint words will lie scattered across the plains, stark reminders of long nights, drunk on wit and that red liquid – alcohol with no name. It's the same result, I remember us slurring. Rich men covering up flaws behind thick chardonnay scented mustaches. Irony at its finest.

The sun will have no mercy, though we never expected it to, and will crust lips and hair. But we will remain. Until the coming of the moon. For that is when we'll see the glimpse of our forever. Though we won't be on the ground, but feeble spectators to the plague of stars. No. We'll float up with them, touch liberty at its purest form and never look back. Our inaudible laughs will reverberate and chime through those tormented by economic blues and they'll look up and think. No. Really think and wonder about how their life ended up centered about conformist paper bills when the sky was theirs to take as but infants to life's embrace.

William Blake.

"Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.

"And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door."

The Priest sat by and heard the child;
In trembling zeal he seized his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admired the priestly care.

And standing on the altar high,
"Lo, what a fiend is here! said he:
"One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery."

The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain,

And burned him in a holy place

Where many had been burned before;

The weeping parents wept in vain.

Are such things done on Albion's shore?