Mascara-Viscera Part 4

Thief, thief elf with a key, a thousand rasping angels their throaty javelins hurled from branch's edge, brief pageant robbing summer's pantry.

Offal of the fall, the lake a sequined glove tossed from a careless hand; a rowboat as a buckle chromatic foam for a finger's fan.

YELLOW HAIR

With that lime green hairnet commonly used by b.u.t.terfly dispatchers-- something your aunt might have commandeered to put her hair up donkey's years ago, I unjarred the bottle of air & with a pair of forceps tried to wrangle the life juices from a Polyphemeus[1] in a manner akin to Ulysses in that cave three millenia ago; his gentle bleating like the whine of the net across the gelatin fabric of air or the flash of a tomahawk gliding across Custer's golden hair.

[1] Large buff silk-moth with two eyespots on the hind wings named for the giant Polyphemeus in the Odyssey. Ulysses had the giant blinded with a sharpened pole.

PILTDOWN MAN

Popping out of the dark reddish "Merry Christmas" haze twinking blinking land of Nod (or rather it's Ned, the hefty trucker); eyes, steel-belted radials, in a rig big like Santa Claus; a Stegosaurus swinging sabre-toothed tail & flexing padded paws to gobble night.

Loads so dreary-weary their chrome-plated swamps are debris after a tank battle for troglodyte trilobites & chocolate coloured ooze belching brown down funnel flaps to carve deep bellows inside earth.

Such energetic slaves to cough & sound their wheezing sandy blasts make for breaks in a clearing for I see our trucker, eons from now, wedded to sentiment and rock perfectly preserved (to the dismay of future inhabitants), a fossilized remnant complete with steering wheel embedded in his chest (forlorn and anatomically correct much as dolls used in a.s.sault cases).

In a vision, envisage his life replete to the last Raggetty-Anne detail --straw-coloured hair, for one, looms like binder-twine or horse-hair thread tugged from a dirty mattress which props a toque or baseball cap, tobacco staining the resident gum chewing Neanderthal with tartan lumberjack shirt.

Contact with Piltdown Man, soggy h.o.m.o Erectus given to gunning engines, churning rubber as cavemen might in the La Brera tarpits.

Consider a farmer brief centuries ago stumbling onto a similar scene pocketing no cloverleafs of his own pasture's making but concrete expressways looming thru the fog & damp, then coming to his senses, hard-pressed as I.

SPANKED

Buying up egg rolls at 50 a kick, they royally entered our bloodstream --a riot of sensation akin to dynamite caps kicked off in the brain.

Later, sitting in the booth a chocolate brown wall to aid the digestion; a frumpy waitress plunks water down to complete the feast.

Taken back, the surcharge at such festivities exorbitant, we squander in exact change the full price to do it again.

THE CROWKEEPER

"She gallops night by night through lovers' brains...."

I see grindstones in the sky, pots of tulips overturned --big tug of the reins and chestnut hair is seen before the windowpane with chance & more chance lost to frost or hungry bees this still autumn eve.

Darling, walls that division us are envelopes of pa.s.sion bridging trust, seal it lest it rust.

Skeletal sc.r.a.pings make for poor bedding (this poor rhinoceros of lies) the devil gliding about so disguised on his tentacle and toenail chair (inviting lair) or is it hiccup and bandaged prayer yet stalwart wall is a rosary bead thick ale and bread to hungry snail or, better, lips to Romeo's blushing pilgrims.

Then, sudden, I'm old-- on a bench counting stars where each is a radiant patch of energy leased to the dark, an emblem burst mailed from eternity, spark to cigaret's flame to burn these little suns as cupid tails; your "bright eye, scarlet lip, fine foot, straight leg and quivering thigh."

CUANDO-CUBANGO

Moths, if they dream dusk, sport esurient hip-flasks on their wings-- gangster rum-runners better to sully dark, traverse caravans of colour amid silk-routes to dazzle Prester John, cork unscrew the unicorn horn askew.

2 Compte de la Mothe escadrilles/flotillas D'Entrecasteaux with Bougainville discovering well, Bougainvillaea and I, latter day la Perouse, cunningly amuck on coral adoration and wine, (red as scarlet leaves) chenille, frangipanni and the Marquis house colours of the flame-bitten tropics.

3 Let me scandalize why.

Watch the sea churn to white bubbles then coat your nostril with brine to run a finger down brown skin pa.s.sing for the Bronze Age.

4 Notice the invention of sun, a cloak suspended in a canopy-canoe profusion (left over from the first dawn,) oasis of calm, patter of motes and beams.

Garden of Shalimar.

5 My sentiments exactly.

ONOMATOPOEIA

One thing about this type of education, it certainly taught an individual to be philosophical about death.

He could ruminate conversably on the ultimate fate of a Greek shade or the Mesopotamian interpretation of the underworld.

Even contemplate figuratively what Achilles felt was his true funeral abode.

Shoel. The grave. Romantic poetry might have little practical application but it was great conversational stuff.

A book or two by obscure authors sure broke the ice at parties, was unbeatable verbal jousting.

Too bad the joke was on him for majoring in it.

Few people really cared what onomatopoeia was or that Presquile was in Maine. Worse, they acted like you were nuts for studying the Aeneid. The Aeneid! It did, too, have importance. Literature, that is.

Why it gave a man depth, a presence, a gracefulness that transcended petty, material strivings. Too bad, one couldn't show the white palms of one's hand for a living or revel in soft flesh as the natural mark of a born aristocrat. O tempora, oh mores: that the cla.s.sics had fallen so low.

It was maddening that literary civilization was within a hair's breadth at being snuffed by the ordinary convention of task bearing.

Being a poet, so basic to everything, didn't even show up on Manpower's computer scan.

The universities didn't care they were having the times of their lives parsing verbs and conjugating declensions, telling graduates "the pendulum will swing".

The best retort for that was the pithy epigram of the working man toiling in honest sweat within the secure bounds of a trade.

AT THE RED THROAT

In youth, Death was a puny boy possessing but wormy hands & fleshless fingers as in Witch Hazel or Scrooge's Future Ghost --that insipid Evil One Hansel so easily outwitted in a gingerbread house.