Darkest Peru

All entries will be friends-only from now on. However, I'll add you if you want to be added, it's not personal, merely a copyright issue. Leave a comment to be friended.

For Those Unaware, due to circumstances beyond my control or willingness to relate, yuki_onna is no more, I am over at mirrorspindle now.

Please make a note of it.

Anyone feel like beta reading a short story? It's due Friday, and once again I am refraining form posting it all here.

Title: The Psalm of the Second Body

Subject: Shamhat, the prostitute sent to tame Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Length: 3,000 words or so.

Some knowledge of Gilgamesh would be helpful.

Who's game? *smiles toothily*

Justice is practiced only under compulsion. Bounded on each side by asp and asphodel, I will give each to each what is theirs--or else I will hoard everything to myself, what is due them and what is due me, until I take all their punishments onto my own flesh, and all my ascendant vapours into my lungs, and become a body of deserving, bent until my nose brushes the ground with the gangrenous karma of every flagellation ever passed from leather to breast.

Give me the death you own, I will close it in a litle box and wear it around my neck like a relic of St. John--a shrunken head, black and sere, tufts of embalmed hair wisping into the air. I will travel over Holy Land with a gown of boxes, and what a music I shall make, the clodding of wood against wood, death against maiming against suicides, I will perform all your penances on the hot dirt. I will practice justice, over and over, until my body is a mass of rosary-welts, and purified in the marrow of stars.

( Lancelot--The Hanged Man )

Writing a novel. Will return when it is finished, to ruin more of these pages with rhymes. Which is to say--see you all in a week or so.

Perhaps I was supposed to learn something here. Something about being a hermit in the smoke-branched mountains, something about the anchorite chained to a stone wall. Perhaps I was supposed to lie down on the slab and press my pilgrim's palms together, exalted by a heavenward gaze, and hold a green-cowled moon between my thighs until I was released. The four of swords, blades all round, resting in a mausoleum with hyssop and yarrow on my stomach, and gardenias to swallow up the smell of death.

I think I was supposed to sit in a tree and empty my mind like a glass pitcher. I think I was supposed to go down into the grass, and know the roots by their Christian names.

IfI had memorized the hiragana of my palm-lines, and affixed my tongue to my eyelids, to taste the absence of color, I might have taken from this place a kind of gangrenous peace.

I was supposed to learn something here, something about how to bear this domesticated void within me, and not hear the howl of wind thorugh my lightless womb.

My hips are made of glass. In the halls of the library, they creak and shiver, multiplying their colors according to unnameable equations. They reflect books they do not understand, mute and stupid, meant only to carry the weight of glass-flesh. My feet alone are made of blood and skin, toenails like manuscript fragments, text hiding in the creases of heel and bone. The rest--I am a body of mirrors, slide into me and become a queen, I am empty, I am artifice, I absorb only blue light.

In the space between my breasts, coal has re-formed from diamonds. Here are scrawled buffalo and antelope and hunters trekking across the geography of the translucent torso, which is and is not an open vessel, which does and does not wait for the simple slip of your limb into its hall of terrors, which can and cannot see its own organs through the window-skin.

Break me, break me, break me, put your fist into my sternum and lick the blood from your hands. The nature of the glass-self is to be broken, to shatter--to burst is to become a nova of catherdral colors, and if I was once a blue veil of virgin thighs, I can be again. These kneecaps bend, bend, bend, and eagerly scratch themselves to dust on your teeth.

Full of that legendary black bile, I breath the algae-latticed water of 4 am, and it slides and ellides over my communion-tongue, tasting of eel-livers and verdigris. My lap is full of shattered light blubs, their pearl-sharp dust settling on my hair like a net of knives. The gratuitous morning boils on my scribbling hands, choleric light, mewling blue and grey. The Madonna of Pre-Dawn Light, Our Lady of Excess Humours. Legs crossed, the corruptible lotus, and the cicadas, the cicadas are stirring at my toes. See this frozen pose? This dead-limbed yogic splendor, hobbled at ankle and knee. And the stigmatic torso, where the winds were driven through, and the body broken into four stone slabs--I cannot read what the sun wrote on my bones.

I am sitting outside my skin, the horizon throttling with its petroleum fingers every neck I have ever owned. It is a poor beginning, all dressed up in methane blue and grimacing in the gin-soaked light, that door I can see off beyond the left-hand highway, the door that leads away from those dark fingers and their endless reach.

At 4 am, there is only the body of air and darkness, collapsing into itself like a Russian doll--daughter into mother into daughter into mother--and the wet sky-palms press down like a debauched baptism, pushing my red-lacquered skull into the next.

What guards me in these rust-ridden hours? Only scabrous wraith-whores with snow-burned hands, verses like flecks of spittle at the corners of their lips, clutching at my ears with choleric tongues, transparent hips grinding against me, begging to have their fortunes told. Their yellowed limbs run like yolks over mine, (divine jaundice!) and all their eyes are the secret blue of the drowned.

They crush Tiresiac breasts against me, whispering of how they were once men, before the flood, and their pretty red cocks pointed east, east, east. The wind and the sun slid over them like slick mouths, and the world was awash with their seed. Of course, before they grew those primordial beards, they were women and their ovaries thumped in them like little hearts--they have switched so many times they cannot remember the original regalia. Every seven years the mating snakes appear, rattling out the old songs.

These tits, they confess, are only theirs by happenstance--they will give them over to me, if I want them--they long to feed a mouth, any mouth, to catch the thin white stream of dystopian milk. Like old aunts they purse my lips, running fingers over my teeth, pushing moon-slippery breasts into my throat until my jaw fractures without sound, smothered by this colorless flesh. They beg me to suckle at the psoriatic nipples, they stroke my hair, croon, weep, whisper huskily that they will come back when they are men again and will I still open my pretty red mouth?

These are my dead dears, my hermaphroditic sisters, hunched over my limbs and plying my tongue with oracular sweets, the prophecies of the eyeless breast, fluid augur gushing from the womb, wetting the walls with portents. They tell the lie that they love their brother-selves, but at midnight the clock forces confession, and their chorus hisses through the ceiling:

Only when we are mothers can we rape you with smiles painted on our bellies. Only when we are daughters can we fill up your womb with honey and mortar, and make you heavy with our slattern-koans.

With both hands I have crammed the moon into my throat, and vomited back its chalky milk. I have scrubbed this white bile from the walls, astronomical gristle, the ground bones of its ruined face. Diamond slag drips from my lips ravaged by canal-cracks and the scars of past mornings spent hunched over the floor, heaving the sky into the drain.

When I was born, the moon was in Virgo. Perhaps I was meant to be a nun, and blister my fingers with tallow, sew up my cunt with copper wire and scour the nipples from my breasts with a paste of consecrated nettles. Perhaps I was meant to be as blank and unpenetrated as a statue, no terrifying black crescent grinning in me to swallow men like wriggling fish. Perhaps I was meant to have a rosary of severed eyelids, blinking against my throat at vespers, and plant the dross of infant foreskins in the churchyard, to feed the slack jaws of dead sisters.

But I ate my vows on a silver plate, and the plate was bright as the moon. They lurch in me, swinging the weight of the body I was meant to make of this hot flesh, and when I open my mouth to sing the matins, they fly out in a rush, a rattle of lunar horrors. My body is a hammer, and with it I mutilate the holiest of lights. 

Paper my coffin with poems that look like the hands of beautiful women. Their pages should shroud me like Laertes, edges curled brown and sweet. When the dirge is sung, black and sere, if it is too much to ask that my mother claw her arms and tear her hair, at least cut my father's throat and shovel him in after me. Cover us in hyacinth and rosemary (for remembrance) so that the stench of our debauched passage through the valley of death will not stain the fungal cathedral-ceiling, our putrefying psalms wafting up into the soil like the smoke of a grey-bellied censer.

There must be a mass for the Freudian dead. A requiem for Electra and Oedipus with a swan chorus, braying out a moon-hymn, a menstrual canticle bubbling in the bone-chalice. Sew his eyes into her cheeks, sever her tongue and wash his feet with the foaming stump. What a chapel it would be, what walls and what splintered pews, whose altar birthed that surgery.

Scratch all that--bury me at sea, I cannot bear all this noise, all this earth piling its mother-memory onto my skull. Jocasta hung herself so that we could all forget her, shove her wrinkled breasts into a gold box and hang it up in St. Peter's. She did us a favor, cow-haunched and mute. Where can I go to escape her, to escape him, the gnashing parent-golems, offering the linen noose and the bathtub with grimy grins, teeth sliding in their heads, grunting their own nicotine-paean in 4/4 time?

Nevermind. Burn me. Beasts fear fire, it has always been so.

My forearms irradiate the room, scalded skin pressing on the air, cell whispering to cell, subdermal communiques husky and dim. Confessional flesh, wet and kneeling even when I stand. When I slept, my body ran off my bones like sweat, and the bedsheets woke smothered.

I dreamed once that a man stood next to me on the train, and his eyes were made of spoons. He put his sunburned hand on my breast and caught the nipple, bronze as a helmet, between his fingernails. Blood seeped like milk from the twisting wound, and a child tugged at my skirt, begging to drink. As I wept he put his mouth over mine and spoke into my throat:

There is no 'I,' the self is perpetually finished and unfinished.

It is a pun only in English, the singularity of the letter I and the body held upright, limbs solid, a caryatid caught between man and child in a creaking carriage car, head thrown back, illuminated by flourescent coronae, alternating flashes of shadow and glass. If by some clandestine alchemy I could metamorphose the blood of my breast to gold, I could appease, I could be forgiven, I could loose his thorny hand from the skin which crackles and peels back, meat-black, and falls away, to cover the child's lips like sugar.

In the beginning, it is always dark.