On the Third Day, Page Three
How does an entire landscape starve? Hide it behind the highest hill, Miss Everest. Lift your head up over the crest of your tiara and review your wake, the naked empress’s golden goose hidden under a tiger-lined regal cape that snaps asps at passerby’s as you raise your wet, still simmering scepter to the clouds, and say:
Page Three: Pussy Mine
Oh, I love the way she say that pussy mine (Pussy mine)
Oh, I work that pussy out like nine to five (Nine to five)
Oh, can’t get that pussy off of my mind (Of my mind)
Oh, hit it from the front, then I hit that pussy from behind
— Bella Thorne, Pussy Mine
as if swan-diving from the highest fertile giant into the vast and perilous divide scraped open in gashes of arroyos and heated basins. The limbs of trees become sad hollow echo chambers for scurrying nameless jerboas, just a cozy of clay-caked fur, killing one another over an insect.
The severity of the desert looms large over the denizens, too energy conservative to frenzy or be restless, patience is the brew of every day. The sun is a delight until you cannot turn your face from the brilliance. Or your back. Stuck shackled, a rock formation of old Prometheus, knee-deep in the burning sands, pleading with the stars to arrive early. But with too much firelight, he can never tell where they are, and so his prayers go wasted into the aether.
The horizon blaze jitters as a phantasm of legs mummies into view. You may sit down onto your scepter and wait. Patience. They will be here soon. It is a man and his camel. But the TV hasn’t been tuned to the right frequency, so let me leave you there for a moment.
But from the air, the view is magnificent, wriggling spermatozoa of dunes, eyed with the oases, a lingering scent of curry from the cookpots of climbers, just over future’s ridge. Trace a line of time’s carving in Tibetan chimes or a skeletal hand down the length of her back, and there’s a nodule where each piece of spine must reside. I could slip my fingers in between your bone, to the other side of your scapula and unpack your forgotten wings.
Because the movement seems planar from up here. When I was young, I used to tolerate an Atari game where you guided an overhead tank through a maze to rain detonation down upon your opponent. How quickly I disassociate from the relationship, it wasn’t me who guided that tank, it was someone else, some ghost hidden in the machine who merely took my joystick position as suggestion. And you’d only fail if you kept pounding on the large red action button. You couldn’t fire quickly enough, and you would stutter your machine into overdrive, and the ammunition would get clogged in the barrel. This is back in the day when we were still faster than the processors; days long gone.
If I look at my clock, it tells me this is 2021, and as a creator, as a human, as a flesh monstrosity bounding about this obstacle course of existence, I can no longer keep pace with the clocktimes, they’ve long outpaced me, as I’ve outpaced my biology.
Not in a vapor of worms and degradation, but just as an imaginator. I could picture myself being at the door without having to go there. I could run there forty times in my mind in the actual time it would take this entire apparatus. While time may not move too much faster than my mouth, it moves far faster than my corpus. I am dragging this horrid catastrophe of flesh behind all desire and hope. And one little sharp point intentionally placed could collapse it all, decohere my existence even before the bulging artery levee bursts in my brain.
And what does it matter then that grieving tears are made of saline and not silicon?
What would it do to this story that literarily hasn’t even started yet?
“Thanks, dear reader,” probably isn’t sufficient. I would take the back of your neck, and feed we a kiss that bellows with love and affection. And if that doesn’t work, well, then I’d best tackle my best mantis position to plead for those saline tears to ablute me of my mortality.
If just for a moment.
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