reading Lolita backwards in a mirror
MITCHELL WALKER SIMON — November, 2024
the blood still throbs in my writing hand
it has bits of marrow sticking to it
and beautiful bright-green flies
I feel my slippery self eluding me
the music drowning the rest
the men away ... the melody of children at play
sounds rising like vapours from a small mining town
I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing
was not his absence from my side
but the absence of his voice from that concord
This then is my story
the ingenious play staged for me
began with the crack of a bat
an almost articulate sport
in a sluggish, heavenlogged system
of vivid laughter from my foul mouth —
nothing could be nearer
the tactile sense becomes at critical moments
our main handle to reality
I was injecting spurts of energy into the poor fellow
as if the bullets had been capsules
wherein a heady elixir danced
double, triple kangaroo jump
still singing those impossible sonorities
plangent chords churn in : G3 F2 C
“never use herculanita (i.e. heroin) with rum”
he pleads, he bleats, he bleeds.
I bandaged him up with a rag
like a maimed spare limb
I can arrange for you to attend executions
(not many know that the chair is yellow)
are you curious ?
I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica
plotted with love under pleasant skies
I have not much in the bank right now
but I plan to borrow
all the royalties from my upcoming play
I suggest you move in
as a house pet
as a young lad with three testes
I have to nurse my impotence
from your inner essential innocence
offer me gratis gloam moulting moist
silent soft formless tussles
or ox-stunning fisticuffs or goatish tender
hopping off the flying furniture
I am practically impotent, I’ll give you a splendid vacation
recall Kipling ?
une femme est une femme
mais un Caporal est une cigarette.
Now we need matches
stiff in the barroomette
my smudgy moustache twitched
lucidly insane, crazily calm
thin in a purple bath robe
incanting some selenian glow on a penele cigar
like a familiar and innocuous hallucination
up bum’s bloodshot eyes
no piano had plunged and plashed
like polka-dotted pinafores
or scintillas of diamond water
between the pines and cedars
of the ancestral home at 34 Grimm Road
Manchester revisited :
in an American suburban street a lone pedestrian
is more conspicuous than a lone motorist
and even the most miserable of family lives
was better than the parody of incest
which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif,
hung in his own remote flowered void
this scholastic rigmarole
like an iceberg in paradise
glistening in the neon light
recalls a pentapod monster —
my male vulnerability in trite brashness
not a boy friend
not a glamour man
not a pal
not even a person at all
but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn
foul lust provided me
fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp
a lithophanic eternity of genuflexion
an agenouillement for sweet mellow rotting Europe
my automaton knees going up and down
retreating in a mincing dance
glowing net rent on my damp retina :
“no, honey, no.”
I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind
I handed him an envelope with four hundred dollars
in cash and a check for three thousand
six hundred more
life is very short
but I have to say it
may be neither here nor there
voulez-vous venir avec moi ?
I mutely asked his blessing
in a world of total evil
we would become strangely embarrassing
smothered over unfolding memories
by the depths of calculated carnality
the existence of a Supreme Being
I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin
He is as good as destroyed
let me dally a little :
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty
a lovely young velvety delicate delta tainted and torn
on the brink of a russet ravine is revealed
by faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo
just as 2020 A.D. sings of folly and fate
an insouciance to souffler
Sade’s Joseph is all drink and drugs
smoking himself sure —
a fragment of cigarette paper on his underlip
guessing much and shaving little off
disdainful of hearing aids
as mauve almond trees bloom
I had an idle urge to squeeze out the blackheads
on the wings of his perspiring nose
with my long agate claws
like a bit of dry mud caking
waterproof like Botticelli’s russet Venus
cur, a mongrel curse
fragile, frileux, father me
in velvet and beige, maybe like a viscount
an aphonic whistle
from several smoking stacks leech
red mud and grey drizzle dribble
a wormy vegetable garden
dismal district all dump and ditch
the taste of coarse corruption.
I have camouflaged everything, my love
everything dapper and bilious and execrable :
“why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?”
why would a hunter need a pointer
more than a pew?
Mnemosyne, most mischievous of muse
the mother : purloined, amnesic, worthless
watches candy-striped drawers accept
languorous columbine kisses
from a mulberry mouth
(
my heart is a hysterical, unreliable organ pulsating
stark stiff lurid rhymes of a maniac masterpiece portending
possibilities of bliss with a little maid-men’s
shocking cure of pederosis
perdu in a Quebec sanatorium retching
the repulsive gagoon and his wife, a kiddoid gnomide
picker of cuticles at the office party
a cubicle of ads and fads, plenty of pleats
my frenetic lips vivisecting parties
flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder
upon a settee whipping wind might call :
“Dolorès Disparue”
an ex-pugilist recapitulating
especially painful palpitations
from recondite Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH
in the slanted handwriting of a frail frame fountain pen
a repressed undinist in talcum light
versed in logomancy and logodaedaly
swaying and staggered, speaking of
betrayal fury desolation horror and hate :
“he is your brother”
this Guartiano Forbeson seems to waver
insulting verisimilitudinous pseudonyms
masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile
free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother
freedom for the moment is everything.
who is neurotic ? I ask
)
the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain
after some lapses and losses I found him
probably Polynesian, a painted cretonne chair
upon which an exquisitely folded tartan lap robe
lay like La gitanilla, humping
so rosy and exemplary, our fundament jigging
sparrow’s sperm or dugong’s dung
as millers around the neon contour of “No Vacancy”
criss cross in drowsy rectangular shadows
despite liberal libations or intercrural ague of the ancients
lightheaded with a casual chuckle
his brown rose tasted of blood
which at least made sense
I had it in a jotter : “Joe, il est ill”
he drank beer with milk to counteract his “sprees”
tottering and grunting, shamming to evade my caresses.
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy
upon which doomed loves and lungs rely —
Why did I hope we would be happy abroad?