this is just a trifle written after a really intense dream state one night while thinking about my ex-boyfriend Ozzy. You figure out what it's about -- it's actually quite straightforward if you can comb through the strident metaphors...
I was never born. I shall never die. I have not always been me.
I don't want to think about death now; the cessation of consciousness. I must begin to believe in heaven so that when death comes, I face it with a rapacious grin, arms cast skyward &endash; immense! Like in dreams. Death must be the dreamy savor of rest. It can be no other way.
The lady's worm has teeth; I see them silvery slimy fluorescent promise dripping from the slitted maw. She wears the serpent like a necklace of pearls and amber; an albino corn snake. She wore the serpent to the nightclub, diving through the mist of cigarettes and intentions, and she spoke the two meaningless phonemes of my name.
I begin to lick her thighs. The skin of them is as white as eggshell, the gilded silver fur cascading down and filling my sinus with the hearty stench. No, this is as far away as one gets from death &endash; I am as alive as life castng towards life, swelling out like seas' foam. I am giving birth. Imagine! A thirty-three year old man giving birth!
The serpent angles it head to look at me, translucent tonue flickering and guttering in the nascent air. Dispassionate she is, as the higher-ups warned me, dispassionate and horrifyingly equivocal, her face tells nothing. Only the worm communicates, silently, spectacularly, with tongue, then teeth.
I reach into Lilith's tiny cunt, fishing for reaction. She hardly blinks or blushes, but the serpent strikes out, stretching itself to full threatening length. I don't know if the snake is my enemy. It seems to transcend me and Lilith both in knowledge, in sensitivity to the real rhythms of the universe. Perhaps we are meant to die in discomfort, alone, cursing. I believe the serpent knows. The glittering alizarin eyes know, but they tell me nothing, simply offers, and transforms.
Is it better to die in sleep? Alone? In the prime of health, or
covered with itching boils that no ointment salves? Which awareness
is the correct one, the one that leads to rest, comfort, even
consciousness? I don't need to be saved, I just want to know
what's going on. I have to want to die.
The scene in the nightclub was priceless. I stood at the bar, the bitter, unwilling, lonely king, naming the various beasts as they came into the night's existence, and the bartender drawled, "Hey, man, now there's a cure to what ails ya."
Lilith, tall and majestic, like a volcanic peak, an impossible garment of many colours which cauught the light and confused the eye as to the form of her courses. I, hungry for experience, welcomed the confusion. And of course the unmistakable gleam of the variegated scales of the worm around her through, as if embracing any declaration she might make. She came to me and I came to her, and now we come to now.
Lilith is behind me. I am still in shock from birth; wet and gasping and traumatized and in wonder at how the world has changed. I feel Lilith's breath on my back. She arranges my cooling limbs until she is pleased with their shape, and then I hear the throaty laugh of the conspirator.
The snake's tongue flickers across my buttocks - and
then I feel its head and tongue and all else inside me so clearly I
can see it before my eyes. And as surely as I know that night follows
day, I prepare myself for the lethal flick of its inexorable
jaws.
(4 a.m., 23 August 1994)