Didi loved her work; she needed
little more than praise, immunity
from prosecution, and a god
that swore that crime still paid.

Dolor was the daughter of Woe Betide,
born from a murder of crows; she
kept the wolves from the door with an
arsenic smile and a penchant for razorblade prose.

No-one knew exactly how or why
they cut and closed the deal
to prime unnatural disaster
with lascivious appeal.

Cut/Scene(sters)

Overlooking the best parts of London's east end
sat a dispossessed Nantucket shack, its origins arguable,
its contents curious, its occupants rapacious but always
reliable; inside, a pair of lightfingered domestic gun molls
get dolled up for an evening of terrifying all-night drugstore counters
and patronizing the patron saints of the neon underworld.
Black never looked better then when it was smeared
across the exodus of tubercular-pale flesh that stalked
through the city, like a pair of movie-extras
from a spaghetti-western set in feudal Japan; together
they created the daintiest fervor in steel-toed rhythm,
cutting a swath through exiled neo-nobility and the best
that ex-pat publican houses had to offer.

Any self-suspecting bystander, indecent or otherwise,
might anticipate the impotent arrival of a marshall
to amplify the seething of the Samurai Sun before time was called
something other than a waste of space. But this was playtime;
the reprise of subdural wars between repressive regimes
and extraordinary dreams, thought out over neural zones
drafted to captivate hollow hearts and spineless mimes. Downtime
inevitably gestated a complex vacuum; its terminus delivered
sporadic bursts of semi-automatic sarcasm that triggered
a mass exogenesis of mutant muses, rendering both style
and substance redundant in this sordid subdomain
of the dispossessed. The stage was set; or maybe the set
was staged--equally implausible scenarios soliciting exploitation.

Nails filed to inextricable points, they clawed their way
to the top of the sprawl, stopping only to extricate the random
bit of unblooded fodder from the gin mill, the landscape
fast reduced to a cartographic abstract of cathartic wound probing
until the whole neighborhood looks like last year's carcass
in this year's kevlar. Locking arms, they continue onward,
waltzing in three-quarter time to a thrash-metal beat, a ritual
repossession of fleshly bodies in the face of mechanical
intercession; now they're operating on carnival sideshow impulses
and post-hypnotic suggestions. Didi's still punching the clock,
her hips moving like a roulette wheel on her way to another
cramped-quarters tête-à-tête, while Dolor amuses herself
by telling fortunes, turning incurable romantics into the
chronically inane; after all, a girl's got to fake a living.

Moderation was not Didi's forte; having outlived the vulcanized
suicide suit, she morphed to fully fledged fashion fascist,
the very model of vulgarity. Her catalyst crossfire dress,
iridescent shaders and two-tone tessellated stockings suggested
she was on a role to nowhere, a wanton world of whorecraft
besieged by anachronistic avatars shooting up the mainstream charts,
repudiating vital signs like grand theft automatons on liquid nitrogen.
While psychotronic strategists were talking heads, Didi gave them
hell; scorched earth and stagnant sky squeezed existence dry
until bleeding hearts turned to shrinking violets with a predilection
for pseudo-masochism. No-one could have predicted the chain
of events that broke all links with virtual relativity; no-one
that is, but Dolor, whose manifold manifestations never failed to breathe
an essence of inevitability into their nihilistic games.

Suggestively intertwined, this post-war pair of black market
Mary Magdalens rattled windowpanes as they masticated
the urban sprawl, racking up charges of biochemical auto-exotic manslaughter
and noveau-narcotic larceny, nicking dime-store novels and
cut-rate couture, which they stashed in garter belts and skinslips,
saving up perjuries for a rainy day. Even the most ardent of
admirers in absentium only looked them in the eye through a two-way
mirror, the better to avoid the cryogenically carnivalesque sprawl
that lay like abandoned marionettes in their wake, decorated
by carrion birds and the glitter of alchemical taint.

Slash/S(in)isters

Sisters of merciless mayhem united by
dactylic daemons; tetrameter's running as
questions configure amoral dilemmas of
surplus cadavers despoiled by insolvency.

When Dolor reasons, Didi rhymes. A line
is drawn to intersect the underpass
of Styx and stones, where neither is inclined
to limp along in pure iambic farce.

In this haven of hellfire the land is for free,
so as temperature rises, the yield offers pre-
nuptial profits on which reputations are laid
and a pestilence rains on convention's parade.

05/29/2011

Author's Note: A collaboration with my own sinisterly sinuous sister in prose, Laura Doom...there was a time this kind of thing would have gotten us burned at the stake -but then again, we like tempting fate *saucy grin*

Posted on 05/30/2011
Copyright © 2024 Therese Elaine