I'm never comfortable in the company
of men, even those with no presence.
Then again, women rarely feel comfortable
in my presence, whether I welcome
their company or not. I call it
plan A, though it's not a policy
that offers reassurance. Plan B
covers critical ill-will, involuntary
defamation and sensory depravity.

Katakumi was exceptional; an unnatural
small-print disaster, an exclusion
zone with a triple A mortality rating.
I stared shamelessly through a slit
in the fabric of virtue as she talked
herself into the night. Her pencil-thin
eyebrows wrote florid prose
whenever the conversation wilted,
and a host of lesser insects swarmed
the ripe nymphalid orgies that publicised
rumours of her specious freeze-dried frame.

Clearly, her agenda was hidden; she might claim
to have mislaid his TV schedule or, in a crisis
of faith, scour herself with anionic surfactants
as a precursor to dissolution. Enough already;
I needed to know: was she kosher, geisha,
or vintage tomato? My instincts told me
to consult an introspectrometer, which suggested
a secret half-life weighing heavily on her credibility,
but maybe that's just me. My conscience dictated
some hasty lines of retreat and made for the bar.
My 4G megaphone charged itself out of the market.

Left to my own devices, I frisked my backpack
for displacement activities and discovered
a hole where yesterday's pleasures had fallen out
of love with today's voluble collection
of moot excuses. With time wasting away
and space expanding to fill avoidance
I lifted her labyrinth of visceral illusions
and stole into dawn like a beat poet
screeching round the block; in the muted light
of sonics and semantics, I could find no alternative
to pleasing myself...

10/15/2011

Author's Note: [edit 17-06-15]

Posted on 10/15/2011
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