TOUCH ME

The King of the Dying Years sang to himself, for he was dying more gloriously than anyone else could possibly have imagined.

“Dirty old man, shit! Who you lookin’ at wrinkly, eh?”

“Myself!” Said I, in extreme icy quiet! “King of the Dying years at your service!” (For past eccentricities are not forgiven in the vigorous, youthful present, not forgiven by the burning ardour of stupid adolescent obsession.) “Hurt me if you can, ignoramus! Infuse me with life, though you know of no life to infuse! Shoot me up with worthless youth, though your fetid youth be so ugly! Beat some genuine feeling into this shrunken shadow, though sentiment ceaselessly escapes you! Wound me into some semblance of a reaction! Do one last thing for me for I cannot do it for myself. For I cannot do it. For I cannot. Myself. Touch me if you can, for I can no longer be touched!”


“Hey! Scumbag! Who you staring out, eh?”

“You!” Stared I back in extreme silence. “Touch me if you can!” (For my daughters are gone, tired and unforgiving of the same old stories, and I never laid a finger on them, or in them come to that. Never even thought about it until just now, ‘till just now when I saw through you, through those dead, empty teenage eyes. I could almost have felt sorry for you if what there were there were not simply so pathetic.) The King of the Dying Years sang to himself, “....the voyeur and the leopards, the toucher and the touched....our prowling eyes upon it all....”

“Hey, you! You! You askin’ for trouble?”

“As always, girl!” Was my imperious retort. (And I was not surprised at the tone of my voice, for my darling wife is gone, for she it was who kept me on the straight and narrow. And my old friends, they are all gone now, every last one.) “So do one last thing for me, will you? For I cannot do it for myself! Come on! Touch me!”

“Touch you?”

"Touch me!"

THE LEOPARDS (BIG CATS AND A BALD MONKEY)

“Peter, this can’t go on. Simply can’t go on. Friday’s the limit. After that it’s the end, I can’t take it anymore. Friday....We’ve got to get her out of here....” pleaded Alba in a distant sort of voice on the point of cracking under the emotion of it all, but my erection felt magnificent.

....the voyeur and the leopards....

Alba stared in my direction, sort of vacantly, gazed through me really, but, there she was, standing there next to me, next to the bed, next to The Pretty Girl lying on her back on the bed, radiantly naked. Alba, radiantly naked also, lowered herself onto the rumpled white sheet and she was over The Pretty Girl, on all fours, and, folding her elbows to lower her head, brushed The Pretty Girl’s cheeks, her whole face, with kisses and licks lighter than air and the movement was entirely under control, slow and deliberate and strong, like a leopard might well move and Alba turned her head up to look at me and thereafter never lost my eye, so I was held in the glint of a leopards stare such that, at that very moment she became a leopard and then they both became leopards before my very eyes and settled in together, elegantly, in that way that leopards have of moving together to rest, to caress, to watch. Big cats purring, forever vigilant, powerfully content.

....toucher and the touched....

The two of them were radiantly naked, me too, aroused and entranced, magnificent, and we were all bathed in celestial light, slightly blue, slightly orange savannah. (Except, of course we were not, for “celestial” and “radiant” and “magnificent” are just the kind of words that come to mind to describe these kinds of celestially radiant moments after the fact, a posteriori.)

....our prowling eyes upon it all....

In a trance, in the tall grass, from atop a small rise, staring into the clear, black moonless night sky, three leopards look incredibly insignificant, celestially, radiantly insignificantly magnificent, three leopards bathed under so many stars, the Milky Way, Mars, infinite galaxies they suppose, parallel and bubble universes, but care not whether they are right in their enchanted suppositions, or wrong, but they are eternally vigilant. “So much space, so much silence....” they think to themselves in magic unison, (Except, of course it was not magic, for “magic” is just the kind of word that comes to mind to describe these kinds of celestially radiant moments after the fact, a posteriori.) and, of course, with that thought there is no more silence, and there are no more leopards, no more eternity, but hey! Lo and behold, a magnificent music floats out of the ether.

the voyeur and the leopards
the toucher and the touched
our prowling eyes upon it all

“That’s it? That’s the lot, the whole song? Three fucking lines? Stupid fucking title almost as long as the song, three lines, and we’re back in the real world?” A voice in my head importuned me, but I drowned it out. “Yes! So, right then, we’re in this together. She’s with us from here on in, we work together.” I said.

“Big Cats and a Bald Monkey”© 2012, Jone Hernández & The Blue Roadsters™.

Elsewhere, in the real world, various men and women, AC Commercial Reps, oblige a father to witness the show they have arranged for his daughter. Then, after he gets his last feeble erection, they shoot him several times in the stomach. He who buys pays the price. There is profit to be made from these things.


Somewhere very distant, perhaps in a different dimension, Tankman Johnson lies atop the turret of his Chieftain, his custom baby, in a trance, staring into the clear, black moonless night sky. He feels incredibly insignificant, celestially radiantly insignificant, so many stars, the Milky Way, Mars, he supposes, but cares not whether he is right in his suppositions, or wrong. “So much space, so much silence....” he thinks to himself, and, of course, with that thought there is no more silence and a magnificent music floats out of the ether.

....the voyeur and the leopards....

And with that he rolls over onto his stomach and bawls through the commander’s hatch, “Put The Roadsters on the sound system, let’s get this show on the move, celestially, radiantly, magnificently on the move! And put that leopards DVD on the monitors. What? The one Bug Eyed Peter sent just before the New Year....and mute the soundtrack, we need the music.” And to himself he asks, “Why do those old BBC wildlife documentaries kill the magic with words like endogamy?”

....toucher and the touched....

“He who pays will pay the price.” He murmurs to himself.

....our prowling eyes upon it all....

A CHILD IS BORN

My father’s diaries and journals were hidden on the very top shelf of the kitchen larder. Hidden where he knew they would regularly be found by inquisitive youngsters, my sister and me. I was twelve the first time I climbed the shelves and discovered his writings, his daughter, just thirteen. By this subterfuge dad was able to explain things without recourse to conversations that made him sound confused. My father was like that. Now that I live with Alba and Peter we would love to turn him into a work of art, which, in his own modest way, was what I think he aspired to create. We have his works of art. His daughter read them many a time when she was younger but, in her late teens was unable to bring herself to read them anew. He created my sister and loved her dearly, but he brought me up with a quiet, desperate adoration I was never able to demonstrate in return. When I understood this, I understood his sadness, his silent despair. Pardon me if I have spoken of these things before, but sometimes I need to get these ideas off my chest, sometimes, when I speak, I can only speak through his words. Sometimes I am inside his head, I am him and so I can plead forgiveness.


The smell of death, he called it. The Smell of Nothing, he wrote, but he kept the concept quietly to himself throughout his childhood into his adolescent years. It was, he explained, a distant mixture of historical odours of institutional catering, cold cooked nursery lunches, tepid school dinners, and lukewarm hospital meals, “a prison of vast steaming aluminium vats filled with the faint smell of death. The Smell of Nothing, the smell that takes my breath away, that empties my lungs. A vacuum, The Smell of Death, it visits every now and again, like the welcome perfumes of night time pursuits, of sperm between my fingers, sperm seeping from between your late departed mother’s legs, sperm at the altar from which I so often fed so avidly. The Smell of Death, it visits every now and then like the scents of mourning toast and fresh coffee the morning after, but The Smell of Death, it stalks its way back too often for comfort, for it has its job to do; to remind me that ‘You are still alive!’.”

And then there is the entry entitled “A Child is Born.” And every time I read it I understand what my sister must feel and I long for her company ever more fiercely. Sonia never leaves news of where she may wander, so my longings remain strictly my own to suffer. How can I apologise? Father tried for an explanation but Sonia was long gone. “A Child is Born.” was written two weeks before dad died and is the last lucid scratching in the last, the newest, and the emptiest of his little pile of black leather bound journals.


“Born bald and choked up from the amniotic ocean into nothing. I was breach birthed, beached in salt sand and bathed in sticky blood, strangled with your gristle noose, but nothing happened. Birth, it had killed my art. The delirium was gone.

Then daughters mine, one breached bellowing the amniotic portal I had oft time worshipped at, she was mine, I had created her with you in love and lust. The second from the scalpel, from the burnished caesarean blade born, yours from somewhere and someone unknown to me, both born into nothing, both grown beautiful, yours, supremely, dangerously so. Adored, yours, supremely and dangerously so, but nothing happened. Births, they had killed my art. The delirium was gone.

Grown bald unto death, splattered and gagging on blood, I had been opened in caesarean canal, to give birth to cancer, in vain, and then I was drained, flushed away into the canal, into the tumourous sewers of nothing, into nothing. I watched the whole process from the fluorescent heavens, the theatre ceiling, the operating theatre ceiling. Cancer. There’s nothing to be done and nothing happened. Its birth, it had killed my art. The delirium was gone.”

THE LIFE MODEL, THE MODEL OF LIFE

Nineteen seventy two, late October, my memory feels it was a Thursday, perhaps Friday, in the life studio with my easel, drawing board and sheaves of quality drawing paper, a selection of drawing pencils of various softnesses 2B 3B, and vision and a model and me and I just, for the life of me, find it impossible to get the sketch to say anything. Then she twists and turns just for me. “Oh! Oh, mummy! How I love that lonely bumble bee!” I thought. “Sometimes you just can’t think straight....”

The model was called, let me suggest, if my memory serves me well, Louisa, and she was neither fat nor wrinkled nor old or grey nor deformed or toothless nor senile in any way, which made her nakedness incredibly easy to look at, which made her nakedness incredibly difficult to draw. She was twenty five years old, perched on a high, paint splattered stool, her right elbow resting on a grubby plaster Doric style column, that I remember clearly, and she spoke in soft tones, when she asked for a break, a cup of tea, to change her pose, she spoke in a poetry of becoming coyness, of a past somewhat Syd Barrett, somewhat distant, somewhat disjointed, remembered from way, way back behind the remote gaze of her glazed brown eyes.


For us, seventeen year old arts students discovering Bowie and Reed, she was the earthly princess of experience, a little bit of experience we could touch vicariously....“The Blue Moth!”....and I was supposed to be worshiping her with my drawing instruments, but I was utterly unable to study her to draw. I was incapable of getting my head round the idea. “Hi there, little bee! Bee, promise to be beautiful forever, like The Pretty Girl here....”

The boys and girls had given up and retired to the bar and the beer and the table football to exercise their wrists. Me, I had five minutes before Louisa wrapped herself in a tatty oriental silk dressing gown and floated, no, better, flitted off into the real world playing the part of The Blue Moth....“Mummy! Mummy, she’s dancing for me, mummy! Look! See?”

“I want to see everything!” I exclaimed, and rather shocked myself with my vehemence. “I want to see everything but I can’t stand in enough different places at the same time! I need to see it all!” So, at that, Louisa opened her legs and I could truly see more than I had ever seen before. “No! No! Sorry, I didn’t mean that Louisa, really....” But she, being the princess she was, smiled regally and fluttered off into the mists of nostalgia only to be remembered with lost lust forty years later.

LA ÁNFORA DE PANDORA / THE IMP OF MISCHIEF

"Mamá, ¿por qué todo este mar está tan salado?

"Porque está todo lleno de miles de millones de años de las lágrimas de los dioses!"

"¿Y por qué están los dioses tan tristes?"

"¿Tristes? No están tristes, cariño; andan por el suelo retorciéndose de risa, sujetándose el costado de dolor.

"¡Pues creo que los dioses están siendo unos tontos de remate!"

"Eres un cielo. ¿Me prometes que siempre serás un encanto? "

"¿Mamá?"

"¡Sé siempre así de maravillosa! ¿Lo prometes?.... ¡Eso, mi amor, realmente los pondrá de un humor de perros! "


It is given, of course, that the original conversation was conducted in Spanish, as The Imp of Mischief was born to Spanish parents. It was acted out on a small beach in the face of a stiff northerly wind somewhere in The Basque Country, some ten years back, but....

“Mummy, why is all this sea so salty?

“Because it’s all so full up with billions of years of the god’s tears!”

“And why are the gods so sad, then?”

“Sad? They’re not sad, darling; they’re rolling round on the floor in fits, clutching their sides, laughing ‘till it hurts.”

“Then, I think the gods are just being so plain silly!”

“You’re so sweet. Promise to be gorgeous forevermore?”

“Mummy?”

“Be beautiful! Always! Promise?....That, my love, will truly put them into a real sulk!”

CHILDREN FOR SALE

The boat is hauled up onto the beach. The force used on the winch handle, winding the rusted but greased cogs, tensing the cable, ratcheting in the rope, feels like the winding in of time, feels like safety.

Refloating, re-hauling, winding, day after day, week after week year after year, one generation after another until, one day, the sea and the sand have finished with eating away at the wood and caulking and the boat, slave to the both of them, the salt sea and the sharp sand, prisoner to rope and cable and chains, has died sodden and softened, and is at rest, and the tension is lost and it all begins to fall slowly and silently apart.


The shoals of silver fish that quivered in rainbow sheets in and out of the arc lights, under the ominous shadow of the hull, into the nets thrown like disease sown onto the ocean, sown by sun baked brown salted muscle, the shoals of silver fish shimmering were fished out years back.

Salted muscle sits decaying, cancerous and cankerous, on low three legged wooden stools, wrinkled like useless sunburnt leather, hungry, and hungry for the wide open ocean, thirsty, and thirsty for the wide open seas, in myriads of back alley sewers in myriads of modern cities. The same slime the world over, disease sown onto the land. No more nets to be knotted, eyes as dead and opaque to the glassy gazes of wives, sons, daughters, grandchildren, their eyes as dead and opaque as those of the last rotten fish staring them out, gutted then swilled into the gutter in myriads of decomposing back alley sewers the world over.








Photograph used with the kind permission of the photographer Piru Sedano. ©2011, Piru Sedano

A GOLDEN TEAR IN GOLDEN RAIN (AN AFTER DINNER THOUGHT)

Hard to see to finish my shave, what I heard, I gathered, was that you had just urinated most copiously and with most obvious pleasurable relief.

I brushed my hand across the steamed up mirror to reveal your watery head over there, rising behind my left shoulder.

A somewhat mischievous look there was, on this childlike visage, so I slowly turned to gaze and my eyes were led by your eyes to a lonely tear of urine on the very end of your index finger, dancing the last desperate dance before crying to its death on the cold bathroom floor.


I bowed slightly, took this finger offered, and its offering, gently into my mouth, and saved the dancer's life.

You said, “Not a single road would lead me to Rome, but a thousand pathways have brought me alive from Greece.”

You dabbed my lips with the little folded rectangle of moist toilet paper that had, a little previously, delicately hung between your thumb and third finger.