Friday, March 18, 2011

ICARUS TARRED AND FEATHERED

Come hither my darling one, take a seat, the apparition sits where The Pretty Girl used to sit. Sometimes I beckon her move, and she moves down the endless corridors and passageways she used to saunter coyly down but that I had never noticed before and I beckon her do lie down, and she does doze dreamily in the pure white sheets she used to sheath herself into, curled, baby curled, covered and carelessly wrapped to be unwrapped for sex.

Rise and shine my love, awake, she is sensitive and attentive. Sharp, acute, her slightly out of kilter opinions are neither overly original nor overly eloquent but, shy and attractively self-conscious, she expresses her thoughts with such a freshness and with such self-depreciating humour as to make herself quite unique, to illuminate in herself a difference, an aura.

Her aura is the infinitesimal chasm between the routinely ordinary and the truly beautiful what do you say to that my dear?


This way my dear I guide Beauty across my path. The Pretty Girl crosses my path, causes me to check my step so as not to trip her, and so I step aside, bow, and she passes me where, everyday, on leaving home, we used to skip hither and thither to the front door, but today, yet again as every day, I do not want her to leave home, so I do conduct her back, with a gallant, grandiloquent gesticulation of my arm, to the bedroom. I bid her wait please wait please bide your time bide your time a little my love.

She bides her time awhile her arm sweeps the net curtain from the frosty pane, for it is terribly cold outside, but not in here, at home. Her dramatic gesture sweeps away the dark and heavy cumulus clouds from the sky, does sweep away the sheets of silver grey sleet, to reveal deep blue, black. The black hole.

The blackness simply turns a badly re-enacted theatrical arc of her arm, into something quite unbearably grotesque, unbearably tragically sad, so I sit her, sit here my dear The Pretty Girl where I would like her to have been sitting but dare not look upon the ghastly rotting corpse of she I had so loved and so admired so deeply for so long.

So long my love she fades for fickle memory has failed my vision. I feel her sorrowful gaze is upon me. I have led her eyes unto me.

Sees she through the artifice of my all too churlish desperation?

“....the sheen on her skin the shine in her eyes
but deathly white to decay her image flies....”




The title of this piece is taken from a series of photographs by the artist David F. Brandon. Permission kindly granted by Mr Brandon to use both the title and his photographic illustrations. Click here to view his work. Thank you, Bashir B. Sherpa.