Art & Literature with
Eat Sleep Write’s Philip Butera
With contributions from L. Thomson and Susan Roberts
A Column About Imagination
Imagination is the ability to form
new images and sensations in the mind.
NOTE: ADULT THEMES AND VERY EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
(In other words, this is a seriously HOT piece of writing!)
There was a loud knock on my cabin door. At first I paid no attention but the pounding continued so I put my glass of straight vodka on a night stand and went to open it.
I thought if a woman was coming to the door it would be Godiva. But as usual I was wrong. It was Mildred Rodgers – not beautiful (she just misses) but alluring and sultry – a woman that daylight never favors but nightlight raises to fascinating magnetic. She will draw you in and while you hear her lies, you will care little. You want your hands on those breasts; you can’t wait to slip a finger or two inside her vagina then bring them up to your nose and sniff what adventure smells like.
Her silky white blouse is open just enough to make me care, her tight red skirt hugs barely below her buttocks.
She finds a chair and keeps her legs open just enough for me to want to punish her; to punish every woman. But especially her, because she is the fallen angel, the one we don’t actually care about – we just desire. We want to consume her, taste her from eyelids to toenails. We want her to degrade us, make us feel unclean and apologetic, knowing salvation remains beyond our grasp.
I hand her a glass of vodka. She gives me “the look” – that look that makes my pants begin to bulge. I want her. I want to climb into her and never leave. I want to be a part of every victory she proclaims; every man and women she steals love from, unrepentant, never looking back. She remorselessly grinds her heals into the face of every lover left begging for more, prostate on the floor where broken glass burrows into their backs and the spilled alcohol burns their wounds.
I walk to her and place my hand inside her blouse playing with her nipple, pinching it and rubbing it hard. Her look back resembles one looking at a pathetic blind puppy, one whose mother and siblings have left him to suffer and die alone. It is not pity, but what is next in line before hatred. Her hand goes to the buttons below my hand and soon both her lovely breasts are exposed, big, round, freckled delights inviting me to be deceived. I am in the garden and the serpent knows a sucker when he sees one. The odor he exudes stems from selfishness and vanity decaying under the too thin veneer of respectability. But I am a poet, deranged and permitted to live outside any realms of respectability. Loathed for knowing and loved for being blessed.
I suck on those beautiful breasts, hide my face between them; lick every part of their gun metal, smelling my own alcohol infused breath. I fall to my knees and now she fully knows it is she who is in control, her fingernails dig into my eyes – triumphant in knowing she has found another mark, a john, a chump, a sap; – those breasts tasting like the splendor of a night sky with every planet on fire- every planet burning up, wanting to leave their orbits behind. There is no distance, just this corrupt act being played by two misfits. She digs deeper into my face past eyes, past skin, past dura, past cortex into that primitive area, the limbic system. Yes, this is where we want to be – tearing apart those links that keep suffers agonizing. Strike a match and burn out that communications area known as the thalamus. The hypothalamus, rip that creature out – it has no right to control my emotions! I need no cingulate gyrus pathways to guide me. It is you God whom I hate. You, the phoenix that neither raises nor dies -maker of tortuous and forsaken offspring that cannot direct light to themselves- tormented instead by endlessness. The forever Pantheism – I will control what I want; at this moment no spirit will interfere. I roar, I am, I am with this woman.
I toss her to the floor, that flimsy skit at her waist. There it is. The jewel, the betraying shadow, the creator of tyrants, my mouth nuzzles into it – petitioning for forgiveness – my lips searching for meaning but there is no meaning, only flesh, flesh the centerfold of all poetic creation. Fuck the descriptions of landscapes and oceans. Fuck serenity and divinities with multiple scenarios. I am inhaling life, this flower of debauchery, this beginning of sorrow. I love it – it pulses in my face, I am wet with her, with Mary Magdalene, with Christ herself, I want more, the voice in my head telling me to strive, to fixate, the warm liquids creating the weariest of streams evaporating from my face. Womb let me in! Take me back.
You, carnival creature devoid of knowing what need is – take your hands from my head, stop pounding my face into your exhumed divinity. My hand searches the floor till it finds a sharp splinter of mirror. I squeeze it in my hand, I crush it as hard as possible then bring it to her love of living and rip upwards, and deceased dreams gather quickly, those dreams about absurd sexual encounters. She is opened now; I am delirious with joy, licking, and sucking being aware of nothing but portals. Gorgeous tasty blood and female fluids both the delight of madness and lovers never remembered.
She needs to be turned over. Now the rectum must face consequences – there open, waiting, ugly, and foul – my tongue searches for an exit out of this whispered about arena where only deadening vices are welcomed guests. Yes I understand, I know what a poet must redeem, I must gather all man’s misinterpretations – I must expand darkness and take flight. I have entered. All dignity dissolves – an absence of art – an absence of creativity – the swirling vortex of nothing transposed to even less.
Now it is she who begins to kill, with daggers in both hands and like an endless flash of falling trophies my chest is an heirloom of slits – this is what God’s love is all about, How pleasurable pain and condemnation are. This is woman, vile for her many favors, yet they all survive there is always beauty from ashes. There is the exquisiteness of God’s most artistic creation – her mirror image- Woman.
The sun, embarrassed, comes prematurely through the windows; all that whiteness shinning, all this syrupy affirmation poured from and between us. De Sade was right, we men are but animals.
There is only hatred now; cold unsympathetic hatred. All the hatreds gathering and devouring each other – hatred of being, of needing, of wanting and the vilest – the hatred of oneself. My eyes look above her. Sitting in chairs are Raskolnikov and Meursault; they shake their heads, tears welled up. They are caretakers from distant memories and they have come for me. I kiss Mildred’s moist lips, they know that I now comprehend, I comprehend – we are all murderers – that is what thought is – murder – every one of us – we are all murderers. Raskolnikov rises to lock the door, to keep us safe till our redemption but Meursault stops him.
Mildred is standing there – lovely and desirable – “Are you OK? Can I come in?”
The vodka goes down easy, “Yes, yes… I was just thinking.”
—
Philip M. Butera
Philip Matthew Butera grew up in Buffalo, NY, earned a BS degree From Gannon College in Erie, PA, went on to serve in the US Navy then received a MA in Psychology from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He expanded his education with post graduate courses in Psychology and Creative Writing. Philip has traveled extensively in the US and Canada and has lived in such beautiful places as Hawaii, California, Virginia, British Columbia and Ontario.
He believes that the journey of life for him has been more of an astute perceiver than a determined participant with the outcome never considered – it has been a pure meander of instinct, experience and knowledge. “Mirror Images and Shards of Glass” is his first book of poetry. His second book of poetry, based loosely on the Odyssey in a collaboration with artists from eight countries and will be out in the summer of 2015. He is currently working on his first novel – “Caught Between” the true story of a New York City policeman who killed a Mafia leader’s son. Philip has a column in the quarterly magazine, Per Niente. He has taught, lectured and owned businesses. He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Phillip can be reached at: badluck30@comcast.net
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