It was a Roman Jesus

That cut in for a dance

And when her shoes were broken

She wept upon his lance

It was a Roman Jesus

That loved him down the grain

And in heaven he calls her

Perfect among the foreordained...


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


"So, I'm lying in bed, completely satisfied and oh so proud of meself for what I felt was a damn good performance, and I roll over, expected her to swoon like a lover and give me twenty kisses, you know? But no. Her back towards me, a long, exasperatated (spoken incorrectly) sigh, and she gets up and... leaves. Leaves me lying, buck-naked, alone! Like it was just that bad."


The bartender poured Lex another shot, tuning skillfully out of his pulp-smashed talk, yet impressing enough of an interested eye to keep any drunkard confident in his importance.


"It's just... wacko, you see?" Lex went on after downing the whiskey and folding his face from the sting. "She like... does this whole innocent thing, and I waited so damn long... and then she just slicks me off like another handbag... slippery little Gel...thing!"


Lex let out a burp and let his palm thud on the Casino bartop. He hadn't drunk so much in ages, but he felt so pressed, so flattened between the pages of his own story that he could devise no other cure for his aching displacement of the air. He had let, like so many of a child's wooden blocks, his pain build upon itself, splintering his skin and rotting away his organs. He buried his paternity with Zandra, his heart fled with Tai-San, his conscience lay in the dirt under the constant pressure of Siva's cadaver, and now such a little woman as Gel has lacerated his pride. He drank, yes, how he drank!


He threw his head back, like a bird swallowing a fish as the liquor finned and flopped like an acidic tadpole down his throat. His mind felt about as clear as a congested earthworm, and with the same optical capacity.


As he hastily swallowed what felt next, not like a fish, but more like the heron itself, he felt a heavy tumor of wet air, sweet as sweat and tender like tears, clasp to his ear, which took the almost palpable scent and the dripping cloud, molded it into the out-of-tune whisper of a song...


"The itsy bitsy Spider

Went up the water spout

Down came the rain and

Washed the spider out

Up came the sun and

Dried up all the rain

So the itsy bitsy Spider

Went up the spout again..."


Lex felt poisonous sin cling to his cheek and blacken his neck with desire. His head wobbled with alcohol and titillation as he managed to get out, jokingly defensive, "You're off-key..."


"I've never had complaints before," came a voice that strained painfully with sultry tones and purple-velvet charm from behind him. He spun himself around in his stool slowly and looked up at the Galatea that towered before his lucid form.


She was heroin-thin, her skin like perfumed water and painted heavily with thick, black designs that curved with every accentuated physicality, reaching down inside their textile cages and smearing back out as if inferno-inflicted. Her cheeks and lids were sunken smoked, and her lips a red darker than blood drying on pavement. The corset seemed to be stitched to her skin, while glorified underwear hitched the gartered boots that gleamed like the glass eyes of a doll to her cylindrical upper thighs, and coated her multi-colour-stockinged legs, impossibly long. Her hair was a plastic cherry-raven colour, and tweaked to a left-him-still-sleeping look.


She was celluloid pornography, seductive perfection bottled in a vase that stunk of booze.


"You're beautiful..." Lex stammered, groggily.


She pursed her mouth slyly, her thick lips curling like paint peeling off the bedroom wall over her flawless face.


"Never had complaints about that, either..."