Vanishing

Vanishing

Once upon a time, a young woman fell so much in love with herself that she was able, without any applied focus, to make others disappear from her gaze. Vanish into sunlight and shadow and vista. First they’d grow soft, a slight pull at the corners of her eyes. Then blur, in and out, like a guttering flame, or blowing snow. Then poof, they’d be gone, usually forever. Nobody there ever again. The woman never noticed, she was involved, she was in love, she was herself.

One day this woman encountered a man with a mane of hair that shone like the night sky, and eyes so soft they almost hurt to look at, and on the back of the third knuckle of his right hand lay a diamond so icy she thought she heard a crack in the air. She had noticed him. And now instead of one, the two of them filled her gaze. No one else. Him And Her. Her And Him. A perfect fit.

The man had a different eye than her. He noticed, without any particular effort, everything around him, every last little thing. In every direction he looked, he saw details tripping over themselves. Every place a brocade of patterns and precision. Every person a map of gestures and meanings. Every moment a symphony. And because of this, the man was utterly in love with everything, indiscriminate. Including a young woman so beautiful she grayed anyone near her. They were a perfect fit.

From this union, they made a child. A beautiful girl, neither vain nor worldly, who instead loved every last little detail of what was already gone. Every second of moments lost. Every speck of the past buried. When she grew up, she chose to chronicle the past, to share all her joys, all her terrors, all that she loved. She told me this story, with relish.

When the child, who was called 'Sunshine', 'Sweetness', and 'Honey-my-knees', was seven years and seven months and seven days old, she saw her beautiful mother before a mirror. A mirror so flat, so perfect, before it one forgot who was the face and who the glass. From this mirror, her mother’s face stared back at the girl, through her, as if she wasn’t there. Until the girl’s anxious kiss awakened her mother, who looked at her daughter and asked in surprise, “Where did you come from, Honey-my-knees?”

Every year after that, the girl watched her mother become thinner and thinner, until she was as thin as carpets, as blankets, as paper. And then it seemed her mother fell into her mirror, and disappeared from view. Like the edge of a horizon, or the path behind your shoulder, or the thing you forgot to recall. And sometimes the girl would notice her mother, out of the corner of her eye. And her mother noticed her, like a ship sailing into view. Then they’d wave or kiss or blow the air around each other. Never quite hitting. Like clouds, or hummingbirds.

It was during those rare moments that the daughter always pictured her mother together with her father. Two sides of one face, two planes of one hinge, like the kiss of earth and sky. And all around them the details grayed, until the daughter's memories of them were distilled from place and time and circumstance. Until the couple stood alone, a truth eternal. Him And Her. Her And Him. A perfect fit.

When the father fell ill with sufferings, an endless list of aches and scratches, pains and pressures, the daughter could think only of her father who was. Her father who had been, with the soft eyes and the gentle voice. Not the man before her, who plucked at invisible menaces, and swore at his demons aloud. And so, without even trying, she made him disappear into his past. She fed him automatically, bathed his battered flesh coolly, turned his bed sheets down.

But on the day that the man noticed that everything around him, every last little thing, was turning, and drifting, and ending, into light, his daughter saw him directly. Looked into his eyes, which were so soft, so full of indiscriminate love, that they cut her heart in two. She called out to her mother, called her right out of the mirror, and the beautiful woman peeled from the glass just in time to see her husband’s eyes sink into ice. And poof, wife to widow. The beautiful woman cried tears so hot they bleached her blouse, wailed so deep it ripped her skirt, shook so hard she tore her shoes. Gave her grief all that she had lost, with nothing, and no one, else in view.

Then the beautiful widow took the ring off her husband’s finger, and slid in on her own, a perfect fit. And the daughter gave her mother a look that cracked the air.

“Give me the ring from my father’s hand, for I have tended him at his death, and ministered to his ailments, and suffered his indignities. Give me the memory of my father’s strengths, for I was his strength when he had none,” the daughter said.

“Who are you to ask for such a thing?” her mother demanded. “He was my other, my self-sworn, my match. His ring is mine, has always been. You can have all else in this room, but I keep that.”

“Then I shall count motes of dust in the air, and the threads on the blanket under his arms, and the hairs upon his head, until I know exactly what my worth is to you,” said the daughter, then she closed her father’s eyes, and made her mother vanish from her view.

When the mother turned seventy years and seventy months and seventy days old, she shook herself out, like a guttering flame, and suddenly was no more. It must be said that she hardly noticed, she was involved, she was in love, she was herself.

The daughter took her mother’s hand, which was as cold as ice, and slid off her father’s ring. She read at last what was written inside. Just her name. Sweetness.

That was just the kind the details she loved.


From The Insect Diviner
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Tales of The Devil

Tales of The Devil -

Magic Lantern Shows
One day the Devil decided that he would diminish the miracles of God in the eyes of Man, by helping them create their own miraculous things. The works of Man grew boundlessly, until the fact and fiction of all were suspect, until the truth and the artifice of any event was suspect to man’s own machinations. How could God show Man a miracle, when Man could create his own?

God, however, was one step ahead. With each step Man took in his own skills, with each map he made of his world, the revelation of God’s miracles expanded beyond his reach. Grew in every direction, outward, inward, through, between. The Universe grew larger, more complicated, filled with ever smaller elements. Ever more amazing things. The Devil spun in rage.


Elephants
One day the Devil decided that he would work on diminishing the work of God by helping Man see the value of their animals all dead. The pleasure and gain from the carcasses sold, or the pests destroyed. The devil knew that if man was alone of all God’s creatures, that it would be a self-created hell.

God however, was one step ahead. For when the last elephant died, in the last circus on earth, and the last elephant gnat with her, Man knew at last that they were not alone of all God’s creatures. No matter what lived on the planet with them.

For that legacy, however, the Children of Man were less forgiving, and the Devil rejoiced.


Popcorn Kernels
A long time ago some one invented a way of popping corn that made each kernel full of air. This so excited the people that it became a way of life for many, time and time again. Through many incarnations. Open fire, covered pit, coal stove, electric oven, microwave, convection air. At last the people invented a way to make the popcorn without the corn itself.

“Now is my chance,” the Devil thought, and he mocked the men, and said that even God could do better then that. So Man were spurned on to greater and greater zeal, and they expanded the size of the popcorn, refined and reshaped its texture, duplicated the splintered seeds into a hundred different flavors.

Over time Man forgot the actual taste of simple popped corn, and the endless variations of the Mans’ invented foods took over his ancestral diet. Eliminated their ancient agricultural dependencies. The word popcorn became synonymous with antique notions, and old-fashioned jokes, and, curiously, a specific type of oral sex. In this way a little joy was stolen.

But Man replaced it with something new, and that didn’t change anything between God and Man, so the Devil spun in rage.

The Slippery Glass Foot

The Slippery Glass Foot

Once there was a princess who loved a horse so much that she forgot her fears and acted very rashly, attempting a jump her horse wasn’t prepared for. The spill caused her foot to smash into a million pieces, so the doctors replaced the foot with one made of glass. It was hard and cold and caught the light beautifully, but it was much too slippery for the princess to walk upon, so she spent her days in a large chair, her foot propped up for all to see.

When the princess grew older, she often peered into her glass foot, hoping to spy a vision of the prince she would wed, the life she would lead, the future she would gain. But all she saw was what was already before her, turned upside-down through her shapely glass arch, swollen through her five toes, stretched across her ankle.

When the princess died, exactly as large as her chair, but sadly, no greater, her foot was kept and treasured by the stable boys, who named her their patron saint, and would call on her to protect them from the misplaced hoof. Especially over ice.

As time passed her renown grew, until she became the Patron Saint of dancers, acrobats, tightrope walkers, sprinters, and all who relied on a sure foot. Miniature glass feet were worn around the necks of young ballerinas, for luck. And the story became that a girl could see the face of her true love inside the tiny foot, if only she looked hard enough, and truly, truly believed, while rubbing the slippery glass.

From  The Insect Diviner

The Whole World is Gay Guide to Film - A Selection

The Whole World is Gay ™ Guide to Film

- a selection

The Wizard of Oz

Cult led by dead, spooky-voiced girl with bound breasts, also sacred opera of same name. Story of drag-queen suffrage illustrated in crushing domestication of a falling house and subsequent path to redemption by bubble-bath fairy gown, to the final burning of the broom and melting orgasm of the green spinster witch. Hunky dildo companions in fur, fabric, and steel, opium dance sequences, costumed dwarves, and howling monkeys, create the original model for all subsequent Gay Pride Parades. A primer lesson on the importance of the proper shoe.

Rating: An Astounding Archtype

Auntie Mame

Auntie Mame offers a rich vein of the Whole World is Gay™ outlook. Gay son is offered to lesbian widow who sashays him through a world of 100% gay characters with fabulous costume changes and drag-queen pathos. In not one, but two versions, each more edifying than a weekend with Paul Lynn. In the original, Rosalind Russell as Mame broad-hands her costars through a ‘who’s-out-next?’ life-sized Mousetrap! Game with flaming drinks, trapeze seating, and plunging glances. In version two, Lucille Ball does the impossible and tops Rosy’s over-the-wrist dinner-theater gayiety by turning it into a glycerin-lens wretched musical, with lesbian costar Bea Arthur to make it all fall into place.

Rating: Seven Shining Silver Stars Each

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Mary Poppins pseudo-sequel where the very gay Dick Van Dyke rides a fabulous parade float into Austria with a sweet fag-hag who isn’t really Julie Andrews after all, and two children who seem plump for the oven. With storm-trooper dance sequences and musical fruit salad, the film slips under the surface of the Brother’s Grimm, with Chitty as the pederast-perfect auto-bait so popular they build a town around it. Watch for pivotal dancing sex-toys sequence.

Rating: Four Wheels of Fun

Johnny Guitar

Cheek-bone goddess Joan Crawford proves she’s illuminated from the inside when her and her lesbian ex-lover battle over the heart of a town. With rampant cow-poked eroticism, heaving rifles and pistols, and the looming metaphor of the railroad all crashing into a mob crazed firefight, a wedding dress lynching, and a final Bitch Royale between the pointing chests of Mercedes Cambridge and Crawford. In this seminal role, Crawford forever pinned the role of shoulder pads in gay culture.

Rating: A Stunning Six Shooter Salute

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Australian version of the Wizard of Oz, with the boy stuffed with sex, the boy in girl’s skin, and the secret daddy. With a lavender bus, a giant shoe, a fecal relic of a saint, lectures on transvestitism 101, gang-rape tenderness, a crazed ping pong cannon, several bad lip-synched performances, and better costumes than Auntie Mame.

Rating: Big Bumper Bananza

Scanners

Closeted homosexuals repress their sexuality so hard that the energy, once released, makes people’s heads explode. The psyexual scanners makes your nose bleed, your head hurt, your veins pop, your throat let loose a thunderous roar, and then the orgasm literally takes your head off. With super-steroid thick veins, the scanners jiffy-pop each other until they’re all gone. In sequel after sequel, watch for the heaving erotic conflicts between snarling pit-bull faces best seen in the vertical position, and then only in the dark. Big hit with the violence-porned as steaming carcass finales work their prosthetic best.

Rating: One Pop Each, Three Pops for Series

To Wong Fu, With Love, Julie Newmar.

Outsider story of two heterosexual men (Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze), and their girlfriend (John Leguizamo) who pretend to be drag queens to fit it. Town of misfit toys pity them, wear red, hold hands. 

Rating: Worth the Anthropology Class Time 

From - A Vile Old Queen’s Guide To Etiquette And Proper Living 

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Jason Messinger Books
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Maui Love Letters
A romantic collection of poems and artwork
inspired by the beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii.

Eating the Child Within
An entertaining collection based on classic children's fairy tales
reworked into adult poems of violence, lust, and betrayal.

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Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty

"Gaffe! Wrong face! Hic!"
the spindle cries.
Line plays out,
twirling point pricks.
One drop - instruments.
Thread stops,
weaves asleep.
Frozen beauty,
the rose wreath,
cages rarely smell as sweet.

Kiss, quick breath, end, the cycle peaks.
Lips touch death,
spinning wheel starts.
Blind eyes, Prince Charmheart;
hero's role Fate's predrawn -
palm lines master,
the strings spun.
Spindles seek to do no wrong.

Oh Peteena

Oh Peteena

Oh Peteena,
Teen and Pet.
Your fragile cast
of lash and tail.
Your quiet number.
Your avid fans.
All the places
you have been;
Zero Cool Nebraska,
Hasbro Japan,
stage and screen
and Xerox machine.

Signified inside
your Q-T tail,
your hithered eye.
Egyptian Goddess
in gentle white slavery.
Front leg girl
with the back leg story.
Oh Peteena
Tell me more

Cyclops Lover

Cyclops Lover

Cyclops lover,
You put the third i
in irresistible.
You make the me
in remarkable.
You set the u
in undone.

That sharp little bit left

That sharp little bit left

You moved after
you were orphaned
and we lost touch,
or was I shut out,
and either way
it was gone.

Some mistake I made
that was never mentioned
aloud
but broke it all
down to less than distance,
or convenience,
or time.
Less than any
excuse.

If only I could recall
with certainty,
but a thousand slights,
a hundred hurts,
countless unforgivables
cloud all my friendships.

All those things
we forget
to ask forgiveness for.

Was friendship the price
of death
or distance
or deeds undone
or was it something simpler
like sour lemons
or the feeling of nothing
between two and time?

I regret little.
But I regret that vine
allowed to wither.

That Song For You

That Song For You

What is it about
those full women
who live life
like it’s the syrup
in a flower,
or a slow drag inhaled,
or pages of a book
under the shade?

Slowly, fully, alive.
They always get
exactly what they want.