The String and The Pearl

The String and The Pearl

A string of pearls once hung round a woman’s throat. The woman liked to hold them in her hands, and feel their smooth surety. These are my lucky pearls, she thought, and liked them best of all her things.

The woman was leaving a place alone, as sometimes was her way, when a raven saw her. Look at those grubs, the raven thought, as he watched the pearls with hunger. The bird swooped down and grabbed the string, the woman shouting loudly. The string ripped, the pearls fell down, strewing the ground with small white seeds.

These are not grubs, thought the bird. My lucky pearls, thought the woman, and gathered them up in her glove, sliding them down the empty fingers, like a tasseled purse. She left the raven only the pearl in his mouth and the broken piece of string. The raven took the string to line his nest, and coughed up the fat pearl to one of his chicks.

"More!' cried the chick. "More!"


- from The Insect Diviner

The Sausage and the Coal

The Sausage and the Coal

A sausage was placed on a grill by a hungry man.

I will cook this sausage until it is charred and crispy, thought the man, saliva on his tongue. He turned the sausage with a long fork and pricked its skin. The juices ran down and hit a hot coal.

The sausage thought, I wish I was that hot coal, then the man wouldn’t eat me.

The coal sizzled from the hot juices and thought, I wish I was that sausage, then I wouldn’t fade away.

The man turned the sausage and thought, I wish I had another sausage.


- from Abel's Fables, by Jason Messinger

The Sweet Smith

The Sweet Smith

There was a place where a sweet smith lived, who made sweets for children and adults. He made sweets as yellow as sunshine, and as dark as earth. Sweets as finely carved as insects, and as crudely shaped as rocks. Some were small like raindrops, others large as millstones. Some were as thin as a spider’s web, others as brittle as a wasp nest. But all were as sweet as the honey bee’s home, as sweet as your first secret kiss, as sweet as a baby’s ten toes. The sweet smith delighted everyone with his creations, but especially himself.

Now in this same place was a woman who knew all the names of everything, and all the words ever written, and all the ways that this becomes that, and that becomes this. But one thing always eluded the woman, one thing she could not learn. What was inside her own heart? At last the woman decided that perhaps someone else could see what eluded her, so she found the sweet smith and gave him a request. "Make me a sweet that is filled the same as my own heart."

The sweet smith looked in his recipe books, and searched through his shelves. He went a great distance for the things he needed, and spent a long time perfecting his plan. At last he made the sweet, and called the woman in.

"Here it is," said the sweet smith. "Here is the sweet, filled the same as your own heart."

"Ah," said the woman who picked it up, then put it down, then turned around and left.

"Wait," cried the sweet smith, "don’t you want to taste?"

"You eat it," smiled the woman, walking away.


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Michael Jackson Was a Fembot

Michael Jackson Was a Fembot!        

8/4/2009

New evidence has been released that the recent death of the super pop-cultural celebrity, singer and entertainer Michael Jackson was a hoax. The actual Michael Jackson tragically died in 1977 when he contracted a fatal case of Legionnaires' Disease while performing with the Jackson Five at a Veteran's Hospital Benefit in the nations Capitol. Scheduled to star in The Wiz, Walt Disney ‘Imagineers’ created what many experts are now saying was the most successful robotic hoax since Joseph Stalin, which mesmerized the USSR for over a decade.

US News and Entertainment Corp released information that reveals that since Michael Jackson's actual death in 1977, the entertainer the world knew and collectively adored was actually a robot-like animatronic device engineered by the scientists of Disney Worldring Industries.

 

First envisioned in the late fifties, when the untimely death of teen star icon James Dean showed the movie industry the critical financial incentive to keeping stars ‘alive’ past their deaths, robotic devices have captivated the American Public for decades. Starting with Elizabeth Taylor, the first successful pop stars to be 'resurrected' through the miracle of feminized robotic devises - or ‘Fembots’ - enjoyed lengthy careers unhindered by the actual mechanics of living. These synthetic creations became actual puppets for CEO's of the entertainment industry, creating pure revenue streams easily hidden through creative accounting tricks coupled with public stories of profligate spending by those 'crazy entertainers'.

 

Designed to capitalize on pop culture's whims, Michael Jackson was the first successful male version of the Fembot, although many argue that designers never got past their earlier female influences. Over time, the marvelous singing, dancing and squeaking automaton was revised and improved upon to add new dance moves and more life-like qualities. While the verisimilitude of each new model was improved, the entire line of robotic devices had been plagued by slip-shod construction, resulting in bizarre public displays and inconsistent physical characteristics.

While later versions added longer interaction-simulations, many experts now argue that the best version of the Michael Jackson doppleganger was the original created for the production of the film The Wiz. Later versions had been famously marred by programming glitches and poorly reasoned PR campaigns, as when Never Land Ranch was created to make the Michael Jackson robot seem more sympathetic to children.

 

The general appearance of the Michael Jackson impersonating machine was modified over the years to reflect a changing taste for a ‘whiter’ entertainer, as determined by focus groups for Disney Worldring Industries. “Later efforts to humanize the device, with short term marriages and adopted children, only met with limited success,” says an expert in Social-Imagineering who worked at Disney Worldring but could not reveal his identity pending an ongoing Federal Investigation.

Many who were duped by the sly ingenious simulacrums are now demanding amends. Jackson’s Mother-In-Law and known Fembot Pricilla Presley may still be called on to testify at upcoming congressional hearings on the preponderance of artificial entertainment idols marketed to the American public. Congress is expected to focus on whether Chinese manufacturers are partly to blame for our cherished illusions being pierced. Alleged master criminal Diana Ross faces up to two hundred and fifty consecutive life sentences for her part in the vast fraudulent conspiracy against the American buying public.

In related news, President Barack Obama sat down for a beer last week with honored intellectual Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley, the police sergeant who arrested Gates in his own home. Sergeant Crowley called his beer "too warm", Dr. Gates complained his beer was "too cold", but President Obama called his beer "just right", thus ending over three hundred years of racial tension in America.

 

The Insect Diviner

The Insect Diviner

A woman could tell the future by looking at insects. When the grasshoppers flew she knew winter would be hard, when a ladybug landed on her she knew there would be a fire upwind, when a beetle crawled by she saw a birth, or a death, depending. When a butterfly landed she saw marriage, if a moth she saw divorce.

One day the king of insects heard of this woman’s strange gift and called on her. He flew from his hot climate to her cool land. It took a very long time, and the king was tired by the end.

Would you like some flower nectar? asked the woman, when she met the king of insects.

Why yes, said the king, who lapped the sweet syrup.

Would you like to relax on this sweet cushion? asked the woman.

Why yes, sighed the king, who settled on the cotton.

What else would you like? asked the woman, hovering overhead.

I’d like to know what you see in me, asked the king. What future do I show you?

Fame, said the woman, as she slid the needle in.


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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.


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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 

Now Available through Amazon

Jason Messinger Books
Now available Through Amazon



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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