3:04
Franz said bite me here, and Mieze bit him there, and Mieze said bite me here, and Franz bit her there. The curtains were closed. They were the color of gray snakeskin. Outside, a war developed in Berlin. A gun fired at Dillinger on a movie screen in Chicago. They were someplace else. The seconds were already ahead of them, waiting with their guns pulled. An alley with no escape.
There was a red light flashing. Both in their heads and out, flashing. There was torturous rampaging music, what Mieze called Egregious Sonic Fuck Music. It sounded like iron hissing in a winter lake. It sounded like cold iron against hot iron. It sounded like cold soil thrown on a cold and gaping mouth.
Mieze said suck me here, and Franz sucked her there, and Franz said suck me here, and Mieze sucked him there. On the walls were paintings of aged and vulnerable and meek and sultry cherubs that looked like dirtied candy. Between Franz and Mieze were many angels and demons. Their eyes blinked. Their mouths blinked. The cold and gaping seconds.
An egregious room. An alley room. A Dillinger room.
His hair, she thought, felt like the feathers of a dead bird, the dusty feathers of road-kill. Her hair, he thought, felt like a wig hanging from the crown of a nude tree, a wig with an extinct color and a texture yet to be invented.
After the flashing, the biting, the sucking. After the soil, the cold, the gaping mouth. After the iron, the wig, the candy, and the cherubs. Afterwards Mieze took a sip from the whiskey bottle and peered out the window. The sheets were purple. The scratches and bites on their skin were purple. The purple of dark lipstick. The purple glow thrown from muted televisions playing at 3:04 in the morning. And a car passed by the house. And a car passed by the house. And a car passed by the house. And a car passed by the house.
~ ~ ~
Q #1:
Where was Fassbinder born?
Q #2:
What was his first homosexual encounter?
Q #3:
What was his first heterosexual encounter?
Q #4:
What was his favorite Jean Genet novel?
Q #5:
What was his favorite line from a Douglas Sirk Film?
Q #6:
How did he die?
Q #7:
What was found on his body at the time of death?
Q #8:
What was found in his body at the time of death?
The Double Life of Mick Jagger
I.
There was this one time at a party in Detroit, this Christmas party. In 2003 or 2004. I was in the bathroom washing my hands and two women walked by outside and one said to the other that the other night she’d had a dream where Mick Jagger was trying to seduce her, except in the dream he was a woman. The other woman outside the door said he was a kind of woman. His mouth, she said, was a kind of vagina. And that exchange made me want to write a poem about that idea. About Mick Jagger’s vagina. I tried it the next day. My window overlooked a pawnshop with a shitload of lights flashing in the window. I came up with a poem about a couple, a man and a woman, and they both looked like Mick Jagger, and in a sense they both were Mick Jagger.
II.
In the hotel room in the poem the female Jagger will dress the male Jagger in whore clothes, call him whore names. The male Jagger will think during such episodes of how the meat inside of him could build a massive cathedral should it ever be extracted from his body. That is, if you took the meat and pounded it flat. And used quite a bit of metal wiring. His eyes could be in the center of the cathedral either in the floor and looking up or in the ceiling and staring down. Either way they would never blink. And his teeth. What could they do with his teeth.
III.
You fuck, the female Jagger will say, like a whore. You fuck, the male Jagger will say, like a porn film with the furniture scratched out.
IV.
Yet they do not know they are part of the same person. They do not realize their separate essences will only be reunited upon death.
V.
I was rereading Helter Skelter around this time. I was listening to some of the songs from the Manson family around this time, pretty songs sung by young women with childlike and fairylike voices. The two Mick Jaggers would be killed by a hitchhiking serial killer, a thug with a red mohawk. They would die on a bright June morning, in the silence of an Iowa cornfield. Did I hate them, the two Jaggers? I did not hate them. But I liked to think that in some way they hated each other.
VI.
The crows will eat the hearts of the Mick Jaggers. Plastic crows. Lipstick hearts.
A Brief History of the Beatles
Mieze said to me earlier in the week that as a teenager she’d been obsessed with the possibility that Paul really was dead, that the rumor from the 60s had been right after all, that a bland fake Paul had for decades lived under the name and sign of the actual boyish and endearing Paul, and that the most haunting lyrics from any song ever was probably I Buried Paul murmured during the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Mieze said to me later in the week that “Helter Skelter” was the song that turned into a crime that turned into a made-for-TV movie.
Revolution Number Nine
Mieze sits on the hotel bed smoking a cigarette.
By her knee is an ashtray and a pair of sunglasses.
She has recently showered.
Her hair is wet and her cheeks are flushed.
She is tired and sunburned and excited and hungry.
Franz is under the covers pretending to be asleep.
Franz listens to himself breathing.
He is tired and sunburned and drifting and hungry.
From the room next door comes music.
It is a low murmur.
Franz can barely hear it.
Mieze can hear it a little better.
She is younger and less sleepy.
The Beatles.
One of the ballads from The White Album.
The television glows.
The screen shows 7,000 figures writhing in the mud.
Or 8,000.
Because the picture is grainy it could be a cartoon.
A cartoon drawn in a crudely realist style.
Or the actors could be electrified mannequins.
And therefore not even alive.
And therefore not even dead.
Many wear black masks and black gloves.
A midnight ball strewn across the mud.
An evening dance left out in the rain.
The ballad ends. “Revolution No. 9” begins.
The curtains are closed.
The curtains are the color of dried rose petals.
The sun is out.
The sun lights the curtains.
Franz thinks it is around four in the afternoon.
Mieze thinks it is around two in the afternoon.
Extraction #1
The man without air used his stomach muscles to center himself in the middle of the field. He used his jaw muscles to extinguish certain ideas he had only come to understand recently. He used his skull muscles to watch films involving parades of pork moving through cities of delicate snow. He used his spine muscles to extract newer and drier shadows from a previously dribbling haze. Behind the purple curtain the 19th century withdrew. Behind the scarlet curtain Marilyn Monroe prepared for the Day of the Dead Mass. Behind the coarse curtain the sea tossed about like houses tumbling from clouds.