COQ AU VIN
A dive into the inner construction of a morsel of coq-au-vin on the side of my dinner plate, not avoiding the embossed heraldic coverlet lurking on the other side of pepper-meant expression: press me, my aura, here come my soft globular uptight nuts, the stunning ricochet of scatter leaving a perfect outline of a real irreducible atomic particle glimpsed for a nonosecond, yet real. Down beneath the votive cardinal punnet where the bloodred wine rushes into the pan and the matey jugular gets you going knucklewise. I was yclept by a pincer movement, and the picture longed for animation, an antlered roebuck flickering on the cavewall. By the time we got to the cartoon movie, the art was greasy with real life, so I started drawing round the spots on the cardboard feastbox. I stared with fascination into the sack of your libido, Troy burning up and Nausicaa marrying Telemachus. Risk come fist served, the vein pulsing beneath the fig leaf. Cut onions and crushed garlic hitting the hot olive oil. In the bower, all lowers, and expectation craves, I'm wriggling through a shaft cut into the red clay.
I'm hanging upside down in the furze of my imaginary, droplets of the commercial ocean running across my brow and the curved glass of my lenses. In keeping with the catchment area, the undeveloped eggs found inside the carapace next the backbone are creamed into the sauce itself, testes as ovaries reflected into themselves. My tender gawp was rosy in the stream.
Then the ovulated generalization caught the genital drift and my halfblue glue-stand improvised an iridescent apparatus. Mighty moments ahead in the surf. We dived into friendly oblivion, aware of the twinkle at the esoteric edge, ridged and fluted like a Georgian bureau. Speculation appeared as crazy notches cut by a dissatisfied customer. I saw a defecating skunk eating peanuts from off the paw of an intoxicated wombat. Ray White's blues guitar was especially cutting that night.
Uprush of mushroom from Eyjafyallajökull like I had pampas grass growing down the side of my chin. All I needed was some discipline. I didn't care if Joyce folded bits of his morning paper into Finnegans Wake, at least I wasn't reading Rebecca West. There is no fear of disorder when the do-mind is flexing its magic muscle. The day's residues were smeared all on up my arm, fossils from the London Zoo Insect House and drinking muddy water from a hollow log and Iris presenting me with a treasure chest of mineral samples, the novitiate vertebrate staring up at a moon with only atmosphere in between. Tree trees fuzzing the poetry of my funky Swamp Thing.
The coelacanth out of Christopher Dewdney bit into my detailed analytical grip and removed a section of my current historical awareness, the wonder of breathing air at last.
The ramifications of my dreaming surprised Mordecai (aged 18 months), who viewed a prospect rather more interesting than a Bridget Riley painting. Philadelphia 1976 finished in a burst of applause as Frank Zappa reflected on his role on the stage while it was happening. I took this reflux as the cold viewpoint of the future palaeontologist, and was grateful that it closely resembled flash moments of sexual arousal so extreme my left testis rose up from the scrotal sac. Nor bin defiant undeterred.
Then the picture spoke, some kind of half-assed satire on The Wasteland.
We were the outriders of a fleet of vessels parked on the perimeter of Alpha Centauri. I'd learned Latin in order to navigate the known universe, only to be told that no-one could see the all-important stuff and that I'd better squint and watch the corpuscle dragons slide across the iridescent slats between my lashes ... some kind of spider was going to crawl out between her cunt hairs, I was certain.
All was diagrammatic, peopled by domestic vacuum cleaners with googly eyes on.
It all climaxed in a furore of barbecued chicken, freely transposed like the matter in hand.
