About Face

Officer P

37 Officer P I. The law officer makes his way across the maze, way ahead of the effects that may be caused by his penetrating search of the perpetrator of the crime. He is undaunted by any crime, this crime, for example, nor by what will soon be his own. This law officer is never alone. But he, in her midst, is not alone in desiring the stage for himself or in desiring the female curl of the woman dancing on the stage. Drinking much too much, he engulfs the stage blinding another to her closing call. The female curl, smooth and compliant lacks an instinctual resistance to bodily assault. Performing is in her a purely vibratory pose as if she were purely vibratory. Rarely, if at all, pausing to contract, as if her musculature were no longer intact, she withstands reform. Eventually deformed by the exhumed officer’s blows as he battles, staging the battle of his own judicial process against self in self-incrimination, redoubling his attempts to kill her before he destroys himself. Hooked by the skin loosened in the brawl he is pulled free from this tentesticled entrapment; still drunk, blood poisoned, won’t he now be of little use in law enforcement? II. Officer P had a cavernous capacity to drink himself silly. Round in the roll, strapped as a barrel Filled to his lids with occupational hatreds His hands became hotter His pulse, a hammer To pummel the dancer He pulled off from the stage 38 Fixed into place, eyes in his pockets, He aims and he shudders and explodes in her socket. P’s shot full of holes He’s torn and he’s leaking His transgression pooling Inexcusably exposed Now she is finished— there are shreds everywhere . . . Officer P lost his case There is nothing left but this indented carapace. III. So P opens the door to the Black Rose and walks right in. He wants to see the proprietress. He sits down, gets a drink, and she comes out to show him her properties. This joint is something of a cave. I’ve already described what happens in the cave, but to quickly recount—P’s belly is uncompromisingly convex. When he gets into a fight about whose performance is whose, he crowds out the other claimant with his sheer volume. P and his prize, Miss Blond, leave through the private rear exit, the cave’s anus, which opens out onto an uncharted sea. There is the boat: a simple shell with no rigging. P stands in the prow, erect and stalwart. The curl swoons and finds her place on the rear seat. She is wrapped in fur, her bleached face framed in a blond curl. There is just enough boat to convey the statuesque figures through the stylized waves profiled in white foam, and just enough boat to prevent the couple from slipping off the skiff as the boat responds to the sea’s shocks and jolts. The two figures, the black and the blond, the rigid and the supple, the weapon wielding aggressor and the yielding open question approach the rock island. The island, like the waves into which it is set, is also a carefully profiled element, jagged and well textured. 39 From the beginning, she was co-opted. The employee: the welldressed violation of her bodily property: costumed, managed and drunkenly swaying between performed perfection and irreducible captivity. P extinguishes her, never recognizing her incomplete complicity in his own crime. Dead, but already eddying into standard Venus molecules—she is loved but destroyed, extracted, ground into powder, applied, inserted and discovered impregnating feminine thresholds. Moments later, years after, eons even, all the while eddying into standard Venus molecules, she will once again develop organs: a functioning vagina, full breasts, and a head of flowing hair. ...