Chapter 1

Produced by Sorour Imani.

MASCARA-VISCERA By

Paul Cameron Brown

CONTENTS

Flashpoint Marzipan Santo Domingo White China Plates I White China Plates II Mail Drop Headdress Airbrush Swords and Roses Moonrock Smokestack Tickings of a Clock Flashpoint Equinox Penny Wise, Pound Poor Metaphor Embers Skin Asgard Old Brompton Road Street Scene Curse of The Downtown Trade In My Books Made in Space Godiva Pelée Pelée: May 8, 1902 Electra Sideway Look Lolita Gardens Unpaginated Sequin Yellow Hair Piltdown Man Spanked The Crowkeeper Cuando-Cubango Onomatopoeia At the Red Throat Shamrock Lost Patrol Blackamoor Up from the Floor Men of Shade Knight-Errant Water Fast (The Pearl Fishers) Tales of a Brave Ulysses Inside Seam Debriefing Naiad Trance Pyromania Tide Charts Village Idiot Clippership Flood Kipper, Tea and Oranges Tank-top Viewer Mail Seagulls Imagistic Living Room High Roller The Garden Canvassing

"The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks". Emerson

FLASHPOINT

1 The moon has a larder and a kitchen, wears a nightcap as Father in the Night Before Christmas.

2 The moon hoards pistachios, marzipan commands the shadows is mustachioed sleeps in a sloop (at least when I look) like the boat owl and pussycat took to sea.

3 And on country nights in high summer fishing nets seem drawn about his face, reveal ribbons of light, eerie panhandlers grubbing quarters; a sinister sailor with a sack on a pitch black wharf.

4 Between clouds, leafy barques the hinge reflected on the thick, ashen door the moon will pirate your senses set them adrift amidst twilight islands in the mind's Outer Hebrides where mystery is king and the hem of robe you kiss is an envelope pilfered.

MARZIPAN

1 A thick hole in the dark from which stars pour silver as in pails their runny divide ink-strewn scalps torn from the roof of the sky.

2 Padded footprints giant ferns blooming constellation prints, the wind an athlete pacing about a track drying thru fingerprints thin, nectarine light.

3 Sand down whitest skin moving past your hand a gown, mauve to green, iceberg lettuce, the black festering across a ribcage; while night arranges moths to dusting powder pucker-lipped fronds from afar

4 Afar, the word a gypsy tangled in the waves, foam from a medicine bottle agitated and strewn, bubbles calculated in gasps light into the distance forlorn tree-frogs, the cricket sound round deep --movement of night as a rumbling in the ground,

SANTO DOMINGO

In the crypt with Columbus in the crypt with Giovanni of Genoa, the diaspora driven Jew; watching flecks of the cathedral floor jade-eyed and mica afraid yawning down brown the abyss, his skeletal coffin thin accae wood, phlegm coloured flamed ointment of the saints in holy water bridging the little centuries.

2 Serpentine heavens in coiled stars heaving like passion fruit hung down piano wire.

3 Meteors douse the light of black stems, eye holes cut of old Spanish sailors; thin ghosts plundering night.

4 Melange tableaux peut-étre les étoiles sont oiseaux.

WHITE CHINA PLATES I

The moon hummed like a refrigerator, light thru shadows --the solitude of dusk closing in; black scars visible across the moon's face shaped like mountainous hands, all silent, the occasional leaf rustling.

2 My fork at plate's edge listening, listening to the haunting one eye on the staircase wall white as the numb light outside palest night. Caught off-guard, the musty settee and armchair acting as hallucinogen to the nostril, the calendar of events playing ghostly tag with sheer curtains hovering, shroud-like, on the family Bible big and brown as the Lord's foot stool.

3 The unravelling tale slowly much as thick yarn with a kitten batting it, one event at a time in sepulchre movement down a linoleum floor. Two twins burning, fever scalded in frigid water only shock setting in, dying to join the black creek water from which her unwilling buckets borrowed this liquid crucifixion and bitter vinegar.

4 Or the drive-house door, silent in precision, unseen hands before marauding hoofs in unison dark from windows' edge to better hear little poke of sleigh bells or harness rattling grim with a sick man's cough.

5 This admission of spectral animals somehow more unsettling than the young woman next combing her hair at the foot of the bed scaring the daylights out of me picturing the whereabouts of stockinged feet, these tricksters from another world; drum and kettle corps gypsy fife with harbinger doom to rasp of falling broom-- old and yellow silky straw witch's hair-- and a cat dark as the Devil's very bread.

WHITE CHINA PLATES II

You could have driven a pick-up truck thru spokes of that moon, so big and radiant this upended water chestnut-- ground mist weeping in the shadows flutter of an old woman's shawl, the clammy smell like a child's fingers to the face, a little unsettling crickets and dew in brigades running tears on the old shoe leather.

MAIL DROP

A boat sits on the very shallows of a lake in egg-cup fashion, a tea-cosy covering waves, orchestrating the bob of colours in white enamel blue inverted water.

Afar, the boat is a rasher of bacon a strip, stripling, stipend slicing the lake, distancing.

The boat is an envelope at the end of the world, planet-sized, pea-green about to spin crazily into the sun at the end of a rifle-sized mail drop.

The boat rides amid the between places of things, furtive longings where crones sit within waiting bushes & lizards visit skin, dirge of teeth gnashing the fringe canopy of flowing leaves.

HEADDRESS

Stravinsky's Firebird, Debussy's La Mer lilting arrangement like a windmill with a little Hottentot of a bird scurrying over leaves like hot coals, nest a pudding arrangement, oven-shaped, dappled with a string.

She is alternatively lady of the green shoots, Empress of an Andes of twigs for this cow-pie upended between trees is fortress and manor, blockhouse and Maginot Line careening between the branches much as a sloth toe ambles across the roof of a forest gingerly stepping on noise, clinging to velvet footpads, sitting between shadows within the roar of a clearing.

AIRBRUSH

Iced coffee, wedge of toast-- the sun poking thru cranberry glass delights exquisite Duchess of Berry, her decanters & an hourglass.

Halo-hello in your fingertips I said, to a cadaver of light boldly striking a tuning fork to ring an engagement of gold flecks by your bed.

Limoges vase for lace and pretty underthings for outside the stream steals my interest, wearing tumbledown silk pyjamas and a peek-a-boo smile that points thru reed curtains.

A rustle from her chemise and sun parasol parts green boudoir draping shiny, black rock.

The muddle of this earth-time puzzle, brief flutter to the eyelid's butter-- I saw match-flare crocheted into the snake eyes of your dress.

SWORDS AND ROSES

Some lives have themes. Goldfish that stubbornly die; compatability only with distant lovers --flowers (but no sweet-breads) that wilt to the touch.

Waiting. Charcoal-grey cat agreeably on a green linoleum table with light basking in.... a tad playful, paws up, (classic boxer stance) but no one notices. Others oblique in their transparency, are unmindful of even the empty closet and greeting cards that smile hello.

In the dark this room shimmers below life-raft status; chairs are buoys bobbing under waves of congealed fright. In the morning the first pigeons rifle over rooftops, mad flutterings like your eyes stabbing gables looking curiously like your heart. A tree bandaged in wood manages a feeble handshake with sky cajoling winter.

But it is the moon, large and eerie, a golden earring mindful of a Chinese panda that plies its trade.

Mandarin-like, a snout so cloud-entrenched soft night barely resembles willow and bamboo shoots the universe left to feed her.

Nuggets or nougats? Should I call you "opaque", use coke-bottle glass as a symbol of light-headedness, transparency? Keen vision? Could it be more is known of outer space than your mind or that leaves, frosted with cold, are conducting interviews maliciously within the park fold?

Rather (and this is so circumspect) no one owes anyone in the brisk coinage and trade that breeds human waste ...

So drivel passes as conversation, a handshake for real investment. A lot in common, the wrong dreams. Pretty awareness, the desolate pennies stumble from our hands.

More substance, really, in the rustle of a silk dress or static electricity that pops over orb-sized breasts. Hide and seek peek a boo, you don't need me I don't need you.

MOONROCK

She wears a cat encrusted T-shirt & panties with L*O*V*E guarding the Paradise door & when balm of night casts shadows, her face is moonrock distant to mysterious down storybook crags; her darling form cloaked in twilight garments of an inky earth.

Gates of Venus, . . . as if feline whiskers whispered, wan cat eyes in amber dark glowed pale honey in alchemy or blur of soft movement was caress to stars' elopement with the sky.

This woman summons fire, stokes furnaces to quicken parchment leaves of flame-thick desire, honed soft on ripples skin tones were curvaceous drift of oars, vivacious breast on buttock's door, more moisture bead holding regal court, this prance down wet & downy stair.

Rain is a swift messenger paw prints with descent of night where moon becomes a plaything of clouds' passion, and pincushion upward surge of clammy earth.

SMOKESTACK

A small fish, its colors embers amid the swirling water; reminiscent of a café in darkness-- the smokestack tablecloth fluttering in the matchbox breeze.

TICKINGS OF A CLOCK

I began to see old lanterns, books opening/folding within your eyes; a pale light running as silver to the sea.

Then crestfallen leaves dangling as from fishhooks or the autumn moon's skeletal lightness tossing a path between waves over this sidewalk, that, with the back streets passing occasional hisses at the main culprit, night.

The prim measurement of your smile, not the wan neglect of cool skin tones or fabric always more suggestive of summer colours, sideway movement of shadow into tickings of a clock.

Rather mist and clamminess, lipstick in a smear as a thumbprint before the coughing of a motorcar as its elliptical wedge tears darkness away from sight.

FLASHPOINT

CHOPSTICKS

Only marginal chances of finding a Great White in my coffee although the cigaret's tubular belly is flotsam against my hand-- a dirty kerosene color, sleek & grey.

2 And stirring the embers of my cup, suppose the grinds become primitive shark lore of forgotten peoples or death sticks, dry rot teeth, fathoms squinting light.

EQUINOX

The four Equinox sisters, the one, Fox, streaked-- all color, a blur a Bloomingdale's on fire, a wedge between Everest & her fortune.

Samantha, the other dun-coloured earth-tide (in full bloom), blossoms vernally & literally busting out of her breeches with eyes like barely sugar. Jubilee. Fête de la vie. Lighthouse keeper beckoning twin shafts of warmth. Camberwell Beauty. Rattan Bar, shooting star.

Carraciou (and castanet) an evening song, the most buxom but with dog days & tiresome moods flushed with heat. Tidewater in full ripple, a murmuring of abstract intelligence orchestrating summer's growth. Emerald keeper. Silken flax beguiling smile, wiggling toes. A stickler for detail, she was (with endless contortions) always in the grass.

Brumaire, evaporating vapors, the most withdrawn & difficult to know-- a dead leaf combed thru wind-swept hair.

Infernally inclined, a modicum of sparse economy idly knotting ice thru a cadaver fence before putting on a brave show-- her stern beauty and most commanding feature, snow, shone like almonds or stars twinkling from an anorexic fist.

Alabaster, her prison whiteness this Brumaire. A clock, pier, immovable, still.

Firing up the flashlight in the dark like beautiful woods sleeping.

PENNY WISE, POUND POOR

Fall was a tubercular cousin residing in the country sparse hair, rasping cough.

2 Night air was damaging stringing pumpkins around orange chains, the milkweed pod shivering in open shirtsleeves little noises sifting from burrows in her chest.

3 Fall was... reputedly from another country wore glaring cravats, gold leaf and Rubenesque chain; stalked the lark mocked the breeze.

4 Penny wise, pound poor leaves a shock of hair prematurely white degradingly picked from the comb flung out fireflies crisp bodies to singe fire-cold light.

5 Advancing stairs in poor light, the season became makeshift wallpaper hung by tedious hands. Little seep of plaster dirt escaping the touch, grass bristled by frost where occasional flower was torched with cold savaged bees stumbled from the weeds.

METAPHOR

There is a star near the hinge of planets, a barn under a cow's lick of moon-- plausible people moving thru an airless universe.

Pay attention to the frond of lilac . . . limestone troughs upon which thickets of Indian scalp & devil's paintbrush soar to the horizon and, afterwards, little creeks run with the sparrows of evening time in step to tiny boatmen that echo enamelled snails from the very consonants of earth.

Rustle of leaves, some might argue breathless gasps to intone the savagery of little seasonal voices cut off mid-stream.

A spate of bees, early colonizers deflower blossoms and strip-mine lava butter of erupting hard-shell tulips: such careless penetrations-- volcanic intrusions entomb their hairy bodies caked with the iron-lung of blackened soot petals, each a cough drop on the heaving breath of a declining afternoon.

EMBERS

As you enter into dream-- its the unconsciousness which stifles, the thin embers called flame that outdistance the controlled rubric of desire.

SKIN

Her emerald top phosphorescent candy glow stick candy, sno' cane-- floss like the mane revealed beneath, spun hair matted/woven into icicle lengths & pubis mink.

Her presence as a monk sliding under a cowl, jet-black velvet or midnight eye-liner shadow knotting strands of dark.

She comes on waves-- candelabra is a name deft movement of finger caressing storm, bare legs shining wet street lamps decantered ambered wine.

Cigarette floating between lips, uncharted voyage of the smile where puffs of smoke are parrots' wings, incandescent show-girls in novelty across the flame.

ASGARD

In the ardour of an Asgard fire see adders from her vinous fire per adua ad astra.

Listen to the wind-- the ageless, intoning wind, a sea-hag encrusted on a mattress of waves.

Cat's footfall, breath of fish the flowering beard of a woman.

OLD BROMPTON ROAD

"Death is but a sleep" quaint rationalization even to Revolutionaries. Think of Robespierre holding his bleeding jaw or Marat outside-- eyeing the inscription, scofula no longer distracting while tepidly emptying bath water.

2 Dreams, poetry of painting, deathly pastel shades alongside granite canyons entwined with rosebuds and leaves-- bone horseshoes clanking in the dark.

3 Catch basin, drainage ditch upon which the raspberry parts its tendrils and human remains, the loathing of the living ("not dead yet...." ...appropriate obscenity:) scrawled on one Victorian mortuary, windows knocked out, coffins in full view a hand's reach away on a dare dignitaries in a pile pried loose; one, few years hence across the Channel, sworn enemy to the French.

STREET SCENE

No open barge crowded with nameless waifs or junks in a teeming harbour --just odours spilling from a back alley, stair wells littered with cheap saki bottles, one propped to rifle the door.

IN MY BOOKS

The way I figure it, a number of people are out of control at any given time ... gin rummy & hockey notwithstanding.

Mickey bottles and varicose veins are sure signs of indulgence as are, proof-positive, speed-traps & roll your own Black Cat.

Sure 'nuff, even Sunday driving stands at the motor edge of frenzy while Mom's apple pie is little more than just peaches & cream home baked greed.

Take stock car racing or the trots, Little Orphan Annie Comics or Budweiser. Vice, like charity, starts at home.

Each curtails a larger problem and self worship begins the moment your zipper opens.

MADE IN SPACE

Mood food. In deep, deep water without the thought of water bottom, I thought of you.

Sous la peau rouge, Chartreuse, I thought of you.

Dans le cafe du paradis, ile au emeraude. Cascades aux ecrivisses la belle aux Bois dormant. Tir a l'arc, volcon.

Precious little majesty to Words nor necromancy of place names, ma douce.

Partout, je te vous.

GODIVA

Lingerie, black pumps a navel creamy enough to drown a kitten-- the clothes assemble in microwave fashion --crackle of fire-- the silver pants zoom across legs with curves so caress bound a formula racing driver might tumble.

As eyes rise in jade lantern face & hair is brushed with all sheen aside, the lady is more than a Godiva or Goldwyn-Mayer cinematic production, this oasis of sparks, twin peaks of McKinley-Matterhorn fame, her calendar of words pulling Oil of Olay & perfumed honey thru each studied remark.

PELÉE

The night before ... sultry Martinique, a tortoise shell cat climbed, lap to pipe, amid curbs of orange smoke.

2 Mount Pelée, a smoking hard hat with the candle-wax of longing gutting in paraffin for 30,000 souls sent to the Crematorium her harbour hissing lava foam; even coffee beans fused into other metal bits, a danse macabre twittering machine, (nature au contraire), tortoise shell improviso with splotched colours weaving dawn's light & feline crouching.

3 --the curl of her island's paws lanced in heat, brief wisps tugging Pelée's synopsis (dark & smouldering), with cat eyes glowing up the mountain dark into vegetative whiskers.

4 Pull of my pipe full leap of centuries before the bite of the stem dumped fire again

PELÉE: MAY 8, 1902

With the smile of morning in her purse, the dark laughter of her cat napping in the crevice, half-alert, Martinique (angelique) on padded paws climbs from night.

I saw her hair-brush the lava to warm the bay, crinkle little St. Pierre jammed into one parking lot, volcanic embrace.

In the little museum --the holocaust cenotaph-- Nature pared essentials to the bone, a cauldron of smoke peers from old photographs to cement (danse macabre) bric à brac ivy/stone and coffee beans wedded in grandeur fission-fusion-froideur resembling masses of bees, grotesqueries & beards upstaging even Miro & the distant surrealists; where reality masked vampire fiction to roll sulphuric heat toward belches of St. Pierre's prison.

And Cygnet (his name close in French to "Swan" leg-irons) (subterranean chamberling peeking out), undaunted solitary survivor-- the bars on his charnel house were the fingers of God pointing the way free.

ELECTRA

Fantasy, Capri. The edge of a pillow. Certain words--murmur, seashells. A face beckoning thru time, lacy windows with purple shades simultaneously drawn. Tears of gold. Love signs, glass of champagne.

A tree of hemlock nearby. A delightful print tablecloth that signals the breeze. The courtier in fancy dress. Twin bottles of vintage wine abreast rider and horse.

Potables. A blue eggshell. The sun stirring Virginia Creeper that moves in unison with the wind.

Electra and electricity, the current that prods the mind.

SIDEWAY LOOK

It's snowing and all I can think of are leaves to wrap your memory, leaves pungent as tea, green curls alive with the promise of fire, shutes like fingers to play a tap on your skin.

The snow is wet like your eyes at parting, cold as the promise of a winter dawn wet again as city-streets I must tread to make a living, the flask of wine pressed to my lips.

On the winter landscape all I see is the ghost white of sheets, our sheets wrapped to keep breath warm the log cannisters of our bed a heady raft upon which to travel to burn up an ocean of delight.

LOLITA GARDENS

A man weeps at your ankles, climbs the stairs to peek-a-boo panties, with finger clasps, a Rapunzel lowering your hair, the long-matted braids a skilful weaver turns to gold.

An ivy forest in a castle impregnated with doors, the prince overhears the code "let down your hair" and, with perilous grasp, mounts the stirrup wall, foot to clasp, searching cloud grey & storm blasts for billowy mists green within this empress queen.

Walking plasticine ledge in the shower with a mermaid soaping her perfumed treasure trove, at an intersection within that woman, her tulip trees explode-- faeryland syrupy, tasting of apricot and sugar cane; a swallow parting indigo sky.

UNPAGINATED

Orchestrating violins thru whisky sky clouds slide like billiard balls a Jackie Gleason-Fats Domino ricochet off greener velvet; my pheasant escaping snow.

Jack Ketch the hangman in brilliant plumage, a touch of Borgia in long, murderous hands.

The light of Capone in steeple-dark eyes running like a haunted ship around the white, facial disc.

Offset. Bold type. I see you through pages of my history book only you're unpaginated.

Unclench the fist, watch for effervescent islets, erotic mounds of Venus or protuberances called Marquesas off my left hand.

Omens are the cloth of dreams, scissors used to open sky.

Work out cosmic debts-- figure stone footprints on Hollywood Blvd. en route to Tijuana for a start; I should have been Buddha incarnate or curator at the Hermitage, wild shaman for the Arapaho not a cocoa butter salesman from New Jersey, nagging soda-jerk in L.A. 'bout the time of Marilyn Monroe's quick magic.

The Almighty unpacking orange crates, sending Florida cold unravelling karmic debt, brass studs in your eye mowing suckers with your scythe; Birthpath urge, Father Time, de-gutting chickens at Pleasure Farms looking to Hindoos for clues (placing roaches on a lucky few.)

This hurdle over stones crass fortitude ensemble, strange melange spewing nails, elbows round thin pain gutter cathedral looming into view where there is more viscera than mirth before ripples of enchantment cause vibrations at four and the phrenology of universal measure is a moon ribcage in light --gazelle of trees a dinosaur in height.

SEQUIN

A youthful bandit this forest-- faltering eyelids in mud troughs & puddles like brisk lies woven thru deception.

Stealing autumn into its colours, leaves in birchbark rustle a full mauraud stealth across every breeze.