Rites of Priapus (winter 06)

Dramatis personae:

Priapus
Plaintiff
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
Ira “Unicorn Killer” Einhorn

Priapus:

Prickly tickly wee wee
The little piggie went.
Tingly purple tip,
shaft pink adrip.
Come to papa: dock.
Flag awaft, pole engorged.
Shaft wows you!
Crinkly shar-pei slips
on tongue, says wow!
Bow! Swallow me!
Also sprach cock-robin.

Plaintiff:
No more! Negative! Gag me!

Priapus:
Then let me hip you
to man’s whole history
(my version abridged).
Once he was golden
but as with solo cells
one wished for two.
Once that was through
so appeared woman.
And if she was weak,
think of her offspring.
Please hear me through.
The weak were slaves
yet were fruitful.
From ressentiment alone
they multiplied.
Their separate ailments
metastatized.
Thus diversity seminars
and civil action suits
--as if life were fair.
Paramour, shall I explain
what my imprimatur
can implant upon
your materia prima?
Or shall I get knee-pads?
Or do you need light surgery?

Plaintiff:
See you around.

Priapus:
Wait. Take a tip, tingle it.
Time to switch modes?

MODE A:
Be the girl in my harem
who really pleases the boss,
no Andrea Dworkin drone!
If you’re a spiral stair-step,

don’t be the pink conch,
or serpent's hiss inside the shell,
wind recurving circly space,
some lavender lip-gloss
concealing in your murk dentata--.
be where I am. Drop down

Plaintiff:
--to be your “mournful last resort”?
You bluff!

Priapus:
Let’s change this pitch to hard-sell.

MODE B (HARD SELL):

(Sweat poured down his brow,
whose furrows were valleys
through which streams wound,
semen streams smiled Priapus
to suck as does the bee.)

No old man melts in your mouth
reeking of oysters and urinals.
Darling, unicorns are real.
Regard his horn above!

IRA “UNICORN KILLER” EINHORN:
hanging out, nearly approved,
but from sky declaimed,
among bare pipes that dripped
the silvery braids of dew
on poems to the mirror or the sky:

Watch out bro!
don’t hide a woman’s body
in a footlocker stuffed with today’s papers
because she won’t do you!
To be as me, do not be me.
Bludgeon fast, or stonewall.
Fly far, and molt your nom de plume!

then ROSCOE “FATTY” ARBUCKLE

popped in:
Stressed, dude?
Don’t use prosthetics,
or take what is handy,
and ad hoc, ram her,
as Unicorn would.

EINHORN:
(glowering):

Fatty, schlemiel
-junkie, shut up.


CHORUS:
Where was the paperweight with snow-drift
curled around the red barn and the country road,
where the crystal ball, the lead-bottomed
eight-point-antlered coat-and-hat-rack,
blunter letter-opener, ballpeen-hammered pewter,

O where that heavy object
to make this boo-boo better?
Where the brass trophy,
weighty even with a hollow core,
bronze lion’s foot, cut-glass decanter,
micro-brew beer bottle bludgeon–

ROSCOE “FATTY” ARBUCKLE:
No no no nuh no, stuttered Fatty,
panicky, not that one!

CHORUS:
But if sharp blows cannot cauterize
can one rip some cinderblock
in chunks from office walls
of this land-grant campus

fashioning a portal
to alternative worlds,
to shut the speaking subject up?

Through what wormhole can Priapus crawl?
See how low our hero’s head has bowed.
**********************
Wait, said Unicorn.
Don’t leave witnesses.
Clean up in the washroom
without the custodian about,
sniff arm-pits, douche if you must
before returning to wifey.
And what the heck, let the girl go.

[Plaintiff leaves, grabbing keys.]

Will she sue?
whispered Priapus.

Suits me, said Fatty.

Loose lips, replied Unicorn,
sink ships, sink flesh torpedos too.
Just don’t take the rap.

It’s no biggie
to rub the stains deep
in fabric so you don’t appear.

So pack those pheromones
back in your Fruit of the Looms.
Use some alcohol handiwipes
they stock in the bus loos.

Priapus:

Guys, thanks a bunch, Priapus replied,
his shirt-tails dunked in the washroom sink.
And after wiping his Byronic brow
he checked for protein spots
luminiscent as those the president
dropped on Monica’s blue tulle
--visible sign of his puissance--
or stains on the Turin shroud
or shine of OJ’s Bruno Maglis

immaculate in that photomontage
CIA goons assembled
who stifled Unicorn’s discoveries
on paranormal mind-meld.

Unicorn’s Digression:

(But the wire-tappers
being Keystone Kops,
cut their own cords,
and with J. Edgar Hoover
obsessed with lipstick
and mincing in silk slips
before cracked mirrors
while Walter Winchell greased up
in their hotel-motel
one star above a flophouse,
the appropriate ears
failed to home into the paranormals
who like Sanhedrin huddled
as they communicated
from steppes and silver seas
more covert histories than radar
or inaudible frequencies
pricking the ears of canids
or loosening the petals
of the plainest daisy
or ugliest junkyard sunflower.

Why do baseball scores
coincide with the latitudes
Seventh Fleet destroyers sail?
Why do batting averages
correspond to my IQ?

What gives me headaches
other than Tibetan monks
on Himalayan mountaintops
as they masturbate?

My psychic antennae
locked into these deep truths:
how flat the earth was,
how tight the queen’s
grip on the heroin trade,
how methamphetamine
addled Jack’s sore brain
amid the missile crisis,
how shots of cortisone
made him a bull amuck
the White House maze,
even how Willie the Shake
made Bacon write those plays.

Enough, said the CIA.
Noble lies must oil the gears.
Their page from Socrates taken,
they paid the handyman
ten bucks just to stay mum,
dropped my Holly Maddux,
Bryn Mawr/Texas belle cheer-
leader-cum-seeker cum soul-mate
gingerly into my linen closet
to ooze on my neighbors
a fluid brown as chaw-juice
or mounds of cockroach liquified
in Stolichnaya or acidic spit,
shrinking her to 37 pounds
of atrophied flesh and bone
to incriminate yours truly,
Philly’s avatar, man-god
in communion with god.)

Priapus:
How rare and strange
that we, so soon, co-recognize!
How close we are, lion-brothers
[surmounted] by hyenas ganging,

our boldest transgressions checked
by batteries of PC lawyers,
Lilliputian Gloria Allred wannabes.

Chorus:
But stains can still drop
on that corduroy blazer
or tight moleskin trousers
as blemishes on the fly,

a little spot, but luminiscent
such a telling little spot.
That sink-water cloudy
with wriggling life,

Priapus recalls Bloom
spent from Gerty’s scissor-kicks,
his dress shirt-tails wet too.
(Precedent, help him through.)

Conscientious as some boychik
at confirmation or mitzvah,
he spit-licks thinner locks,
his collar wet, unfitting

as the clog-free drain sucks
his progeny into the sewer,
mini-Einsteins, concert pianists
roaming the rusty culverts,

no egg to nestle them,
no mama to nurture
their lightning-rapid minds
or spindly appendages:

adieu, adieu, adieu!

************************

Latch on, urged Fatty
to novice Unicorn,
his stairway to heaven:
look, Fred, a stair!

But as they charge
the firmanent, walls
of dislocated water slap them
and again they fall.