Downward Facing Calabash « Memoirs of a Cipher

26/10/2009 • 00:01

Downward Facing Calabash

“That which eats you up is in your clothing.”
– Swahili Proverb

Female with Afro

She moved to Miami to find herself.
An empty maiden in search of fulfillment.
She thought she could find meaning and direction,
In a sea of supple skin and flesh.
She became a reinventrix.

Gourds full of promise.
Entrails full of squalor.
Craniums; atop tanned shoulders;
Barrel shaved torsos;
Perched above legs that elevated owners,
To six feet plus statures.

Soulless,
Self consumed dark angels.
She recognized their hunger,
Like her own never sated.

They are filled with flesh,
And fill each other without content.
And she their polar opposite,
Inside prickly, outside hot,
Is the prototypical iron maiden.

In the forest of this oasis,
She learned the exquisiteness of
Surface worship.

Tan, taunt, lean musculature,
She sculpted, carved and honed,
Under the watchful tutelage
Of gridiron trainers.

Beauty, the ultimate coinage,
Her sex useless,
Its only value in photo or print.
Her femininity reduced to mannequin.

She traded it for androgyny,
As she perfected her corpus,
In the image of men and boys,
In love with Adonis.

So she paraded,
Free she thought,
To seek her deeper source,
Perhaps even happiness,
She deigned to hope.

She mined the bowels,
And cast herself above the fray
Of those similarly encaptured,
By the loamy spray of dissimulation.

She challenged death,
Put herself directly into the serpent’s nest,
And nightly she caressed,
Its silky slickness wrapped around her breasts,
As she danced the dance of an alluress.

There she spewed venom with a silver tongue,
Onto surrogate father witnesses,
Who thought they strummed her like an instrument,
While she coaxed their money from tightwad fists.
Her garter caught what was left,
Through her well choreographed performances.

Wrought through hours of self-flagellation.
Whipped by steel and iron of gym machinations.
The surgeon’s knife completed the transformation,
Until she became, she thought,
A person of true worth.

Validated in press and verse,
Playboy’s ‘Sexy Girls Next Door’,
A broken calabash in all its glory,
Holes punched through and through.
Gaping wounds bleeding red rivulets,
Down smooth, marbled, brown epidermis.

Broken and bashed on the altar of Narcissus.
She could not transform nor heal fast enough,
To staunch the life, that flowed,
Through the sieve of her mind,
That launched the voyageur,
On a quest as ludicrous,
As Don Quixote and his windmills.

Caught in a trap of her own device,
She recognized too late,
That the fawning of the world,
Easily bestowed, is equally transient.

Just as quickly repudiated,
It could not fill the emptiness,
Nor assuage her discontent,
With the hand she was dealt,
And how she had played it.