The Way To Recognize A Dead Word

With Her Eyes Alone She Could Give This Response, This Absolutely Erotic Response, As If Febrile Waves Were Trembling There, Pools Of Madness... Something Devouring That Could Lick A Man All Over Like A Flame, Annihilate Him, With A Pleasure Never Known Before.

I Want To Hear Raucous Music, To See Faces, To Brush Against Bodies, To Drink Fiery Benedictine. Beautiful Women And Handsome Men Arouse Fierce Desires In Me. I Want To Dance. I Want Drugs. I Want To Know Perverse People, To Be Intimate With Them. I Never Look At Naive Faces. I Want To Bite Into Life, And To Be Torn By It.

Talk—half-talk, Phrases That Had No Need To Be Finished, Abstractions, Chinese Bells Played On With Cotton-tipped Sticks, Mock Orange Blossoms Painted On Porcelain. The Muffled, Close, Half-talk Of Soft-fleshed Women. The Men She Had Embraced, And The Women, All Washing Against The Resonance Of My Memory. Sound Within Sound, Scene Within Scene, Woman Within Woman—like Acid Revealing An Invisible Script. One Woman Within Another Eternally, In A Far-reaching Procession, Shattering My Mind Into Fragments, Into Quarter Tones Which No Orchestral Baton Can Ever Make Whole Again.

In My Dreams I Sleep With Everybody.

At First She Beckoned And Lured One Into Her World; Then, She Blurred The Passageways, Confused All The Images, As If To Elude Detection.