Tales from the Apocalypse - Marilyn, JFK and the Sugarman

Marilyn is shot

She is such sweet billowing sugar, spun up in a frothy white dress and spread wide across the street fall gutter-grating.  They wait in darkness beneath, scarce daring to breathe as they rub, jowl by jowl, and then ...

Hot air shoots up into her white-pantied crotch and the camera-man swirls around and around capturing each billowing fold in a 'snap-snap-tatta-rat' shutter-bark that chases back the mongrels to their subterranean lair.

"Paws off, paws off … "

His boot slams down as the last of the fleeing curs disappears howling from the grate, nursing deep bruised tissue.

Marilyn is shot.

Motorcade

It's forever 22cnd November 1963.

A white zen arcade where the films spool endlessly in a series of celluloid mobius loops, one-sided and one-surfaced, as shots ring out and we cut-away to a grassy knoll, a blurred pyracantha tree and the Texas School Book Depository Building where a red-wigged clown draws semi-circled eyebrows and men in dark coats rush hither and thither as small pieces of JFK's brain and skull scud across Dealey Plaza.

They are projected.

A pool of light

I find myself of late stalking the silent world that exists between normality and waking, strapped to the dead images of Marilyn and JFK as they embrace.  They want so much to be alone together.

I watch as two bullets enter and kick back, dissolving into the easy laughter of, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" amidst a restless flow of discarded brain tissue and breast-milk micro-calcifications.  This is their place of living where no pause for relentless thought exists. And I watch, enraptured and mindless at my study, haloed by the flickering backlit screen which etches yet more cold neon tracers into my dilated pupils as my mouse clicks play once more.

Look see!

Marilyn sips champagne in the cold-crusted air of a Santa Monica evening beach warmed by a thick, woollen Icelandic cardigan.  Then off it comes and she's draped in a moss-damp muted green beach towel as George Barris circles looking for the angles.  The sun beams and pops across Marilyn's body, glowing pink and ripe as shards of bleached blonde hair wrap her face.

''Snap-snap-tatta-rat' and Marilyn is shot one last time.

The President looks on impassively, staunched and winched into position so the impromptu tracheotomy can bleed the last of the bullets from his raddled body, a neck-braced stigmata from which no air now passes.

It's a wrap and Marilyn heads for the rock-pool.  I follow, uneasily, in her footsteps.

The watching

To this place it is we come in uneasy footsteps faint heart spits bullets and champagne discarded towels she is looking at me through the screen I am seeing a rock-pool she is casting neon traces running through my pupils as her hand-maidens administer the touch of grace deep kohl eyes that throb and roil the dead President is propped alone in his thoughts I see more she sees me she beckons me onto reefers in the discarded filmy sand where sweet soft sunlight surfs the waves disrobing the towel dropping in my study

and watching ……

I should not have looked.

Sugarman runs

She beckons him forward to the edge of the screen and reaches out, hands him the antlers. He dons them like a crown. She passes him the coat of many sugar-bags, each dripping sweetness and he dons it. She withdraws and the screen goes cold, blue … dead.

Smiling Marilyn.

The weight of sweetness now strapped to his recumbent, studied body, she releases the formicary of ants, bold and emblazoned. In search of sweet stinging pleasures as the dead President stands propped by the rock pool where Marilyn is disrobed. Leaning forward to touch the screen as they hunt him down.

The ants march relentlessly toward his neon-tattooed eyes.

And Sugarman runs and runs and runs …. to the alms of a silent zen-white arcade, wherein lies his end, punctured by a thousand, thousand pin-dot hunters.