The Law Natural

Fiery Venus, wine in one hand and wrath in another,
her righteous indignation with Mars was Providence sent.
Who was he to check her fury with misguided Martian might?

Mars’ failing is arrogance and pride, but all know his
story: Wounded he seeks his father, crying for
indulgence, but it is always rebuked—even if Zeus be dead.

Bloody Mars, thy boon companion in Eris
was dire misdirection--but Martians never learn.
We take strength for virtue, weakness for vice.

His wrath exhausted--the rage for Thanatos killing
his Zeus--, Mars babbles incoherently on Venus'
velvet bed, her auburn tresses enveloping him.

Though her fiery red slap would have educated him,
would have forced him into servile supplication,
she brought, instead, her coal-red ruby to his mouth.

“Shh,” she hushed, pushing him down, rubbing her wetness
over his shivering lips. Smothering, Venus raped Mars of his outrage;
Shuttering, she sank down on his mouth, silencing his humors raw.

When she did, she did so and hard.
Rolling off to watch him strive and wrestle
for his little reward, she chuckled coldly.

Moral:
Mars’ submission was his becoming;
Venus’ ascension, natural law.

Monitor
(or Minerva Complete)

Tall, straddling legs fit for worship,
Pale only for her white nylon cage,
dominates my mind, inviting discharge.

Long legs, muscular, end at taut buttocks;
seams straight as a pin point the way towards
Gemini-mystery that a leather skirt cannot tame.

Minerva is his name, painted lips a painted smile,
jeweled-eyes cutting that coquette stare, freezing blood,
vital signs--ripping sexual identification to shreds.

Shoulders tight, warrior-like, blending to milky-white
bosom; stomach flat as a boy’s sinking to girlish hips;
girlish hips giving rise to an aroused rose, red and nodding.

Cupid strikes hard, and flamed Eros erupts.
What heaven, what hell, what cosmos dost thou call home?
Winged Seraphim, you I worship, you I adore.

Left with nothing but this tawdry Cyclopean eye--
I peer, I glance, I strive.
Would statues were you, I would parks frequent more oft.

Canker Blossom
(or Mars Loves Minerva)

I held the red leaves for hours
Until the blisters began to spread.

Turning, she smiled, eyes adazzle,
elbows propping up to-die-for curves;
her dusky rose ran slick for the waiting,
“None for you, I fear, none at all,” she teased.

Voice husky as night, she pushed her
sunglasses on, kneeling lonely by the beach;
ponderous and pointing, her buds
ready for plucking, blushing canker red.

“Call Diomedes yourself,” she dared, “and
then you can drop the leaves. If he
begs to touch, lo!--I am not to blame. Watching me
was thy want, a thing that should best lie hidden.”

Green-life splotched with red fluttered
away and truer Diomedes was revealed:
No slouch was he, slung and wet,
his bounced for sheer weight.

--And mine?
Tight for rotten canker spite.

My golden skinned Minerva gave him
life, worshiping wondrous rigidity;
if her labors were moans, then too my ulcers
begged, note for note until vanilla champagne.

Ankles held like handles, their pudding
pounding gave cries to blush Mother Night,
and my smaller bulb blazed like wood aflame,
poxed palms dousing my flushed ember.

Aye, how I withered for my pains.

Blistered and swollen, the caterpillar
tucked its flamed-blotched head--
pouting like red-skinned salamander
just until the blisters began to spread.

“Him?” Minerva murmured in muscled embrace,
“Simply not enough for his own appetite. Twas
he that chose the leaf and he who did the wanting.
I simply went along for thy bouncing heavy dread.”




Author's Note: By the way...I'm keeping the sunglasses! She's a goddess! Vulcan could totally whip them up with his hammer and anvil in no time with a +10 Gaunlet of Crafting. :)

III/III

Since I have placed G.I. Joe as a symbol of America's anxiety with the phallic sexuality of the Other (read as The Soviet Union, Cuba, China, any other “red” scares out there), and that G.I. Joe's prolific stature is only effective if G.I. Ivan hasn't subscribed to ZyGain (and a list of others), I have haplessly created a dualistic table that places male heroes from Bond (as in Bond, James Bond) to Ronald Rudat (Dusty) in the category as the Children of Kronos (and I'm more than willing to hear out existential arguments and sign the release of any hero as long as there's good reason); and in opposition(if I must have that sexy thing the West calls symmetry), I place the Children of Discord (as in Greek mythos, as in Eris, as in the daughter of Nyx) on the left: Lilith, Helen, Olivia Clemens.

Discord seems to be the Greek notion of Lilith, and as Lilith's sign has risen of late as a feminist heroine (which I believe I can defend), it just seems fitting that my own character should follow in these divine footsteps. I love Lilith, I really do. She catches all the blame for being the woman men really want (men who must follow a social code and revile all voluptuous women as sirens opposed to the hearth and home), for being the woman closest to the divine shadows at the edges of civilization. Like her, Discord catches all sorts of hell as well in the masculine paradise known as Homer's Iliad:

Strife whose wrath is relentless, she is the sister and companion of murderous Ares, she who is only a little thing at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth with her head striking heaven. She then hurled down bitterness equally between both sides as she walked through the onslaught making men's pain heavier.

Only in a patriarchal civilization can the hand of change be labeled as the hand of strife (I wonder what chaoticians would say about her). If Discord were (and I suspect she has been in some sort) a World of Warcraft character, she'd definitely be the queen of DOT (damage over time). As opposed to direct and very personal thunderbolts lofted about by Zeus, Discord's influence occurs over time, “only a little thing at first.” Since phallus-casters everywhere despise the feminine influence (note Zeus' eternal struggle against Hera and the Christian god's bachelorhood and pimping of Mary), forces like Discord are forced to be underminers (compare against the modern struggle of women for equal rights and the forces that opposed them). Much like Lilith, strong female protagonist's are either forced to abide at the edges of civilization, or like Wonder Woman, become encoded and accepted by masculine jerk-offs everywhere as the strict Oedipal mother, who, if you misbehave, will tie your ass up with the rope of truth and teach you a lesson for the good of the U.S. of A. When it comes to strong females, men are so confused. But then again, when it comes to strong males, men are equally repelled and confused (do I worship him, or do I secretly crave his sexual prowess, and if so, do does that make me gay, a.k.a., dead/undead in the presence of a strict, masochistic father archetype?).

Out of this masculine confusion, out of this masculine demonization of women and all things feminine, my inner anima comes to my rescue. As a character, she's a bit of a fascist for the House of Discord, and for that I am very sorry. It seems as though that when you logically take away all the guns in the world along with their cousins, WMDs, and you logically level the playing field for all involved (the franchised and disenfranchised as one), then it seems as though the writer of gothic fiction is left lost in a universe of seamless indifference. But thankfully, even without us, the universe would be given to eternal Discord. Screw gothic mansions and ghosts, who needs them when celestial design is a vampire (black holes eat light, suns explode violently, and comets bring with them promises of global extinction). And as long as ignorant, unthinking masculinists like George Bush and his archetypal God exist, and as long as sweaty faced Bible beaters cruise neighborhoods pushing their religion of shame, fear, and human sacrifice upon folks, then my Damiana, proud and tall, will always be there to beat them back into utter submission with her fallen wit and strength.

Does my gothic heroine need to be a violent opposer of the God/Zeus formulation?

Answer: As long as the minions of the Pentecost are trying to kill her, yes. But luckily, the vengeance of Damiana is only literal; luckily, being the undead, reborn defender of a feminine Tartarus is purely symbolic.

Does the archetype work?
I dunno, read her when Absent Cause III comes out.

Reflections Part II

Part II
The war that Milton created in Paradise Lost, and the cosmos Dante painted in his Divine Comedy, provides a type of psychic juice for Dracula. I'm betting that by the time the serial went to print, and by the time the “Son of the Devil” became a household name (or the Victorian equivalent of male enhancement kits), its chemical bond with the other two works was inseparable. Ask a Baptist what Hell looks like and what you get is a book report about Milton's hellish abode, or if you're lucky, a Dante/Milton combo. Everyone “knows” that God hates Lucifer, and that Lucifer seduced Eve, and that Lucifer thought he could be as glorious and empyreal as his own creator. If we punch this into our handy dandy Freudian calculator, what he get is the divine version of Freud's Oedipal ideal.

I mean, come on, is the war in heaven supposed to make sense to anyone outside the Baptist/Pentecostal congregation? Am I supposed to believe that an all knowing, all powerful deity would blindly construct a spiritual son who would one days rise and kick him in his celestial ass? I mean (and here I hope I echo anyone who ever suffered unthinking Christians in a college philosophy class) did the All Mighty one day just wake up in his heavenly workshop, roll out and bed, scratch his butt and say: “Today I'm gonna construct me a vile villain; nay, a universal villain that will thwart my very existence, that will bring evil to the world, that will woo my yet uncreated Eve, that will face my only begotten son in a super-duper cage match at the end of Time. Yeah, dats da ticket.”

Saying yes to this question (that the big man upstairs knowingly created evil and set it loose in the world) is like saying, “Yes, hell yes, I want to lock my only offspring in a room full of venomous snakes and scorpions.” But people say yes to this ridiculous equation everyday without question (see Jesus Camp and Religulous for prime examples). But that doesn't surprise me at all. The battle between God (Van Helsing) and Lucifer (Dracula) is the all American smack down between father and son. If Freud has it right (and I'm skeptical that he is), then the son (Isaac, Hamlet, Dracula) is in danger of the phallic-father (Abraham, Hamlet Sr., Van Helsing), and like Zeus, must stand and deliver against the cannibal father (see Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces for further inspiration); but this isn't the case in Christianity. The modern Christian never questions the Father, the same father who knowingly creates evil, knowingly places a virtuous son against a venomous villain (note the snakes and baby allusion above), knowingly allows for humans to become undead and thus eternally locked outside the Pearly Gates (think of all the Baptist fish fries Dracula is missing). To put it plainly, modern Christians worship a strange god, a god whose Greek equivalent is Kronos (time) the eater of his own offspring.

And I suppose I should get around to it now, the anxiety of the day, the question all would-be authors have to face: From what tree does your protagonist fall?
...

Reflections, Excuses, Rationalizations, and Me (or Why I Write What the Hell I Write)

Part I
After watching Strange Culture, and after I got over feeling sick about how stupid and primitive the FBI always looks in real life (as opposed to our fascist heroes from the X-Files), I began to count the ways in which I, myself, was quietly brought up a fascist. I have absolutely no illusions about it. Just coming out of the Cold War, just a stretch away from the Cuba Missile Crisis, it's no wonder toy companies got into bed with ideas like they did. What is the original G.I. Joe but an echo of the WWII frogman? What is Action Jackson, Captain America, and the rest of the gang (ok, you might argue that SpiderMan is at least self-conscious, I'll give you that; ok, yes, Thor is a pagan god made to the tow the Avenger's company line, it's at least kind of humorous) but a reflection of America's hard-on for over powered, masked sadists (which was brought out quite well in the recent Watchmen). And where then, if I am going to actively displace nationalistic heroes, do I place my own hero? Where does my own fictional character fit in all this?

To answer that question, I have to go back to Stoker's Dracula (thanks to a recent Redguard publication). Whenever I attempt to reread the novel, I am always struck by its universal sadism (and as an all American boy gone quite tranny, I love sadism, nothing wrong with the stuff, maybe?). Dracula longs to feel England's pulse, Harker longs for Mina's hand in marriage, Lucy (our echo of female vampires and vampish behaviors) strings along three men only to choose Holmwood in the end, and of course, Van Helsing longs for a type of divine justice in the death Dracula. Line up all together, you get a Stokerish universe of needs, longings, and an almost psychotic lust for control. Dracula must ironically control his environment in order to survive the onslaught of the things he feeds on---humans; and in reverse, the denizens of the Western world, summed up in Van Helsing's moral character, must control Dracula's appetite with a really big, really sharp, really thick phallic steak (gasp, homeroticism in a Victorian text?). In short, Van Helsing must use the strap-on of God in order to put down one of the Western world's most radical embodiments of self-reliance (something our own nation seems to repeat time and time again).

Phrased that way, I can't help but see the shadows of two silent characters, characters that don't really physically exist in the novel: God and Satan....

Photo Stock by Kazma56