Moon Dance. Brooke Biaz

      1 Life or Death

      Word comes this morning that the lodgers are returning. My mother’s lovers are returning and I, Maxim Moonface, must open the curtains. I must calm my heart which dances the Monkey two-step these days to the beat of a pace-o-matic gizmo. I must keep quiet about Che in the kitchen, who’s been working the entire month to restore our appearances. . . . Who says, after all, that he won’t turn out to be the Warhol of muscle? The Picasso of skin and bone? The . . . Of course, his hands aren’t what they used to be. Andique Garnet’s nose, for instance, has re-emerged ill-affixed, long and twisted whereas, if I recall, it was once perfectly invisible. Also, inevitably, there is the question of Dorothy’s breasts. Inevitably and unavoidably, because these breasts do not appear as a reflection of her true spiritual self. Perky breasts and suited to the task of filling a cup; but they are made, whenl all’s said and done, out of her armpits. . . . O but let me not be too critical. After all, Che, skilled as he is, has nothing left to work from but the covers of IT magazine and Suck. No surprise, therefore, that several of our brand spanking genitals bear an uncanny resemblance to the yoni and linga of famous but now retired persons. Our Mounts of Venus, for instance, are all turning out like that of Ms Germaine Greer! . . . But at least, this morning, all my babaloos have heard the good news. . . . That’s them screeching their delight in the room next door as the sirens, my pear-shaped partners, stand on the verandah pounding the door, shouting “Let us in! Let us in!” and raising their harpies’ arms at the sight of yet another moonlit night. And to think this entire flock once swooped on young Moonface unrequitedly, around and around in the dark, their hands plumbing enthusiastically for his moderately sized but crusty Mare Fecunditatis (which Che has now given a certain aged genital majesty, I feel, with ribs like brass amulets and a foreskin of such momentous rolls that it looks not unlike a blossoming camellia). Round and round me like a feathered human mandala, barely dressed in cheesecloths and seersuckers and the flowers of white frangipani in wonderfully long chains, orbiting bobble-eyed and carrying several dogged-eared copies of Love’s Body. . . . Whereas these days all they wish to do is to fly out to freaking Antigua!, or The Maldives, or The Whitsundays. Cutesy plump 747 tourists in cabins built of aero-fibre. (Man! technology astounds me.) Them making noises about broken staircases and fallen arches and Maxim’s latest offspring being born into “Clear water.”

      “So take a holiday,” I call out to them—but they seem to be looking for something more permanent.

      Dare I say, my partners have turned maritime once more, hoping to set sail for the Sea of Nectar, the Lake of Dreams, the intriguing Bay of Rainbows. . . . I mean to say, they’re hoping to try that first great Dutch experiment again (before PROVO), building dykes and so forth, but in reverse, so that all that we once dredged up, dried out and walled into our world, they wish to send awash. All that we formed together as sure as moonrock, they wish to dissolve into their own wild embryonic seas. Their giant albatross wombs of . . . As if pregnant mothers, like sirens, can recall their emotional landscape!

      Ha! Ha! But now the lodgers are coming back! Now our legs will dangle anew from the towering piles of notes and monographs that Dr. (pending) Roszak once called “his immensely popular research.” With Tito, who occupied the first room, we’ll eat. Eat! Hongo Gusisados. Avgolemono soup. Rissotto alla Milanese. Pindaetotokk. Eat! Eat! We’ll consume the entire world. And Zimmerman! Yes, Zimmerman’s returning too. Stupendous! Tomorrow we’ll go Watusiing on The Corso. Frugging and gugging and sheehugging down Raglan Road. Funky