I climbed the stairs with my key and my brown leather bag and I entered room eight. I heard Aleece mounting the steps behind me. Room eight. My own room in a warm country. A bed, a table, a chair. Perhaps I could become a poet again. Aleece was making noises in the hall. I could see the ocean in the late afternoon light outside the window. I should look at the ocean but I don’t feel like it. The interior voice said, You will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose. This is a place where you may begin again. But I want her. Let me have her. Throw yourself upon your stiffness and take up your pen.
She makes a noise in the hallway
Come in, I say
She comes in
Out to the balcony
Stand behind her
Lean over, I say
Up with her skirt
Drool in my hand
to open it up
Watch the sunset
over her hair
Are you connected
to the hotel, the chambermaid perhaps? I say
No, I’m the one
you are writing about, she says
the one who sails down
the pillars of blood
from brain to isthmus
and lost in your unhanded trousers
I cause myself to come true
How noble I felt after writing these lines. Aleece had gone away. The emanations of my labour had cleared the hallway. And how much more satisfying this concentration than trifling with a foreign presence or, worse, disturbing another’s heart.
But you have disturbed my heart. Even if my legs are made of stainless steel and a fish circles in the air at the height of my buttocks I am not protected from your agitation of my heart. I am a bee in your world. I am a squirrel. I move too quickly. I die too fast. Your song is cruel and selfish. You have no gasp to express me. I smell so wonderfully sea-like. There is a seaweed bandage, a one-layered seaweed bandage, on something torn in me. It is futile to contact you in the midst of your training but I’ve been hoping you might fall on a spear and leave your master and live with me on the servicemen’s beach behind the Gad Hotel. My legs have been in a jukebox ever since you left. I am Dutch, I am young, I have sailed the world. Bring the fish back to my anus and bring the bee back to your swollen bite. And remember me, Green Eyes, remember your shell-shocked whore and the lather of her ruthless shaving. I appeared in this world with you when you were lost in the pride of being alone. I took you to bath and I took you to bed and I put sand in your mouth by the ocean.
Forgive me, Aleece, forgive me is scrawled across the seascape pictured on this giant postcard.