a false king and bed post queen
Posted by williamakin on January 25, 2010 · Leave a Comment
The King of Hearts & The Queen of Spades:
It begins at night, she told him. This point is subtle and often lost, misunderstood. She told him where to look for her, the route to her chamber door, which keyhole to peer through. Usually it’s too dark to see anything at all but sometimes he gets glimpses and fleeting hints, shadowed and forgotten. It is night after all.
It is either the moon or her, in the passing clouds of a white dress, that come to him. Or perhaps it is simply his imagination. It matters little which lies closer to the truth.
The Joker tried to tell him hat she was. He said she is but an old widow, silver haired and haloed with sidestream smoke from the cigarette held between rose bloom lips as her hands waterfall a steady stream of red Bicycle cards.
To him, though, she dwells in an endless landscape of derelict buildings and slum shacks from his youth that never existed and were imagined much too late, there among splinter creaking floor boards and cheap dinette sets, in rooms and hallways that ebb and flow like so much sand moved about by the tide. From that tiny strand of shore,with sea foam eyes, she dreams of the ocean.
It begins at night, he knows this. She told him once and he heard, warmly whispered into his ear sealing the bond between them with bliss and grace and secrets shared. He has been there, within her ivory room with golden filigreed walls hung with ornate and adorned images of her faces once or twice, here and there, in the pulsating stillness of its hazy clarity. With two faces and a singular voice she tells him what it all means but the words are bubbles, clear and shimmering iridescence barely tangible, escaping his grasp or bursting at his yearnings.
Smoke Signals 