My Life as a Maiden

today I lay and watched

the clouds hurry away

but before they could I

found your face in each one

and you were laughing

more brightly than the sun

here in my...

so come and sit with me

here in my garden of stones

sit and sip my devil tea

we'll watch the clouds go by

till all the seeds are sown

here in my garden of stones

I have so many stories

I want the ghosts to hear

if you lay here next to me forever

we'll make them up together

dear lover: you know it not

but you will die for me

here, in my...

so come and sit with me

here in my garden of stones

sit and sip my devil tea

we'll love the nights away

no we'll never be alone

here in my garden of stones

each stone I plucked

from nature's breast

and I laid them perfectly

to fit your perfect form

my blood I shed

so here forever you could rest

with me, my love

here, my love, in my...

so come and sit with me

here in my garden of stones

sit and sip my devil tea

oh, I will wait for you, alone

from among the greying coals

here in my garden of stones

my garden

here in my

in my

in my...

garden of souls

Mitch the Cat loosened the scarf from his head as he told me:

"You are pink yet. My child, when the world claws at your boots find not your solace in the dregs of the whiskey ration—nor in the sweet nothings of fine herbs.
"But I admit: these spirits distilled—ah...—they still my weary spirit."

He was full of this shit. He set down the glass.

His scarf was green today, which complemented the coming of fall. It hung limp about his neck.

He rescued his long pipe from within the folds of grey—black silk.

"And the herbs, well, they do soothe my weary soul."

"So... why not then?" I asked.

He considered. I could tell he was just warming up. Mitch the Cat said:
"I need 'em because I need 'em. 'Cause I've needed them for years since I began thinking they helped. When you convince yourself you need something you'll do it until you really do need it. Until you have no choice."

He smiled.

"It's a cruel world," he said.

"Never think you need help. You don't—at least, I mean—you're the only one who can help you. Everybody needs help, and lots of it, most often; but we all look in the wrong damn places. Start helping yourself before you get conned—by the lazy, for the lazy—into thinking some outside shit is the answer. It's a cruel world, no doubt.

"Everybody's too proud and too self-conscious to encourage others to learn from the mistakes they've made."

"And you?"

"Same but for this here lapse in disciplined cowardice. I drank the cool aid and I fucking served it too. Oh, I was a Zhar and life was presented to me as the most beautiful princess you could imagine (the most tainted of temptresses). And you know what I did?

"I fucked that bitch.

"My Life as a Maiden by Mitch the Fornicating Feline: how's that, eh? That'd sell a print or two."

He laughed raucously as I was silent. He loved fucking with people, and I loved him for it.

"We preach all kinds of goodness but when it comes down to it," he continued, "we encourage most all the wrong practices."

"Most?"

"Well, we are doing some things right, I guess."

"And you?" I asked again.

The sky was a milky blue-grey, like the soft underbelly down of some gargantuan bird of paradise.

He looked put off.

"Eh?"

"What are you doing right?" I clarified.

Mitch the Cat smiled.

"Why, I'm dying. A revolutionary experience, I promise."

The whiskey made a soft purring sound as it fell upon the rocks. He grunted as he replaced the bottle on the floor. His pipe added its hazy nonchalance to the morning air.

This was the first time Mitch the Cat had admitted to me that he was sick; and perhaps the first time in our long history that I viewed him as human, even though I had discovered his illness months before and had known his weaknesses for much longer.

So now Mitch the Cat was dying. The longer he smoked and drank and talked of poetic, prophetic nothing, the more I could see it in him.

I saw it in the light grey stubble; the sloping shoulder-line; the deep purpling under his eyes—the eyes themselves, once so brilliantly green they seemed to shine even in the dark. They looked like pale ponds in the evening, now.

His voice: cracked from talking. There seemed to be too much dry wisdom for his thin frame to keep holding in (or perhaps he was desperate to fulfill it before it was lost: was it in fact drying, shriveling, evaporating upon itself as we spoke?). I watched his pink-blue lips move and I remembered him when he was silent.

"I take it back—I am committed to truth, not consistency, a nice man once told me—"

I laughed. You've never met Ghandi, you ass.

"—'cause, sister, this shit here is heaven on earth.

"Fuck all those other hallucinogens: they make you feel like death incarnate. Which, admittedly, is enjoyable."

He look a long draught from his pipe. The bowl turned from green to red to black to ash. The match dropped in a slow arcing trajectory as his fingers went limp and suddenly our atmosphere was awash with his swirling smoke.

"But this allows you to live. Because living's so much simpler than dying, but so much fucking harder, too."

I have so many stories I want the ghosts to hear, I thought absently.

"We forget how simple it all is. Being. The great tragedy of maturity, that.

"The great tragedy of life.

"Innocence Lost. Discontent and misunderstood dissatisfaction is the code of our existence.

"And what do I say?"

He himself considered this carefully, the smoke upon his brow and the soft light absorbed by the scarf about his neck.

"I say fuck existence. Fuck life. My own existence, at least.

"I had my go and the whole shit—show killed me gently. Laid me down in the hay and silk and whispered in my ear all of the nothing I could ever possibly bear and then? it set me adrift and aflame to float from the shore like the half—rotted carcass of some worn out ship.  I'm real sorry, Jimmy boy, God tells me. But we've moved on.

Suddenly he went off in some character’s voice which I didn’t recognize.

“On behalf of world-wide incorporated, I’m sorry to inform you that we will not longer be needing your modeling services, darling. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. Stiff up the upper lip. Hmm?”

I disagreed. The world could never move on from a man such as him. But a man such as Mitch the Cat... well, maybe he had earned the right to cast himself off, having seen the decay in his wrinkling skin and felt it in his bones.

"Now I'm an old dog on the table of alcohol and death in some decrepit shelter and my loving buddy God's got sadness in His eyes and cheap scotch on His breath and a fucking needle in His palm and He's weary of it all too and wants to get this long sad story over and done with.

"See, I was vitality itself—I was life!—and He knows it. He was there—was he with me? I don't know. But he was there and he knows how it all went down. Hell! wouldn't that just be the cruelest joke of all? Maybe God's just some poor ageless wretch who's cursed with the misfortunate to witness all the world in all its glory in all it's ages. Poor shit, He would be then. Have to suffer all the misplaced sadness—

"You know, that's what gets to me mostly: the misplacement. Nobody knows what the hell is going on, do they? We're sad and angry and frustrated but we don't know why! It's all a blame game and it's all so easy and so complicated."

We both sighed deeply and he smirked.

"Tell me about your life, Mitch." This is one of the only things I remember saying. That palaver had belonged to him all along.

He glared at me.

"That's what I'm fucking doing."

I could tell that he didn't know if I was being sardonic or not. I was used to that, although he usually knew.

"You're talking about your dying. It's all very interesting," I assured him (sarcastic yet truthful). "But..."

"Yes. I know. You have life yet, pumpkin. And life attracts life, as does death prefer a similarly soothing companion.

"Oh yes, I remember when I was young."

I thought:

As do I, Mitch the Cat. I remember your existence; I remember your life.

I still do, perhaps better so now, as everything else fades, it seems I can remember everything I have ever heard him say, ever seen him do; every time I ever thought of how much I loved him and the handful of times I told him so.

His smile was that of a crook; and crooked, at that.

"We all have dreams, Junior. We're all dreamers at soul. True story: ninety—nine percent of our waking lives are spent asleep. And we dream every now and again when we're lucky enough.

"It's not about whose dreams are the grandest—believe, mine were the grandest and the cruelest and so I was the greatest and I was the most terrible to behold. But it didn't help. It might not even have been worth it, come the end....

"No, no. Dreams are smoke, even if, by their completion the smoke recedes and you're surrounded by everything you've ever thought you wanted—the fame, the love, the respect and all the damn stuff!

"Life? Life is the small moments when you see a lover's eyes through that thick haze and you no longer have your thought or your perceived 'purpose'. When you realize but for the faintest moments that there is something that is so much more real than the dimensions to which our proud and skittish brains our privy.

"That brief moment when you know—even if you don't understand, necessarily—that you're the culmination of a billion years of boundless creativity. Something more beast than human, and more god—like as well.

"Open your eyes, I never did."

His smile reminded me of a vampire's, and I thought how interesting it was to talk to a dead man. Although, with Mitch the Cat, it had always felt like that.

"So, let us speak of that beautiful and terrible maiden, my darling my darling my wife and my bride, Life."

I gazed out at the sounding sea from my lover's sepulcher, and to him I listened.