# 12 Muse of the Brighton Bathhouse

#012: Muse of the Brighton Bathhouse

I interrogated you with Newport cigarettes pursed at my lips.
And you sized me up like a slave on the market block.

Emergently my covered wagon has been jettisoned and set ablaze by a blonde haired savage, a mercenary in clad multicolored finery with war paint under both blue eyes.

Brandishing a spear and also a bottle of Russian Standard.

She’s since infused my life with her Red Bull risings and cynical parables on the subject of snow ball fighting with General Winter.

“Drink!” she whispers out her demands.

Until in naked oblivion you can pronounce my name in full glory!
Take in all its parts and thus know my demons and also my saints.
Extoll me as your eternal choicest muse. Make me your goddess and savior, secretly.”

And thus I went to work.

My pen and pipes, belting out prose, parable and promises to fight for her to the death.

And she beat me half to tears with the venyike.

In a wild Peony Ambush,
She put herself upon me,
Robbed me bandit blind.
Of my heart, and second soul as I made art to celebrate the coming of she into me.

Penniless as a proverb.

I marshaled all remaining vagabond tendencies into the rigorous use of my baller ball point pen.

Woman, you are a golden locked lioness. Boxing with me, you strike incite and nerves unnerving furious fascination.
Womb to tomb!
You Caspian blue terrorist!
Thing of profoundest beauty.
Drag me down the Brighton Boardwalk and set me as an effigy of hopeless romanticism on the sand of Sea Gate!
Sky high on fire.
Take me to pyre.

When our correspondence first began in September it was like a report on a Cherokee Indian massacre.
Communicated via the passing of notes.
We conducted then a lively human traffic in roses and poems and also in promises.

A triangle trade.

You dripped wax on me shortly after.
I wrote you a play.
“I will try to believe any stories I tell you and you will make me immortal!”
In words and in dreams.
Pull!
I produced on demand and she shot each product down.
Exploding clay pigeons with poems tied to paw, and smoke signals playing out on the prairie skies, steppes and later the chalk marks made on the promenade off Banner Ave were the guarded displays of my awe.

More fire!
She proclaimed, by not proclaiming.

You tied me to a post and blind folded me so that in a mirror I’d not see my manly limitations, my grinning devils leering.

I, the artist would then yell fire!

And poems would be fired off, absconding into night with you as their target, their words would roll out the barrel of my wit without even seeking to dress themselves in the fine garments of rhyme.

The essential quality of a muse is that she will be perfect.

While at the same time being deeply flawed.

At times she will desire to taste you and be fueled on your fluids, intoxicate herself on your writhing talents taking the form of depiction and futurist words.
She is thrilled to test my will, taking me into the shadows of some late night smoke inundated poorly lit alley way.
Kissing me to tears under gas lit wind swept boulevards.
At other times, she teases out my rough savant best by ignoring me completely.
Make me create in some wilderness cave like a mad Hebrew prophet,
In some Warsaw ghetto tenement, create brave new worlds, burn apart in the steams of the bath house old dead tragic pasts until the proper 13th hour when she calculates just when I will be ready to perform.
Then dripping I emerge!
The greatest show; the highest form of art is after all the private performance you give her,
While these are not immortal, their audience of one is the source, the very foundation and subject of all the war effort !

The muse is not there to please you.

She is there to drag you uphill, in an assault on the profane glory of false gods and the smallness of men who plot in listless towers.
Oh yes. Only an artist can challenge the gods and the shackles of mortality they put upon us.

The essential quality of the artist is that he, or she, will possess some skill and some embattled implements that when rendering her muse perfections, and converting her human flaws into deeply troubling, yet inspiring cautionary apropos that;
This bipole, this anomaly of the creative process will then allow the artist the widest canvas to cast her into the form of goddess, a celestial being, a savior, a seductress, or an angel.

The artist regardless of his weaponry will be fighting his way up Bunker Hill.

When he gets there he will declare:

“Love me until your love overwhelms the white gates of heaven. Ravish me blind until I only see myself in the blue ocean of your eyes!”

Her greatest strength as a subject is her ability to assume the form of desire but also to unleash a savage and indiscriminate rejection of the artist unless each piece produced is an improvement on her immortalization.

For were the muse to be a submissive Siberian doll, an inanimate beauty, well that is just an act of painterly masturbation.

Useless to me.
Please excuse for,
My Muse Makes Art a Contact Sport!
And in the steams of the banya I assume the form of Krepki Mushik,
Strong men making fearless art.
She’s a most capable gypsy partisan.
A hooligan seductress.
A wild eyed savage, she holds herself up as a virtuous courtesan, lady at heart, source of great and the granddaughter of Jewish Baroness.
Under her folds I do utter when the steams clear and no one occupies the coffin ship but we:

I’ll Lick your tits and drink Borjomi.
And then compose a body of American poems that will put all previous to shame.