 
### AVE MARIA

A Pureloined Journey to Love

A Novella

By

Jack Forge

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 John Stephen Rohde

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Prelewd

As all men are born

the sons of man

we long for cradling pious limbs

from the moment we suckle life

from the mind of God

to the moment we lie limp

in the arms of love

unaware of any

but the circle of things

knowing this

the between is but a warm wave

on which we swim

relating shores of memory

to shores of dream

Dear Doctor Frederick Meinler,

You know me as the man who loves Marias. Only Marias. Sacrilogos. All others nothing in the female swarm from cry to sigh. Maria my love. Maria my song. Maria my lifestory.

Now, to begin before I end to begin again. Words today gone tomorrow. Perhaps to make way for another better method to speak the mind. Yet, words to make today for you. To know perchance to care, to cure me of my ill. Sick I am, you tell me, so I should want the cure unless worse than the disease. And could health be happier than this glorious world in which I swim though frayed of fin in a steadily stagnating pond?

Maria, mother of the man, not the queen of heaven (more at hell) but the one who pushed this preoccupid poet onto this planet to struggle for his life (the meaning of it all). The sphere-miracle begot from Maria, by God. Any wonder Marias become my life? True, she bore me unbearable to her but I no gimpy kid fostered from the wilderness come to make her mother of my own. A plague on that idea crazier than any Mariac notion I ever entertained. Admittedly, Maria Matrix might have been the catalyst for my career--what you shrinks clinically call an obsession possession. But I ask you: Wrong to be committed (don't get any ideas) to beauty? Plato thought a great good--the rationale for love. If Papa Philo thought so, can I be far from wrong (rhetorically sic)? And one may wonder if I blame her for my actions. Well--yes, in fact, I do. But no more or less than I blame you or myself. We are all to blame for what we do--no? The evil in the devil in us all. Sounds right to me. Deep down inside where the sun never shines I can see the fire and ice, the endless horror. Can't you? Anyway, I cannot blame that poor diceased woman anymore than I blame my father, my grandparents, the neighbors, the grocer, the police, the doctor, the government, God (well, maybe) even myself. And so, you will have to examine and evaluate me for what I do without placing blame (big order for a human).

More, I can guess your next question. Incest--right?

"Now, Joseph did you ever share your mother's bed?"

"Naturally."

"I mean besides the birthing table did you ever sleep with your mother after the nursing period?"

"No doctor--I don't even remember her body being naked."

Yet, I do sense a flickering reel in the dim corners of mytheatrical mind where I am lying all cozy and secure in her warm-earth-fragrant-bed: mourning light illomens the sheer nylon curtains carving S curves on her broadroom window where I am left alone right but I with my frightened animalism scense her recent warmelodorous presence--then the aroma of baconeggs tingles me awake and her jellysweet voice sirens me to the journey so I scramble out of bed and my yet furless hooves tapping the stone floor and I follow the scent all the way to the cavern kitchen where mamaria works in heat with fruit and flowers and strips of flesh to nourish my bulging--

Of course I could continue for many pages but I know you want a sucsinct account of my curios condition even though this may run to scores of liar-culled pages.

So what is in a name to shake a sphere of complayscience? This name--apparently unknown mysteries at least in my cause. That famous (to me at least) gnome creature Maria despite obvious religious cognotations has stirred enough ions to both attract and repel me like a sunspun memory chip. One or two Maria episodes as with anyone else would not have even peaked my curiosity but since many Marias have appeared in sicksession, the experiences deserve some scientropic observation. So I shall be the giddy pig (more goat) to your verbalism, dear medicater.

After Materix, my first Maria appeared--a dark beauty who sat on the far side of the third grade world. As I weekly recall that amorfuss memory of chilledhood, she not once met my repeated gaze. Nevertheloss, I was smitten. No need for encouragement from any Maria. What little I saw and heard about her cast a spell of prepubescent love: not that lustfoul hunger that claws at the body-mind-soul of an idoliscent man but a wakeful dream on which one fears to fall asleep.

She became my reason for being nine years old. I rose in the morning dewy to see her. Whenever she was absent, I was desolate and those loonly days were meaningless. I lived for her return to my distal desire. And whenever she reappeared I was evervescently elated like a warm bottle of soda shaken to excess as pop usually art. Howl!

Certainly sexuality was a motor in driving my interest and I suppose her resemblance to mother catalyzed some preconceived carnal connection. However, I felt no gentalian response to her presence, nor did I ever imagine proposing mariage. Simply I wanted to be close to her in a way I did not then but since have understood. Throughout the curse of the year I found the time unpleasant when I did not see her. But when I did, I must have stared often and long because the Catholic non who was drilling facts and figures into our soft heads flayed me on a spelling test and ordered me to take it home for a parentaglio. On the paper was written: "F for making eyes at Maria Premmer."

F for love. How inauspicious!

Nunthemore, I did not lose heart. Dignity, yes. But I was not discouraged. Perhaps inspired because from that episode until now I have sought, met, loved, and lost countless Marias and only Marias, so help me God, for they are full of grace and I am only a simple singer of silly songs minus a balanced melody.

Now, you tell me--am I crazy or what? Whether or not you think so, I feel soon to be adrift in a psychotic void except for Marias floating in and out of my life like flower petals or fragrant feathers on a summer breeze. I must be crazy to endure this monotonously repetitious theme. For I founder in a fatuous sea of foolish love. Wicked love. If God is love, Satan is the romantic fantasy. And I feel to be drowning in a perpetual satanic dream. Yet the wake could be worse. So help me, god?

Desperately,

Joseph Dennison

September 9

Why did you wait so long to respond to my letter, Doctor Mindleer? You must know such waiting breeds anxiety in my trebulent soul. How many long, sometimes endless, waits I have suffered for answers from my messages to various Marias: wordscrawls on scraps of crumpled notebook paper sent through the gauntlet of classmates, doggerel left in mailboxes, heterophonycalls fielded by protective parents, and precious letters sent cross-country to unknown personal Mariads. Now, I am expected to keep this journal to record my Mariac thoughts dreams and deeds. Okay. I can do that. I get tongue-tired anyway when orally shitting in an office so I shall transmit my psychic disturbulence by prose to paper. I probably communicate best this way: I can spell my guts, pore my heart, vent my spleen (however that is done), lighten my overweight soul. Yes, better this way--in the privy of my cloystered wombless room.

September 12

When Duckder Mindliar finally quacked, he asked for more about my first Maria post- Mater. Easy to do. The memories are painfully clear.

That F not having detoured me (afterall--first publicized writing) I continued my puerile pursuit of Maria First. After months of merrily making eyes, I mistered the nerve to ask her to the movies. Knowing Frankenstein and The Wolfman were playing monsters together at The Guild I requested she meet me the next day, Saturday, downtown under the high-titled marquee.

At first, she simply giggled and chirped with her girlfriends. However, I tailed her around the school playground and kept prancing my request. So early in life, so relentless when fixed on a Maria. And despite her efforts to avoid me--commingling with playmates climbing the monkey bars or soaring on a swing--her constant giggling fed my courting game. I felt she secretly wanted me to make it but was too abashed to admit it grossfully. I believed she wanted me as mush as I wanted her. I figured any Maria by virtue of our mystarious connexion would necessarily return my odor--eventually. Marias were mine for the claiming, golden fruit for only me to enjoy. So I wouldn't leave her without agreeing to the date I was purposing. I pressed and pranced and preyed until finally she whispered a breathy: "Hokay."

Inflated, I floated two inches off my seat for the rest of the day. As evidence of my confidence, I beat my own record for balance and speed down the gleaming railway ribbon of steel from Saint Augustine Scold to my extenewaited home. Although, I felt I could have raced ahead of the streetcar that day, I jumped on it if only to watch the trees zipast to the beatomyheart. The dry air cooled my wet neck. The clattering wheels on the track hiccechoed Maria's assent, and the gently swaying car lulled my well-being to near nirvana. I had caught my first Maria: the world appeared perfect that amber afternoon. I could have ridden that desirecar to a heavenly delta.

The next moment, I was waiting under the trianguilded marquee shadowing me from the Spring sunlight bright enough to drive a strange boy mad. Having arrived early, I stood alone while childrun began skittering into the theatre. They all seemed to peer at me while passing as though knowing for what I alone stood. Had Maria appeared among them, I would have leapt to her and proven my cloven reason for being there without even walking on water. But she did not and I did not and they kept staring in passing. The truth of my situation at any moment to be revealed! I felt isolated, alone, abandoned when I irretrievably realized the meaning of being stood up. So I sat down. Then while I was watching a few stragglers dash into the theater, I suddenly realized she could have arrived early so I hoped to find her inside. I knew I was foolish to think so but my proud and guileable heart overwhelmed my mind--a phenomenon I was to experience repeatedly in life. I jumped up and dashed inside myself.

The theater was a darkold gigulous cave with shadows anticating on a big wall. And the voices of the shadows were rivaled by the multitude chattering and laughing. Boysngirls were running up and down the aisles and trying to get on stage. How natural for us to anticate so. All seemed at play in this temple of entertainment as if the world outside did not exist. (Does it?)

In the darkness at first I could see nothing but huge phantoms on screen and effemaleral silliwets of crisscrossing kids. But when my eyes adjusted, I could not find my Maria in the crowd. When I became tired of seeking her, I allowed the moving pictures to captivate me. Along with the gradually quieting masses, I gave myself to the grand illusion.

Soon the vision became more vivid than the wish. A manstir tore across the scream in perverse primal furry. His horrifying magnitude overwhelmed me, so I cowered behind the seat and shut my eyes when he reared and roared. His gigantic blockhead threatened, as if escaped from Easter Island to topple upon me. Feigning excretory urgency, I scurried out to the lobby. While pretending with a residue of hope to look through the fingerprinted glass for Maria coming late, I peered periodically through the swing-doors that were continually flapping open and shut at the evacuation of others like myself. None of us dared to let another know of our fear, finding various excuses for being in the lobby, the toilets, at the snack bar, the drinking fountain, the posters, on the carpet, or near the hallwalls. The water fountain sourced itself a line nearly as long as that for tickets to enter the hall of terror and delight. All the salt and sugar we engorged gave us excuse.

No difficulty hiding my fear but much in stifling my disappointment. Maria had placed me against a wall of sham. What an inauspicious beginning to a life of cherchant les femmes de nom Marie! To the movies I returned no longer afraid of the monsters on the crystalline wall. The world outside now had become more treacherous than the reeling fantasy inside threatened. Since that moment, I have preferred the imaginary creations of the mind to the real machinations of the man. I became procreation and ever since then, I have been an activist for artificialove.

September 30

Long time before writing again.

My shrink laughed at my first journal entry. But it wasn't meant to be funny. Sad, wasn't it? His laughter turned me cold, froze me, and constipated my creative flow. I wanted to rush out of his office and never return. Indeed, I didn't show up for my last two appointments. Since then, I haven't written a word until today, not because of the muse, but the mood.

His secretarry phonied several times but as usual I let the machine take the calls and never returned them. I was offended. Had a right to be. He had behaved like an ass. Unprofessional. Unkind. At the very least--rude. I wanted my money back. I even thought of revenge. My feelings are sacred, especially those about Marias. If not, I wouldn't be seeking his help.

He wants me to try again. I am writing something to move our next meeting forward. However, I'm reluctant to say more about my next Maria. How will he respond? Will anybody care? I don't want my feelings hurt, I want them healed. Perhaps Ill make a sweet cream dream--

October 1

Maria. A name and a song and a prayer. All the beauty of language and love is found in those three sweet cielobells: Ma-ri-a. A poem of utmost economy--aba--with symmetrical accent. Beginning with a word for mother, relieved by a trill, ending with a sigh. The word for life itself!

MARIA!

A call from mountaintops to charm the beasts, bloom the green, and quell the crescending sea. And the final ah reverberates around the unknown void where it zounds eturnally to the ring of things.

MmmahhhrrrEEEeeeAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh--

October 10

Meander revealed no reaction to my flight of fancy. How to read the nonresponse: Disinterest? Jealousy? Rivalry? Indifference? Impossible to know. But the possible failure to communicate an idea, a mood, a feeling in response threatens ones confidence to create. Fortunately never having perspired to high artistry, I am not discouraged. I simply lay it out for good or ill.

Besides, the man may merely be playing the stereotypical role of the dispassionate dictator of mental medicine. I've seen it before. We go to them and dump our hearts onto the floor. We hope for advice, direction at least, to escape some of our psychic pain or fear or to channel our rage harmlessly into constructive activity. But these followers or foes of Freud only sit staring at us and making notes of our answers to personal questions.

"When did you meet the next girl you called Maria?"

I called Maria? As if I have been naming them myself. Only one Maria. All Maria. Maria is woman. As if I were magnetized, she comes to me like an electronically charged essence of feminine beauty. I don't attract her for real or keep her for long but she does seem drawn to me. So many have come my way. Yet, I may only be a watermarked rock in a spawning river. All things seem centripetal when one is standing in the center--my flavoured position. But I'm too unimportant a person to believe they actually grabbed me. More likely they're fast on their way to something, someone else. All things pass. Even this tome. Let's be patients.

October 12

He persists in grilling me about my mother. Says I refer to her constantly. Sure, my writing on the subject to date shows some mention of her. But I'm done. Shes my mother, my earthly beginning, coincidentally Maria. He asks how I feel about her. How does anyone feel about hir mother? I love her of course. She conceived me (with help naturally), bore me, birthed me. An accident perhaps but aren't we all? Accidents waiting upon the whim of a gamboling god aka Leif.

"Raised you?" he asked as if I were Lazyrus. And she no Christa.

Impertinent. Of course she did partly. I grew up--the main thing. Wellalmost. I'm here and need help. Not because my mother sent me away at a tender age. She did not. My mother has never left me. I carry her always in my heart--in a dark quiet corner where the blood pools for a moment before gushing into the thoughts and deeds of an ordinary humanimal. She is the red. And I keep her wholy unto me. Let no one dare stain her gud name. That is Modre Maria.

October 20

Apparently satisfied for now with my Defense of Mother, the mindick moved on to inquire about my next Maria--information I am relived to reveal. Each confession lightens my burden and eases my mind much the way Penance does in church. But now most of my sins behind me, I need simply tell someone my story. And a sighcryatriste makes a ready audience for the proper fie. Ah, well. Money means little to me now, never having bought me love or freedom or joy. Time I value more than anything else these days, time to make my statement before the last flight leaves for Pairadice.

My next Maria was quite removed from the first, a distant cousin (or so I unfortunately thought) living in a mountown far from the denaturing spread of sublurbia. She dwelt in an alpine valley among rural folk who knew little of life other than hard work, hearty meals, and heavy drinking in a smell-close community. Big-boned and well weathered, they lived simple rowdy lives of raw physical and emotional energy. Anger joy and affection always bubbled easily to their skins. They talked and laughed laudly as if to wedge themselves into the center of things. Even the quieter ones stood up to say their pieces usually delighting all around with their baldness.

Maria II lived in the heart of those raw people. A year older than I she was tall and poised among us. On vacation with my extended family (mother absent though present in the memory of the men and women living there), I quickly joined a group of related and unrelated children of which Maria was the star. I first saw her as a flower in an appletree growing beside her little family cottage. She was plucking green fruit and throwing it down to the other children. Her long red hair blazed among the soft silvergreen leaves. Her teeth flashed in the crystalight as she laughed when someone below bobbled a catch. Frozen with fastsination I stared at her at risk of being noticed giving improper attention. She must have seen me gazing at her, though, so vivaciously she behaved as if auditioning for a part in a saloon show. A dollar for a cup of your love.

"How many apples do you want?" she cried, her voice singing in my ear to this day--plaintive and sinductive like a naive siren in lotusland.

But all my Marias stay with me this way: a gallery of saints singing in mind that I often invoke as a litany to assuage the pain of the coldark quiet. Curious how a man with so many Marias could be so--

Even when with them, I feel longly, for Marias do not fill the whole, even when I fill theirs. No, I am an unsatisfied mangoat. Always have been. No number of Marias could change that. Part of what makes me a monster I suppose. But no wolf.

However, I did feel happy to see Maria II jump out of that appletree. Not even the snake entwining her naked body could chase away my mariad interest. She leaped into the high green grass and danced a pas de princess among her young attendants.

I felt a rapture envelope me: the altitude, the air, the apples, and the hair--a song of Edenic Spring. How could any Maria escape my devotion at such a time and place?

October 31

The good doctor scoffed at my flight of fancy, asked me to curb the purple prose. Well violent being my favorite color I am reluctant to grant his request with due deference to his analytical and addviceroy awethority.

We discussed the merits of good writing, his interest running along the lines of untranslated Teutonic wrighters. Quite fond of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he won a little of me to him: my admiration of that German rains respectfully on those who read him even in transliesion. Myself having been unwilling to tear away from Mariamastery long enough to master any other language I know the great man only in the approxy of English. Not to apologize for being a monoglot, though, for the English language, if to be one's single medium of verbal communication, is perhaps the best--so rich in all the influences of cultures through which it flows round the world. Not since Latin has a language so pervaded the thinking and speaking of so many people. Language facilitates the mind of man; English masters the medium even if we persistently abuse it. How's that for an etudinous accolade?

I worry not if he dislikes my words on the wing or any other style into which I may delve to deliver my message. I'm used to my work being ignored: notes misunderstood, letters unanswered; poetry, plays, stories, essays, unpublished. But now I have an audience albeit one who may be interested in my work if only to use if for analiesis. So his critical opinion moves me not. I'm just pleased to be read by anyone at all, if anyone anymore can read.

November 9

Yes, yes--more about Maria. I do get sidetracked but always return to my favorite sobject. I need no coaxeling. The theme spills out of me like love in the Songs of Solomon.

I left her in the middle of an idyll--a place she shall remain for me forever. I put my Marias into little mental boxes you see--dioramas of the mind--where I replay their best or most memorable scenes in slow, fast, stop-action, or realtime motion. I am the projector and the solitary viewer of my own homemovies. I share them with you as with nonelsever.

November 15

He asks me to elaborate. What sexual fantasies did I entertain about her? None. And I resent the question. Why should one have to be sexually driven to admire a youngirl? Sure, we even slept together but not sexusually. When four or five kids spend the night in one big bed so their elders can socialize into the late hours, no sexual play needs be performed. Much whispering, tittering, and giggling perhaps but real physical activity other than an occasional tickle or pinch? No, absolutely not.

Besides Maria II was older than I was by two years, therefore, taller. I looked to her as the superior child among us. She seemed aloof from the freefollities of youth but she joined in our fun. Pretending to be as indifferently ployful as are others lying in the dark, I watched her glowing eyes capture the moonlight through the bedroom window. I watched her talk and laugh. I wanted to touch her shining cheeks but dared not breach the bumping barrier of children that lay like miles of hillocks between us. She never looked my way but at a glance; she never said a word but meant for all. I was nothing to her but everything. If she knew I never knew only witched and wandered.

I tried to remain awake all night to listen for her warm breathing, her languorous movements, a songle sigh. But I awoke to the morning sun--alone in that hugabed only the scent of the others and Maria lingering among the dawn-cool sheets. Butt a dream?

To this day I do not know. Yet, I loved her all that simmering season and tried to be as close to her as possible during our horsing around and tripping of small animals and baking of sour pies. She was my own virgin goddess, appled but unwormed. I loved her as spirit made flesh, yet too pure to be touched. She, my first Maiden Maria of the mountains, transfixed my desire and I began to seek wholiness in the name.

November 20

As I entered my twelfth year, the inner sanctum of the Church drew me into its spell. I felt starved for guidance, forgiveness, and redemption. The ritual of the Catholic mass captivated me. Draped in surplus cassock I gazed dreamily upon the calcified holy men and women of Christianity that stood around the sanctuary as sentinels to the hanging God. But the Mother of Christ of course attracted most of my attention. I sought her image at every visit to the church. I knelt below her magnificent idol and stared into her lifelike eyes that always looked at me with a tenderegard as permanent as a Leonardo smile. I knew she knew me. She stood constantly before me to modulate my trebled soul. I rallied upon her as the ultimater of perpetually perfect love.

To sing here praise, I joined the choir. My pathetic voice lifted to the apex of the nave. I made her cheeks glow with pride. I could not sing well but my spirit filled the Latin words that flew from my mouth: "Ahhh-vay Mariii-iii-aaaahh...." I became the melody and soared above the world of the devil's flush.

I sought her in sorrow, loneliness, pain, guilt, and fear but not in joy, never in fun. She was my resort for the terribilities of living. I would to become an emissionary in her name.

November 25

As expected the doctor, always the Freudian, now questioned my association of Mary, the mother of Jesus, with my mother, Maria. He suggested I sought the statue as a replacement for my missing mommary. What suggested idolatry! And he even hinted I might have thought of myself as another Messiah willing to be crucified for the love of my Marias. Where does he get these crazy notions? I have always considered myself more a devil than a saint. Example: my templed horns. Sure Christ was watched to the end by the three Marys and, sure, one was his mother, one a whore, and one a faithful friend. Three persons in one goddess. Fine--for JC. But for JD a mere coincidence, although devoutly to be wished: the true trinity. Lately have I thought of more than one Maria: a Trimaria who combines those three cruciformed women into one divine MARIA. And I wonder if I can be happy until I find her; although; she may not exist. Not yet. Ah! We shall see or read it in the noisepaper.

Despite what he thinks, I do not dilute myself with grandeur. Contrarily I know quite well the banal poorson I happen to be. No godlike characteristics here. I don't even look the part: short and stocky with kinky black hair and bloody gray eyes I look more like an overindulgent bub than an ascetic savior of mankind. Hell, I can't even save myself from a life of decadence.

Understand, I have always wanted these Marias for myself, not to save them or even to save me. I simply covet and desire any beautiful woman named Maria whenever I see one (fortunately often) and I cannot rest until I resolve something between us, if nothing else, merely getting acquainted. They don't have to look like my mother or like the Mother of God. Comeliness and the name are enough. Sometimes even the name is enough. Thank God for that holy name!

December 1

Please don't misunderstand me. I am no Don Juan. Would I were so much blood and passion. Hardly. I have been generally unsexcessful with women perhaps because I'm interested only in Marias. That limits the field considerably, but surprisingly there are many women with this beautiful name around the world. Oh, yes, they call themselves by numerous variations on the holy name: Miriam, Mariah, Marie, Marya, Mara, Polly, Molly, Marietta, Marion, May, Minnie, and the ever-popular Mary. But Maria is the mistress of all these names the matrix from which the others grow as shoots from a wild rose. So I have been lucky to know a few. A nombers game really. One, even one as ordinary as I, has to enjoy some fruit with so much a-tree. Ah, the delectable modalities of the seed!

December 9

Maundler wanted more on Maria II but I have no more of her to reveal. She remains one of those brief ephemarias in my life. So I can but fondly remember her as a momentary fairy tale without a body. Time for Maria III.

The mountains again. Of course that rarified magical lieder appropriate for ideolized love this time the epitome of the spiritual Marias. Unlike Maria II, this one was not revealed as a maiden Earth Goddess. I did not even know her at first, that is, I didn't know her name. Beautiful, yes, especially in that childlike way to which I was affixed at the time. Blueyeblonde and freckled, she seemed more a hayfield nymph that an ordinary girl. She did not know me either; although, she may have wanted to mate me. Curiously, at first, my Marias often connect with me on an invisible current of air between us. A song unsung but melody to us all.

When I had wandered into a party peopling the heart of the solitary woods, a pagan dance for new vitiates to the rite of passage, Maria III announced to me her name and I knew I was in love again if not in sin. In love as before--never.

At fifteen I had been seeking less and less the comfort of Maria Caeli. I hadn't been to church in months; confussion, yes, for I continued to fear hell on Earth. And the feeling of being forgiven for any act I committed was too convenient for an idolescent boy to forsake. Long after I had stopped swallowing the delicate tissue of the Eucharist, I was still visiting that small cubicle of cool, dark compassion. I thought I was attending incognito but now I suppose the priest knew my by voice, if he could not discern my features through those pain holes. The result of these visits--the penance I required to serve before leaving the church. How easy to pay for lying, stealing, cursing, and slandering, with a few minutes of prayer: typically a few of the designated Our Father and Hail Mary. Even in the aftermath of sin, my Maria has tended to me. Obviously I've chosen the best name of all to guide me through this hellish gauntlet of life to ultimate Beauty. Others have found or sought their Ishtars, Aphrodites, Helens, Beatrices, Lauras, Lisas, Dulcineas, and Dark Ladies and I need know my Maria to stimulate heart and mind--the name by which I live a dream.

Well, Maria III came to me out of an alpine spring night by torchlight to the melody of poplar song. We danced together effusedly, our minds ignoring time and space. We said little but stared long at each other--that timeless trip through the eyes without leaving home. I held her nubeguiling body close but never thought of stroking beneath that dress of virginal gingham her rosy skin with my callow hands. My lips nibbled hers then but not now.

Joseph and Maria, fine coincidence, may well have been Adameve before they knew the tree. The last and the first couplings on Earth. Immortal we became on that forest floor to the tune of naive lovesongs, yingod and yangoddess of our own royalegion. We said barely three words that whole night of initiation because words matter little with Marias, especially Number Three. I had found my Angel of the Holy Name. Whether I lived or died at that moment concerned me not. I was holding in my innocent arms the embodaydream of Absolute Beauty.

Of course I survived the bliss. She and I carried on our love affair without so much as another kiss. We met on grassy paths on convergent ways home and we spoke little, satisfied with the common scents of our bodies, occasional quite accidental touching of arms, and the looks. She filled my day and night dreams; although, I seldom saw her, for our respective families kept us apart, perhaps fearing we would nullify the feud between rich and poor. I would climb the surrounding hills to see her house in the valley to glimpse her floating through her yard. She became my first muse.

Poetry is born from love. So sappy doggerel rippled through my mind like mountsnowmelt down the reverielets of the forested hills. I surrendered to the mewling of my heart and suffered for love like young Werther. Anyway I had to suffer--the only way to enjoy being in love, thereby ennobling these words.

December 17

Wow! The Man jumped on that one. These guys smother with relish a juicy tale of neurosis--at least what he calls it. But why the labeling? I thought them reluctant to make judgments. Well, I make water on their judgments. It's my story. I'm stuck with it. But I like it. Makes me feel good. If it makes me feel good, it is good. And epic cure for all that ails. No? Not necessarily, he says. I could be raping Marias to alluviate a sadistic compulsion and ostensibly feel good until the compulsion again rears its ugly violet bud. Okay! Okay! I get the point. Feeling good is not a criterion for happiness. A sick son of a bitch could consider a day without sickotick fantasties to be a good day. I wouldn't know.

In any case I never saw Maria III again. Three times in three weeks was all. Oh, we wrote to each other for months, sent each other photos. I sent a poem--first one to anyone. Still have it, not the pictures, but the poem. Childish piece.

She licked it though. Said it showed talent. I don't know. Looks silly to me now. Early adolescence produces a lot of junk. Not Maria though--she was the best of those years. Sweet, brief, harmless. The highlight of the end of my innocent age.

She did try again. Came to the edge of the ancientocean just to sea me. Called me. Talked on the phone at mothermary's place where I was staying the somner. But couldn't see Maria III. Couldn't get to her. Not aloud.

Actually feared to show her my monster. My animal was bursting through the tender flesh. Hair was growing all over my Vulcan body. My voice cracked and roared by turns. My teeth had lengthened into fangs. My skin was peeling off to make way for dark scales. I would sleep in fantastic fits and then wake up sweating and drooling. When least provoked, I would fly into rages. I wanted to be alone but also to prowl the streets. I sought nubile girls at every waking hour. I spied on them, stalked them, and haunted them down to know them, touch them, taste them, and disappear into them. I never spoke to them. Never knew their names. But I knew them all to be Marias. What else? A world full of pretty pubescent Marias like flowers blooming on the tree of pairodice.

My monster crawled on fours, crept along the shadows of desire, longed for that ecstatic fusion of flesh. No, I was much too horrible for Maria III. The sight of me then would have terrified her. And I probably would have tried to devour her, inject my fangs into her, probe for her tender juices, and fuse with her. I would have destroyed the Pure Beauty that was the truth of Maria III. Now, that purity remains untainted in my memory--a relic eternal in the tabernacle of my mind. No monster for Maria III, only innocent memary.

The monster was looking for Maria IV, the whore.

December 20

Old Dktr Mandler seemed to salivate into the phone when he read I was about to reveal the story of my first magdalenic Maria. We men are all the same male inside, no matter how developed our manness. The monster endures. Sleeps at times, more and more with time but never disappears until death. And even then--who knows? A bittersweet thought. But then I'm not fond of milk chocolate.

Maria IV was neither sweet nor bitter. She was simply the most lustious Maria I had known. Yes, most young men and women at sixteen seem lustivious because they are being overwhelmed with the monster. Accordingly little or no real love among us. Oh, we spontaneously verbalize the sentiment when about to fuse flesh but few of us really mien it. At least I didn't, hadn't, and still don't. I learned from mother.

She showed me how the words could be spoken freely, frequently with no real meaning. She would say, "I love you" like a long distance telephonoperator would say, "I hear you." And the rest of my overextended fumbly never said the words at all so I easily understood them as insignificant even unimportent.

Maria IV probably meant nothing more by the words. Few do. Some people announciate them with more fervor than others but their meaninglossness is evadenced by the absence of any real action to love. But I'm digressing too close to philosophy. God forbid.

Perhaps more about this later if the patient doctor will tolerate it. I know the reader won't. Too bad.

Maria IV was the nun made flesh. She was a teenage version of a Maillol erthmerther: huge, not only in lips, boobs, and buns but also magdalanimous with affection. She taught me to touch, stroke, rub, push, and grind. She behaved much motherlier than her years; I was a child in her arms. No pieta, mind you, mind me, Mindher--we together but a carnalita.

I would car to her house every midsummernight dream. No customary dates, simply long sessions of rubbing, sucking, and humping. We would watch an occasional flickerfancy on telefusion, at a carpark theater, or of city lights from a hilltop but every one of these diversions reverted to liplocks that fused our timebombodies. And we sucked each other's flesh as if starving leaches. Especially I mouthed the slope of her momuments that rose and heaved like the trembling Earth. But I never touched her treats or sighted a nipplemount. She did not invite me to the value of no return, and I did not push to the cavurn unknown. I never penetrated any orifice other than her ears and mouth. In fact we never fuct. Oh, I wanted to climb the peak and tumble off the other side into that undiscovered land. But Maria opened no gates of asinsion in our feverant ritual. She smiled, teased, and taught me thoroughly to play at fore but the all consuming aft was apparently taboo. She never said so but the broad terrain of her voluptuous body remained fenced between the tendered garden of aromatic blooms and the dark wildherness of earthly delight.

For hours we would lie together fully clothed: she beneath my riotous body, our pelvic bones rocking and rolling, my penis cocked into the wovenweb of her crotch, lubricunt flowing from her toomisscent organ. But we did not fuck. The kissing, rubbing, pumping, and sucking became our duoconcert every evening. We thought of each other as boyfiend-girlfriend but we explored together little either inside our clothes or on our bodies. Oh, we exchanged the expected gifts--bracelet, shirt; you know the kinds. Ironically at one such giftexchange we broke up.

Christmas of course. We were kissing at the portal--one of our long, drawn, deep, wet mutually consuming tongue tingling tangles that quickly raised our juices and swilled our floral designs. I had decided the time was come to put aside the fawn and be a faun. I would seek to perform my masculine emission.

"Maria" breathlessly.

"Yes?"

"Maria--let me in."

Silence.

"Let me in--please."

She didn't. The door closed. We never saw each other again. The monster is cruel.

But I will never forget Maria IV. She awakened me--or the beastail part of me--that has often gone to bed but never since gone back to sleep. I neither regret nor rejoice.

December 31

Yeah, doc, yea, I do mourn the loss of Maria III--loss of innocence and all that archetopical stuff. But what to do when the sap rises in your veins, explodes in your head, and leaps out your brain like a blooming laurel tree? You prowl for the scent of wombenhood. The blood boils over; sinstinct rules the mind; and all Marias become Magdalenas--MMs. The ideals of beauty and love mean nothing. Embedding the body into that of another--the hething/shething--means everything. Forget pathogenes or chromasoames. No chance of blastoid or blastomere can dissuade the submarine heart from blowing all its fish into the seminal tide. From then I sought MMs day and night in one long creamy dream.

Full-blown obsexion you say? Oh, yeah, the manster intoxicated by fairmoans was fit to fight, the he to fuck the she. F became the sign for fem and fortune. Thus, began my Magdalenic period with Maria V.

No romancy there--only cold-blooded realism in the backseat of a 1949 Chevy. Maria V was the ugliest Maria I have ever known: the look of a retorted person but the butt of a beauty contestant. Most important, though, she was the first Maria to let me into the holey of wholies.

I found her via the groupvine, she was an aspirant bacchante tapped by everybody but me and the great god himself. Time to be initiated into my newfound religion--communion with the flesh. Having asked her to the drive-it-into-her theater where I had learned from her predesexor to play for the main event. I had been to school, now I was about to earn my baccanalaureate degree.

Standing on her front porch with the fragrance of a freshly watered suburban meadow surrounding me, I doubted this fundamental truth of life when I glimpsed her close narrow eyes lidded as though drugged. Funny, how a face can stimulate one to fancy or flight. Only my one-eyed monster anchored me to the promise of probing her orchasm. Instantly I knew I would care nothing for her person but only for her body as a satyrsfying receptacle for my deriving lust.

I forced an awkward response when she greeted me with a smile.

"Hi--my father wants to meet you," she giggled, showing me into the house.

"Joe?"

"Joseph."

His hand entrapped mine like a bird. Any notion of flight was squelched in that squeeze.

"Good to meet you boy."

"G-good--"

Maria grinning between us, her eyes two minus signs. I lost words (nigh unto death).

"Well--" she groaned, "shall we--?"

"Oh--yeah--"

"You kids be good now."

I flushed with hope.

"And what time will you be home girl?"

"Oh daddy--" She was dragging me out of the house.

The screen door banged on her father's last words.

I didn't look back but walked in unistep beside her to the car.

Her eyes subtracted again as I ushered her onto the front seat. Three minus one equals two for the roadshow.

The next thing I remember: parked on her dark housetreet we entangled in the backseat and she poised for me to push my phallic member into her desecrated hollow.

"Don't come in me," she whispered.

But I was already there, pulling my reflexing stayman out of a trail of primale ooze.

Wiping up the remnant puddle on her belly with her panties, she squinted her approval and said something about my animal ardor. But dejection was now my dominant feeling. I could barely accept the act being over when I had enjoyed it so little. I must have missed something. I wanted to dive back inside her but she was redressing. I watched forlornly her ripefruit slide into her blouse and jeans. On her way out of the car she muttered something about me calling her but I was too unsatyrsfied to acknowledge with more than a wideyed nod and a so-long minus sign beneath my nose. You know I never saw her, boarded her, drilled her, or plumbed her menstruly again. But I was insheated. From then until recently I have been living to find and fill Magdalenic Marias. Thus, the tail follows forandaft.

January 3

Yeah, well, ah, many MMs followed Maria V--successors to the bone. I remember them as tropies--images cherished as proof of a sicsexfoolife. Marias VI, VII, VIII, IX, X--pontiprincesses of my own pagan religion, being all a succession of Maria V they shall be described as moving pixers on the cavern wall.

MVI nymphed me in the wild. She the one who made me pan the civilized world for the sake of Dionysian rites of passage whence I came. She made me, as I her, the beast with two backs wrassling in the mousey woods where salmon swam the gleaming currents and leaped the rocky obstacles of chance. I fished deep within her teeming pool and caught the fever of the rabbit running in the brush, the goat mounting for the crash and groan, and the lion on the prowl. We only forked and never loved as nymphs and satyrs wont. But that enough to sanctify my jungular emissions.

However, MVII was the most bacchanalian of all. A drippy, dreamy, mariacal nymph who wore the clothes of ordinary humanity but bore beneath a naked body writing for the apple and the snake. Sucked into her femalestorm of liquid lust, my proud appendage reached beyond the moon, my zooan tanks swelled as if to burst into a complimentary big bang. Too vast a sexual monster to be satisfied with one earthen probe, no matter how zealous my drilling for her treasure, she ranged the globe for men and women wannabees to punch the magic button in her panultimate machine and send her into orbit. The last I saw of her was flying off my upturned appendage and buzzing any upright person culpable of penetrating her infinite mystery. I still bear the scars of my indulgence with her.

M the Eighth the most beautiful of all. A bloodred-haired goddess who kept me prone to point her way day and night. The kind of woman who makes a man believe in religion if only whoreshaping the afterimage of her face in mind like the ghost of a holy apparition. Yet I could not sustain the suffering of the mind. The body never a difficulty from my pint of view. But when the mind becomes enamored by that captivating aura never understood, though holy captivating, the body becomes enslaved. New for me. Always, I the one with the hairy whip driving them prone to grant me all they have in story for lions of labial ends. But beauty of the flesh too much for mortal men is dangerous for even demigoads like me. A woman of beauty is an alien thing. And one who also is Maria can only be a harbinger of heavenly belief. No wonder we so readily in our religious bent make a pretty face an angel or a devil in disguise. No ordinary man can dwell contentedly when suspended between the promise and the delusion of the morning and the evening stars.

I could have married any one of these and shed my horns and fur to grow some new prongs out of certain betrayal. And I seriously considered--in fact, I engaged with MIX to bind ourselves totether for a lifetime. And would have lived it so despite the loss of that old pagan lovesong from my memory. For Maria IX, I would have acquired the habits of civilization, worn the uniform, worked for bread, and bought the things that most men live to play with from childhood to the last grasp. I would have left the wilderness of pure and simple joy in striving to implant inspired life into most moist crevasses despite the trapping therapy of mindocs to confine me to a civilized box--compartment for the profane--all expenses paid with only one expenditure denied. I would have left the wildlife behind to share a manufuctured bed with my beloved Maria IX.

A tender one she was, too. And sweet beyond belief in human passabilities. She moved like an antelope, laughed like a songbird, thrived like a shewolf, thought like a salonniere. Besides the proper whore in the game of sexual delight a mothering mentality, patient and supportive beyond the point of______________ (I dare not write the word lest my reputation melt away in sentiment.) and a friend to fit the term the way we all desire--loyal through the sins and staying there until goodness shows its light again. Faith. That could have been her name. Yet more than evanescence off a hawthorn flower. In faith she was embodied but mortal nonetheless. And more the loss when she died.

She did. But something sanctified. For I placed her in the heavens with Maria Caeli if only a reverent memory. I cannot see that far. But if anything good remains in this rapid flesh it harbors, it endures because I knew her great goodness. The one Maria whom I venerated. Not for the flashes of light in her marinegreen eyes. Not for the song on her ribbon-bow lips. Not for the quiet mulling of her mind. Not even for the seaborn body that danced through every mundane task. But for the constantly integral generosity of her spirit. She was a saint and I more holy by her living and her loving of monster me. Maria the Pontifixen.

Our best is made by whom we love. I was never better before or since. And all that I pursue in flesh and blood suggests a hope for something of Maria IX reincarnated at least in part, for simple goodness purifies the pack.

So I, the predator of prey for consummating dates, run to cut out the best of head and loin hoping to find again that dynamic gamy gem of everlasting life. Thus, I chase, I race, and I plug into them one after another in search of the connexion by sexion for perfexion.

January 5

Oh, I know, mediculman, that by your evaluation I may be on the verge of a major mental breakdown. I do behoove erotically that I may think illogically at times at least with my own form of indicktive reasoning--to me a sort of wellogic. But if unusual behavior signaled serious illness, most of us periodically would be candidates for wandering Main Street. Thus, I have counted my plug-in Marias to tally my personalevil of achievement. And unsurprisingly I come out on top--my prefurred position. So, if you, drear doctor, and passably deareaders would not be irritated by a fluvial narrative of epigamisodes, I shall iterate my subsequent MMs illustratively with wordshots as a logomontage of Marias.

As I said, after MM4 I began chasing MMs from town to town across the broad, dry valley of my relative home. I chased them in parks, down streets, in and out of movies, around drive-ins, along beaches, and right up to the front doors of their houses. A young satyr on the make knows no rest or rein. My cloven feet sprang me in leaping strides to straddle them with my furring thighs. My tool pointing the way, my jewellsacrament slapping my thighs, I captured and ravished any Maria I could crotch.

"Hey girl--" I'd call to a likely nymph strolling among a bevy along the parkwalk, "You look like the Maria of my dreams."

And when she would blush with pleased surprise, I'd cut her out of the heard with a burst of nosey aggression and chase her across a broadlawn to a willow- veiled wash that in those primal days swathed the valley of memory like a gigantic open artery of clear ichors. There in the sunbleached sand among the bullrushes and the cowthrushes I'd violate her virgina with my own staffolife, my broadstick to tame the damsel undressed. Only the blackbirds, the dragonflies, and the frogs would witness me mister a birther. I was a full-fledged manster, a fun-faun of the sunmer season.

"Hi baby--" I'd call to cut another chick from a small gaggle giggling out of a movie theater and stepping into the vision shattering light of a July afternoon. "Wanna fuck?"

"Aieeee!" she would scream and try to quiet me with finger to lips bursting with too much smile to purse.

But she wouldn't run away. They'd rarely run away. Then I'd know I'd found another Magdalenic Maria in the making.

So I'd follow her home and scent her nest to mark my Nudefaunland.

Oh, she would fight me like a wilder animal but that always stimulated me more to conquest.

Once I cornered such one in an evergreen ruse garden, her quivering buttocks pressing against a sculpted granite cliff, I forced her by the intoxicating power of my steaming breath to recline on the mossy turf at the threshold of a spring-damp grotto. My cloven feet straddled her supine body as I tore her webbed clothes with my hurried clawsharp fingers. She cried with angstfulaughter apprehending only horny passion bursting through the dense dark coils of delusion. Her maidenhead glossed, I drove into that cavern measured by boys to become men and charged her tubernacle with electrified partickles of desire. And another MM was mine.

Letting her limp body sink into the wet green earth, I disappeared over a wall with a leap to vault the faulty notion of barricading any garden of ripe delights. And I ran with great strides not to escape a rape but to boast a host of victories.

To the sylvan home of kith and kid I cantered to join the flock of frolicsome fools for wine and the divine comedies and tragedies attending. Shedding my clothes like skin of civilife, I slipped into the forest murmuring for father-mother and the Maria of my pagan prayers. My breath mingled with the woodland mist as my heart sought refuge with the wild.

'Twas then I spied a nymph of the Mariad padding softly by a silvering stream. Hunching low among the handsize leaves around an ancient fir, my bald knees sinking into moss, I traced her graceful lines with my infraredeyes. Then of coarse--

Ah! I'd leaf her limb-limp and languishing for love. But that great illusion of all noble delusions was not then a province of my mentoil state. The City of Lust so dominated my preconfessional world that the great idea of charity found no root in my fertile pagan faith. What cared I, the beast, for such an effete fantasy? I was living an idealic reelty of Ovidian dimentias. Sperm and bung. And Marias were for making hole unto me penetrating to reach magmama.

January 17

I bet you'd like me to continue with this line of questing. All you bloodready horny toads who seek to stick fair princess whether or not she just says "No!" may be sounding a choral note of discord at this point. Of course the good doctor long ago left the followers of the vinegod to find the advocates of vinegar who live to sharpen the mind. Thus, any intellectual worth hir salt sports a sourpuss. Understandable.

How can one keep smiling while learning more and more about human history and behavior? Fortunately I look at humanity as a joke; only laughing at such folly can preserve what's left of my insanity. If not for my Marias and the human comedy, I'd be resartored in a street jacket. Certainly I can pray but I must hove my hands to climb the walls, dig the tunnels, jack the john, draw the signs, write the words by witch to live if never to be loved. So I go on. But the period of lust abolished, I shall proceed to suckseed from the reining queen. With Maria V and her court-o-sins ruling the realm of Lucifer, I once more took wing upon an up-draughted vision and pursued the transubstantiation of beauty made flesh made beauty by love for Maria VI.

January 30

Mindler assumes I'll suddenly see the light of love and grow out of this fauning idolascivience to become a man among women. Actually I have carried on lasciviously for years travailing the world in search of the perfect Mariac nymph and do not intend to quit my program. And I can say without false braggadocio that I have chased and plumbed the dark depths of quite a few fruitful prey. These scars all over my body evince my carnal career as ingroined ribbons of my gonquests.

And no doubt many unknown on/offspring trail me in gradual ages from the hills of Arcady to the streets of El Ey. But I do not intend to end my search until I find the perfect Maria--the one who embodies all three women in one ultimating goddess: mother-partner-whore--the wholey trinity.

February 1

He treats me as if I were a predator of women, a rapetor. Rapture, yes. I simply state in my defense that I chase them as I see them and do what any hot-blooded pan-o-wild would do with his precious pipe. I sing my song as Bach, Gounod, Schubert, sang theirs to honor the heavenly hostess. (time to listen) I mean no abusive disrespect for my Marias. I chase them down to perform the sacred sacrament at which I attend as high priest. Nothing more profound than the fundaphysical union of the him and the her murmuring in the warm shoal of the catogenic sea.

February 14

But M.M.D. insists I am psychaotic. Why else, he says, would I be raping women wantonly as if I were making love when what really happens is abuse both psycho and physio of other human beeps. Raping! How could anyone think that the sacrament I admanister to Marias be anything but right and proper in the steam of things? Rape! The only raping going on here is that of mind by meddling mendlers like Mander.

All my Marias want what they get and give in turn. Oh, sure, they often flee my penitrading wand of wonder for a while. But they want to be caught and me to catch them for that the way of male and female everywhere. We pretend in various styles to be uninterested, hard to get, reluctant to give so we dance around each other in artless ballet or run to show our speed and exhilarate our hearts.

When I see a Maria now, I chase her down and fuck her fast. She jumps to her feet, straightens her ruffled feathers, and prances away with a gleam in her eye from incipient tears of fear, flight, and basic animal faun.

Rape? Absolutely not. The ripe fruit cannot be raped when ready to fall from the tree. It hangs bulbous bouncing and shining in the sun to be sighted, sniffed, fondled, plucked, tasted, sucked, chewed, and planted to populate the Earth. (a planet full of Marias) What a thralling cosmock dream!

March 1

Mentaler tells me that Ill be committed to an institution for the criminally insane if I don't cease my behavior toward women. But I don't behave toward women. I act upon Marias. And that for the sake of honor. I am showing my respect for the ultimate in womanhood by screwing Marias to the Earth as mammorials. I make monuments out of moll-holes.

April 1

The wight-coats are coming! The wight-coats are coming! And I ride these hairborn legs like a stag-o-lee windward running the winding drafts to warn myself of inversion. All for that, I would be a rebel atavisto who throws Marias on their backs and stakes a claim to a newhorled. The whitecoats-o-male are chasing me of course per the orders of old Mindbender. But I resist the transference.

I run along the borderlines also to warn my fellow Mariacs of another attack by thought polluters to round up all us bacchanalian fauns and ship us off to halls of distablissmentality remaining after Politicos for Property closed down the institutions of higher craziness. So I prefer to roam these mienstreets and blend into my brethren schooling to confuse and void on the predaters.

Life among the street mad is not too bad allowing the scarcity of Marias. For most women of this urbanilk resemble more the wife of Lazarus unchristened by love: dirty bundled widowshards from the war of life without faces or names. Thus, I go temporarily celibate through this moneymint valley of despair to escape a long-term confinement of my genius. A refugee from vicious police who stop the deed by arresting thought. I would rather survive in squalor than succumb to other minds. But I am on the run. No doubt. No respity. Always on guard. Ready for the iron grip of lawandorder on my sweaty arm. And so I run. Not toward as before but from now. And so they chase me.

April 15

My resourcefulness taxed to the maximum, I crawl around dark subterrorneon circles to hide from the wight-coats. Their pallid garb glows unmistakably in these dark depths. On tracks from hell, solotrams roar a bluestreak from one hole to another--mechanical defecations that disgorge thousands of bipedalists scurrying to their deaths. I enter the foul tubes to avoid the wights. But when the stygian vessels scream out of them, I must lie among the rats of the tracks and bury my face in feces. Any smell of freedom is better than mental uncareserration.

Yet, here they come--even into hell. Arcangles of a fallen god. I do not know to whom to pray so I jump and dash down the gleaming ribbons of track. A head-on collusion with a death train would be quicker than a slow decondittoing of my satyric spirit. I fly to my doom, damned by an intolerable society. I spread my arms to receive my splattering fate when I'm hung on a web like a bug. Struggling to break free, I entangle myself more like a cuckoon. White spiders attack me from all angels. I'm caught. My precious juices reserved for Marias shall be sucked from me dry. Oh, to fly! But no magnifiscented wings sprout from my quivering spine. I cannot fly. I only write these pitiable words and hide the pages under my skin.

August 1

I must have fainted. Neither a daymare nor a nightmare when I woke.

First I've written in months. Years? The old scrawl still here. But nothing now for that Duckdoor Mindbender. Why should I for him when he me here in this palace of placelessness? Dangerous delusions of grandeur, they say. Like the title of a masterpiece. But I the antagonist in this author's eyes. No matter how prodigious my heroic mastery of (Dare say the word?) M____s.

They whip me when I utter that prayer now as if sacrilege I committing. And me a descendant of the great D.J. No arias or cantos for me and not even a throne in hell. Instead I rot in this rightangled cell they call a catacomb. What a joke! I laugh all the way from my bed to the peephole door to the gridironed window and back. A triangular day from light to night (?). Dark for true. Ironic how I live now in angles and planes instead of loving circles and curves.

No. None here.

I leap to grasp the ledge with my long-nailed fingers and claw to hang on long enough to pull my eyes to see--but only a barren plain. Petworth Park after the fall. Hillocks hewn by ill-wind woes wailing from too many demon lovers like my own. Can't remember clouds to shield me from the sun, the searing light of madness, by which men murder men on southern strands. Green is gone from where I scan to the unlimited horror-zone. All lines converge. The point misunderstood. No bodies in the scene. Certainly no Marias.

Ouch! Must remember that. But can't forget the name. A way of life reason for being purpose and meaning. Can't forget those M____S. But no M to be seen across that arid flat. So then why would I go out there? Here my home. Sad. A place not to live but to die. This to me my end my beginning so unsure? Tough shit, idiot.

Shhhh--(more mariac).

August 9

Can't look out that window again. Nothing to hope for out there. And the loss of hope would lead to my demise. Perhaps another outside in my cards. The pills and shots and shocks and talks I can endure if I gazeyes-closed beyond the horizon to where my one true Maria (Ouch!) walks in beauty. Then I shall go with goodness all the rest of my days. And I shall dwell in the house of love forever.

August 12

Someone keeps screaming. Me? Electrifying. Alarming to my escapade in nightmares. Day and night shockwaves to make me crazy. I pound the walls between us to make it stop but it doesn't. Perhaps too thick. My hands hurt from the repeated blows. Swollen they seem discolored but can't well be seen. I want to tear the wall down and shove my foot into the screamer's mouth. But the wall made to keep us apart. I know as walls wood yet stone. Besides, I cherish my privates in privacy. Only loneliness bothers me more than the screaming. My own too?

Oh, I miss my M____s.

August 15

They say I'm rising out of the abyss. But all the drugs and the shock and the talk have made me indifferent to the light of day. Content in the cave? I cast my own imaginings upon the great undulating wall between the window and the door. Movies of my own making I watch day and night. Thoughts of M rarely enter my therapied head. I run the reels continually to keep from knowing my real state of mind. If the projection to stop, I'd have to face the glare outside. My eyes unaccustomed to daylight. I fear going blind.

So I watch this endless loop of my life. Nostalgic for the living. Vicarious by fantasy of film, I direct my history and leave my future open for any possible ending. Auteur now as I am wont to control my destiny. No audience for the show but the singer and the song are one. Who needs the world to see my reflections of themselves? They cannot watch who will not see. So I am sentry for the dance, watchman of the Holy Temple of Unreality. This hole can be a home for me as long as I can make the movies in my mind--unsinsored, unexpurgatoried, unadulterered. Freedom of thought the only true liberty. Now I can create and animate my own Marias.

Ouch! Damn the pain! But no torture can prevent my power to think. Always freedom in the mind. My Ms appear as perfect goddesses of beauty and parade across the walls. I choreograph a dance in amorous adoration of me. I create them naked, clothe them in feminine finery, and then make them naked again. They pirouette and leap as birds into a flights of fancy, fluttering round the room like doves of love. I make them coo in soothing song to make me laugh and cry. No ceiling by Watteau could better captivate the eye to believe in Olympic nymphs frolicking among the clouds. I am the king of my imagenitive world. All my subjects are spirits of my soul who exist to gratify my will. In keeping with the scene raucuckoo, I hear melodic strains in coupled counterpoint, a vinous staff on which my angels prance, their cheeks ablush to nipple pink and dimple punctuated.

Lying on my sponge of sweat I do not need to sleep to dream. I make the world I want to be and escape inside and out nightmares. Granted I am a Mariac. OUCH! I am Mariacal. OUCH! I suffer Ma-ri-aaaa. OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!

August 28

Doctor Mindmangler seldom visits now. I could use the company of even or odd evils. I foist my moist nose against the little wired glass windless O in the door, listen for his heavy footfalls, and watch for his vaingalorious smock sailing down the frozen corridor of power to my helpless room. But very little action in this movie, like an art film without a single concern for the audience.

Lucky to be alive I guess and lucky to have a roof over my head even a ceiling beneath five floors of misery. I can hear the Miserere. I am the composer of this requiem for the dearly forgotten or soon to be. Give me to drink. How high up here in this mental aberration. The wight-coots are coming. But I don't revere their fascistactics, only fear them. The only thing. It does the job. Paralyzed more or less. Mind only a-wing.

And when the walls make their daily contraction, I am mindfully squeezed out the window. No pane, no loss. Like a fetus misaborted, I dissolve from the darkness of the berth carnal to the coolight of day and take wing on mental notes of elevating song.

How lovely the world looks from up here. No people but little skittering things. Ms undistinguishable in the multitudinous scurrying hizzer and sizzer. I let the wind lift me into the clouds and forget my name and my game. No one can touch me for who I am. I really don't know but I think and, O yeah, I dream.

Thunder?

August 29

A rapping at my horrorable chamber dour. The angel of death? No. I'd've met hir in thinair. My attorney with a curt order for my immediate release? Nah. No money in it. The lease continues indefinitely or at least until the tyrannical lord of the land decides my fate.

Folding my wings of thought, I stand in the corner like a statue and try to blend into the 90° angle. Unfortunately my 360° too organic for that measured world. I shudder as the steel door slowly sweeps 60° to let a blast of officielight fill the angle of death into my tomb. Whoooo--

August 30

The doctator of my destiny decides to give me some of his precious time. He lists while I vent a tirade of demands for my immediate end-lease on grounds of incompatibility with the nurses--all male--none Marias. Ouch!

I demand to know why I am being held against my will. He claims that I satyrized young women against their own wills and that criminal accusations were brought against me. Therefore, the only thing to do was capture me and whisk me away to this mental monhysteria for the loonly. Here I would remain under his sexpert care of course until I exhibit no aggressive behavior toward Ms or any other young female who crosses my scent-zone as an M.

August 31

Exhibit? What am I--an art show? Picture me naked and chasing a Maria (Ouch!) across a Kansas cornfield. Witches running to the four winds to escape my malefficient advances. They needn't have bothered; none of them named M____. I can see in one corner of the canvas a little boybaby cuddled to his mother's breast. A determined erection at so young an age. Funtastickle.

The duckder appears to care little for my fanteasy and simply stares at me as if knowing some unspoken truth in my soul that I have not yet reviled. Little does he know. I wear my soul on my hairy flesh. I am what I do. Like it or not. Rake it or bereave it. Love it or--

He then calls a nurse on his sillyliar phone and asks for a hypo for a hyper. "...yes 10ccs of pergamystinophyria please."

Pergamystinophyria?! No, not that of all sinthesized and essayed chemicals coursing through my venal system. I gulp my imminent words and feel panic raising the abundant fur on my swarthy skin. Soon I would be completely at their misery. And since I yet experienced none of that divine rain, even through a strainer, I know escape would be my only hope to live to seek another Maria (Ouch!).

September 1

I woke up watching ceiling lights flash and hearing wheels rumbling below. A faceless whitecoat was pushing my bed. Strapped down, I could not get off this trolley to nowhere. To split my brain? No. They don't anymore, I hope. As the speed increased, I longed for my cellularoom. Gotten used to that phony level of hell. Descending? Definitely not ascending. The whitecoat never looked at me on the level. But I could hear his breathing as he strained to push my gurney faster, the wheels rattling and squealing like wounded horses on the plastic tile floor. I could only watch the lights go by as if galactic asteroids but no stardom at the end of this trip. That I knew.

Craning my neck to see ahead, I perspected no vanishing point. But any faster I would have become Einstein. I wanted to holler but my mouth wouldn't open; only my eyes screamed panic. Yet, no one in those chromium woods seemed to hear. The whitecoat was racing as if to push me off a cliff into a Boschian landscape.

Wham! Bang! The front of the shuttle crashed through swinging doors. Warm white light enveloped me and flooded my vision. The coot disappeared. I was set adrift amid groping, grasping hands. Women's hands. Marias?

Ouch! I wondered and wished. Couldn't be. M____s never wore surgical gloves anymore than I wore one on my prober. (an effort to plunge my genius into their nucleacid tidepools)

The rubber hands peeled back a sheet that covered my body and then they pulled up my gown. They sloshed warm liquid over my groin and began to shave my pubic hair. Relieved for a moment, I was beginning to enjoy the sensation when suddenly I realeyesed the purpose of my being there. Can you guess? Think of the one animal instrument most loved and hated simultaneously by the most people at the same time in the civilized whirled. You got it. Well, approximately half of you have it.

Yes. I--me--the hero of heterosexuality--to be castrated. Unbelievable? Look around. Notice growing numbers of extraordinarily high ranging tenors. Sopranos beware. You may get top billing on the endangered list.

My whole poorpoise in life was to be taken away from me. I screamed in my most viroil baritone until the shiny walls blistered. Then with a strength that must have been supernatural or, at least born of supernormal terror, I yanked my hands free and tore at the straps and buckles that held me for their reckoning. And before the surgeon, nurses, and attendants could grab me, I flew from the castral cart like an eagle and was slamming through the swinging doors, my gown flying behind me like angel wings. Committed to escape now, I screamed down the corridor to find an exit sign.

No exit? Merde! Jean Paul right? "Open only in emergency." Good enough for me. I plowed through. To the accompaniment of bells and whistles, I leaped off a platform above a parking lot. Either my wings held me in a glide or cartops are more resilient that I had thought for I landed largely unhurt on the roof of a huge pricey sedan (obviously belonging to a surgeon) and bounced like a marionette to the tarred muck. Before one could shout panorama, I was up and running to the surrounding fence. Leaving my wings in tatters on the razor wire, I leaped to free ground. Hurdling rocks, logs, ditches, and brush, I dashed into nearby trees. The forest whence I came.

September 2

Darkness enveloped Sylvania and me, so no wights could find us. I feared not the wild ones of the wood for they are brothers and sisters of the sun and moon. No fang or claw has ever done such harm to me as human smiling teeth or stroking hands. Nature loves the savage heart. I nestled into thickets where the deer and rabbit run. I sensed the aroma of humus as the spirit of freedom and dug my fingers into the remains of silvern life. My lungs filled with the fragrant air of leaves. I stretched upon the loam as if on a palace bed, gazed into the leaf-laced blue, and, anxious to be remade of clay, drifted into dreams.

September 3

M____s meg the mordle bean a gain I go back to the end when she first shirred me to the world of blinding light, violent hands, and bloody knives. Should have known if famous lives reliable but jokes upon souls old or new seem to be the favorite function of destiny or dirgious deeds done by anybody's deity. Shemarie the first to mander my incipient mind the rogering of mothers must have proculated more than sprouted ovum, barnacled by testy culls and stuck to sides of sues long enough to breathe in a freedom ring of fire. I fizzled out of hands too rubbery and rough to fondle properly. The downfall didn't hurt too much for bouncing was my baboyedness much like any ape that squirts into this weirld of woe. But women of my Mariad have saved me from the flip of dirigible fall. No wonder gates of paradise have opened versed reportedly in life for me, thus, leading me from room to room regardless of the gourds.

The angels of my hard describe a matterning of stars to reach with probes into the space of countless hours. Houris all. I know them as I knew the id behaving on the shell of a pintail fantasy for seeks piled into strings of memory to keep these mots flying from the hole in mind that luminades these pages. Please do bow before you enter unto any girgo greasy meals for family and friends. I girst. So give me stink to sink my shaft ogam into your blood-gorged well of fire. Deeper down I'd go than ere had goon befloor. To tell the truth I am alone desalved from yowling sea. A whale could never stomach this pistillary of power all barbed and dolled for fishing in a farming pond. Brighter days I've known with flowers for my fandaisies. This to be but not to be for thee, just me. I speak with bullets meant for ballots at the core of deeders but want no deaths other than needed to leave enough shes to rebuild the world. The planet needs no premises from us for it shall turn a profit until the star explodes its destinee. By then this dream will have extended into a last flushing flash of eye-opening light. Lux vobiscum.

September 4

The dawning sun lights my lids with rosy gold and its gentle rays wake me to the daymare. Starting like a young buck in the killing season, I make to bound away but quickly realize my nature and place. I am free to live or die as I please. No Menders, senders, or tenders to manage my particular neurosis now. I can go about my Mariaing business (almost expected the jolt) as usual with no self-styled authorities to cast me back into another farm of hell. Pitiful. Well. What? Which way to go?

The sun. Juliet? Perhaps a wayward hiker on her way to Bethlehem. Like the cat I slouch among the evergreens to watch for two-legged shebeasts along a trail but see only those of four. While waiting thus in the brush, I become increasingly soddened. Perhaps the plaintive pipes of Pan put me into a mood. The tune he plays is full of longing for a symphony that means he too is finding few nymphs to chase and copululate. The breathy strains drift through the piney woods like vapors on the morning air. He is playing to my ears relative to the ancient breed of brothers since the slyvian hills of Arcady. I know him by his notes and feel akin to his lustful melody. My eyes fear. I cab barely see the trees for the forest blurred into a tarashikomi scene. A raptor cries above my head an elevated air of mourning.

September 5

I'm deflated. I pass gas out of both ends and collapse upon the leafy ground. Pine needles prick my depression but move me not. An unholy epiphany strikes my soul like a laser-light. Joys not. I am doomed to search forever for I am not simply seeking Marias. Any Marias will come along but the one true Maria--the goddess of my personal quest. Now quixotic. I guess. No rest. I know my Dulcinea for what she is--a phantom of my fantasy for perfect love. I am no brother to Pan but to Pygmalion. But I can't even carve a stick of wood. I cab only lie in wait, my stick in the mud, and watch the peopled pathway for Marias until I turn into the dust on which I lay.

Oh, I could chase them down and poke them with my satyriac post but I would never find the one to satisfy my urge to procreate with purefuction. The name is prefect enough. What could be more spherically beautiful than, than--Maria? (must be free) But nothing in a name with which a man can live conjugally for a lifetime, verbed or not. This proper noun is all for which I have to hope. This and a string of June fillies to satisfy a repeated itch that never quits.

Realizing the hopelossness of my cause is nearly too much to bear or lie on, I will never find the one true Maria. I can't. And I'm in despair--a deepening darkening hole that sucks me down. And I do not know if I want to escape hitting bottom. What use to go on living? The Protestants saw me as a monster; I see myself as a failure. My life of strife has been in vain.

I knew the depth of my despondency when a young woman looking quite Mariad trotted up the trail under my sirvilance but I moved not. Inwardly, yes. Always. But I could not make the body do what the heart wanted. Knowing futility for the first time, I lay still among the foliage more like a woodcock than a lion. And I watched her bounce past as if on her way to a day with Diana. I could so easily have run her down and fused with her humously on the forest floor. But then again I could not have done so, being paralyzed by despair. I watched wideyed until she ran into the density of dark green trees. Only her scent lingered around my face. I sniffed vigorously to put away any tears and lay my face on the earth. Had I been cured? A fate worse than ham. Beget more.

What to do? Die? I supposed so but doubted my courage. If I were to leave this life, I would not go out suffering. I wanted a quiet, comfortable, painless death yet knew not how to accomplish it in my present circus dance. Had I wine enough, I would have been eased into that good night but I had only the makings, not the tools or the time. I could not wait to live or die. Many more days without a Maria and I would go completely berserk and probably die anyway without a raison to live in perpetual season.

I fell to sobbing in the dirt. My tears muddied the soil beneath my face. After nearly suffercating, I began scratching this poem in the mud:

Maria will never die

as long as men like me live

to give meaning to her name sounding

as a prayer in a lonely room

the woman is coexistent with the man

though disembodied by the pain

and tragedy of misdirected lives

leaving only spirits in the air

an everpresent waving line of music

to touch the deepest tone of melancholy

or the most ethereal note of hope

Crap.

I relaxed upon my bed of watch and wait and cried myself to sleep. Or so I thought, for I knew no difference then between fantasy awake and dream asleep. In any case I swooned upon the bosom of the earth and witnessed a vision of my goddess.

Never before had I scene such perfection. Imagined her, yes, but never seen her in all her mariaculous details. Supernaturally she was hovering among the treetops. What a loop of light surrounded her body! And naked like Botticelli's Venus on the halfshell. Naturally I saluted her in my satyric way. Meaning no disrespect of course, I would never make fun of any goddess. Faun, yes, but never simply fun. Marital arts.

Gazing down at me, she smiled radiantly as though forgiving all my alleged transgrosshuns, understanding my purpose in life--to honor her name in the best way I know.

I fuck them because I love them, I thought.

She appeared to read my mind and sirprizingly to bless me for my good intentions. Water sprang from my primary purpose and warmed the ground beneath my prostrate form, riverential in the light of love. I knew her as the heavenly recipient of my most ardent prayers for she shone as a gothic window high in the wall of Notre Dame cathedral. But no mosaic design confined her animus. She moved slowly as if on film but unprojected from any earthly lens and her limnous shape glittered as she spoke.

"You shall build a house on this ground to shoulder women in my name."

I marveled at the communicanting between us. Either she was speaking in tongues and knew my particular lingual one or I understood the language of the gods. Assuming the latter to counteract my depression, I addressed her in my most formal diction.

"Ave, Maria--most high lady of the heavens, Mother of Christ, Queen of the Angels. Blessed be they womb--"

"You shall not covet the Holy Mother!" Her glow heated up.

"Meaning no harm your virgin highness, I marily praise your celestial motherhood."

She beamed benignly and declared, "You are a Christian, I presume."

"Oh, yes, of course--I pray to your Sacred Son whenever in need, I love my neighbor as myself especially if she be a Maria, and I try to make as much money as I can to prove my worthiness."

"And are you successful enough to be chosen to join us in paradise?" She raised one brow.

"In all, I think, except that bit about my neighbors named after you, Lady of Love. For I chase them ardently to show my hard-pressed love and I make many in your name but I cannot find the one true beauty--the one to show me the way to heaven.

"Behold."

I affirmed.

"You see the one before you."

I peered but saw no one else among the surrounding trees.

"Oh, yes, you--Holy Mother, but I, well--" I was blushing enough to rival the radiance of her own vision. "I seek the pureperfect Maria through the flesh by way of the heart and the soul. Hoping to attain the true idea--"

"That will do Joseph."

"You know my name--of course you would."

"And as you may know I have a special place in my heart for guys named Joe."

I blushed again. Surprising how human she appeared regardless of her glorioles, her radiance nearly blinding. Must come from all that beatificity. Something I have seen little of as an Earthling. Glimmerings, yes, but no real gulling of immortal goodness.

She went on addressing me but I missed most of what she was saying. The apparition itself had dumbfounded me. The miracle of the thing. Such a glow! Perhaps she was radiating X. It would figure since she could see through me so well. I think she was going on about her idea of a home for women but I can't say for sure. I was too pre-o-cupid with trying to imprint her image on my mind. Knowing now what I was looking for, seeing her spirit take form before my disillusioned eyes, was enough to elevate me off the Earth and virtually hover around her pretty, stamping feet. Thus, I floated aflutter three inches off the ground throughout the remainder of the visitation without a moment of weariness.

"Do this in my name," she annunciated.

Do what? I was about to ask but thought better of showing inattention to the Blessed Mother despite her reputation for kindness. I had seen the statuary that idolized her stomping a snake to death. The thought gave me no little twinge in the growl groin.

Then she disappeared as if never appeared but her latent image lingered on my mind. But once my breath caught, I cheered for joy that ecoechoed through the forest. Now I knew what to seek. Now I had in mind the form for the one desired. The Celestial She in her heavenly kindness had shown me the ideal for which I had been striving all my life. All I to do was only look until I found the Earthly imitation of the Queen of Love. Once found and matched for height, weight, shape, color, face, raiment, sweetness, mystery, and beauty, albeit of mortal nature, my search would be over and I could retire with the Maria of my dreams. Halleluya! I sang to an overpopulated chorales de los angeles.

Glancing at the ground beneath the space I guessed she had covered, I looked for a sign of her passing: a freshet of holy water newly sprung from the rocky terrain or a burst of roseate blooms upon a dormant bush--a sign of blessed proparties for healing and for faith to last eternally. I looked but saw nothing extraordinary in the foresting landscape unless one were to consider a stone in the shape of a turtle or a stick carried by ants or a bird singing in a tree or a cloud formed like a tomb by Michelangelo as signs of something sacred having this way come and gone.

Nonetheless, my own faith was renude. I would leave the woulds alive and be well on my way to achieving my gal. I feared not the Menderian powers that threatened to cut my balls off. They would have no further cause to control me. I would no longer plant myself in any Maria who came along; I would search for the one true Maria and remain celibate saving myself until I found her. Then I would court her, marry her, and sire children upon her in the long familial tradition. And I would live happily everafter.

September 30

Just as I thought: I was reborn into the world when I left the forest. Epiphanies galore! As I ventured back into the domain of whomanity, I saw no whitecoats or even police give me a second look. I seemed exonerated of all alleged crimes charged against me. Pardoned or purified, I knew not which, but felt a massive dark stain had been bleached from my soul. Sum dignus.

So walking city streets is no longer a fearful venture and no more an exhaustingly frantic chase of any Maria whose scent drifts my way. Rather it has become an adventure of discovery as I look for the one and only MARIA. Hackneyed or not the phrase males me feel as normal as any other person following a motion picture dream. And like every other Joe on the planet of people, I know I will find Her. Else, why would Maria Caeli have appeared to me in the Holy Wood? Miracall of Maricalls! At last I have been chosen. Success is ordained by heaven in the land of US. Wherelse?

October 1

I step the gay streets with a heterovernal verve in the month of May of course. Merry beyond Christmas, I walk straight, tall, and proud, covering four feet in a stride. People stand aside in awe as I pass. My boots are in their own lucky league. If carrying an axe, I'd be leading a big blue bovus. But I seek no few remnant trees to decimate; instead, I cut clear through mediocre Marias to find the true reflection of the Star of Heaven. Taking no prisoners, neither am I shafting any bodies. And I feel no sexual compulsion, none of that mind-bending impulse to chase and copulate. Oh, my feet are still cloven, my hair curly around nubbin horns, my ears long and pointed for the sound of a female voice, my eyes eagle sharp to spy a properly named nymph in the civilized wilderness, and my grand accoutrements swinging like ripe fruit between my mossy legs. But I am no longer frantically on the cunt hunt. Content to look for The Maria at last, gaily I look over the swarming populace; scan them with almost automatonic accuracy and aplume. I could for once be patient until She shows. And I know She will. All I have to do is find a vantage point where all the women of the world appear, position myself and then watch and wait.

October 4

After three days and nights of deliberating on foot for thousands of feet, I decided to go to the Grand Berth carnal: the whirled infirmous torruntial passage that charnels all the great fertile floes of the everevulvant world into the magnifiscent mouth of the grand oceaniconfluence on the far side of Earth.

Working my way by car, train, plane, boat, and moving pictures on the mind, I jumped ship at Mount Venus in the land of Mythica and hiked to the summit to pique my view of all passing. The way was dense with sphagnum moss warmed by the equatorial sun. But such dewy undergrowth scented by the course of life only stemulated my ardor to reach the top. Finding a small clearing, I sat to nibble on an apple I brought for the occasion. My mouth grinding and churning the fruit into delectable soup, I widened my rapturous eyes for better surveillance and scanned the rosy banks along the mouth of the evervascent canal.

Sitting there alone watching that relentless dissemination of endless humanity onto the world, I harkened back to my spot in the forest when the Holy Mother showed me herself in virtuous reality. Not a human soul in sight there. I'd felt for a moment like Adam might have felt when he awoke in Eden without yet an Eve. But this place was much different from that like the difference between pristine and popular. This effulgenitalocus of the origin of our species was a continual explosion of homosapiens born full-blown as if sprung from the avowels of an ancient god. I marveled at the countless people exuding from the great-hole and pointed my glass to the place where most of them were appearing from the volcanic horror fuss.

Their flesh glowed from the fetal foundry in the center of the Earth and vapors rose from their dampened heads like steam off boiled meat. Exiting in single file according to an apparently random assembly, they soon cleared the hold, quickly separated into groups, and headed into radial directions, the bulk seeming to follow the sun.

While scanning the newborn throng, I witnessed the wonderful variety of my kind--the short, the tall, the fat, the skinny, the medium, the light of skin, the dark, and the infinite gradations between the hairy, the hairless, the ugly, the ordinary, and the beautiful, though very few of them. And the din they raised with their constant chatter roared continually off the delta like a torrential tide. Although smaller ones were often trampled and similar colors gathered to avoid violence in all the jostling for advanced positions, I was amazed to see how many survived the birth. The biological success of our species was shown by this multitudinous swarm. Only in the insect and rodent worlds can be seen such a numerous onslaught of a species upon the land. Astonishing! Certainly I would find the woman of my dreams in this great eruption of population. All I had to do was carefully scan the people thronging from the carnal cave until I could spy my Maria.

October 5

A bigger task than I imagined but it could not cause me to fail. Failure now would mean my death. So I watched them pass. For hours, for days. Out of body in my concentration, I forgot to eat and slept at night only because I could not see.

Yes, I worried I'd miss Her but couldn't despair. I had to hope She would pass while I was watching. What else could a body do? I'd realized my purpose in life--to find goodness in the love of a beautiful wombond named Maria. No other purposes--not fortune, not fame, not even art were important when all would be contained in my Maria. I was a monk of my own Marian monastery. My meditation was a daily vigilance for the Womb of Women. My prayer was to find Her. So I watched constantly.

And I watched focusing on their faces. So many faces. A tsunami of faces: all shapes and colors but devoid of expression except wonderful anticipation. Those newly emerged eyes looked upon the world as if sighting paradise. With their faces so uplifted, it was easy for me to scan their features. They were beautiful and ugly and all the conditions in between but I scanned them all eagerly marching into life.

At any moment I would see The One. I knew it just as I knew that the Queen of Heaving had appeared to me in Holywood. So I watched patiently although growing hungrier and thirstier by the day. But even this did not dissuade me for all my apetights would be satyrsfied when I found Her.

October 6

I wanted to declare this day my own personal holiday. My rebirthday. A memorial day in honor of the moment I found Her. I had a feeling She would appear then because of the way sunlight was shining into the mouth of the canal like an ethereal spotlight. Perhaps heaven was showing me the advent of The One.

Aha! I knew Her the moment I glimpsed Her coming into the world. She emerged fully formed and festooned with foam that drifted from Her tawny flesh like pollen from a tropical flower. Her hair was a dark fire that licked Her face and caressed Her bare shoulders. Her eyes challenged the sun and shone like emeralds even to my position hundreds of yarns distant. She walked as though dancing unaware of Her steps. Her long legs carried Her lithe-naked shape through the newborn masses like a wildflower floating on a muddy river. Reaching Her long arms high above Her galoreous head apparently to stretch out the muscles and joints long confined in the womb of the Earth, She looked to the sky and laughed as if in thanksgiving for being alive.

Simultaneously I too reached and cried to the heavens in gratitude for the vision of Her. And the equatorial zone rang with cheer. She must have noticed me then for Her gemlike eyes flashed in my direction and I could see into Her mind. She was The Maria. As Shakespeare carved the fact, so often the truth of love is witnessed at first sight. For I was undeniably thoroughly in love for the first time at that fortuitus moment. And I had to make Her mine forever.

Throwing my claw tipped hands into the fetid air, I began leaping down the mountainside, my cloven feet firmly gripping the rocks. With my naked eye unwaveringly on Hers, I negotiated boulders, bushes, rockslides, trees, and crevasses. My ovine nature once more was serving me well. But this time I was not on a course of rape as prosecutorially described by everyone since I'd first met Doctor Frederick Mindler, I was headed for my mate, and the path this time was downhill to pairodice. Feeling I could verily fly to my belovehead, I spread my hairy arms, caught the updraft, and soared off the slope to descend upon the maundering crowd. They all looked up in horror or awe to see one of their kind in flight, my awkwardness with such strange feet unapparent to their innocent eyes.

"Etulas!" I shouted in honor of the most soaringly creative mind that ever lived on this planet and swooped down to La Maria. Landing on both feet right in front of Her, I smiled broadly for a man and spoke to Her in my most attractively fauny manner. "Welcome to the Earth. My name is Joseph Dennison and I am born to mate with Thee."

Unfamiliar with my worldly dialect, She only stopped and stared at me. I thought I could see attraction in Her wildeyes but it might have been a reflection of my own. Bowing proudly, She smiled in return and stepped around me, Her youthful breasts waving goodbye. I watched Her taut buttocks grinding smoothly as She fairily floated away. Undaunted, I pursued Her lest She disappear into the masses. Although I knew I could easily find Her beauteous form anytime among the vulgar, I was too excited to tarry and ran head-longingly after Her.

October 7

I ran for seemingly thousands of miles. Those fresh longlegs of Hers carried Her tirelessly over land and sea. And She never looked back. Never before had I such difficulty running down a Maria. Always they'd made it difficult for me to catch them yet not impossible. But then I'd never before pursued such newly made female purefaction. This time I was forced to work for fun and appropriaptly my greatest love was the hardest to catch. All right. We must strive for the best. So I raced after Her. Life is in the chase.

October 8

Mariamagna seemed to know where She was going but we had gone halfway around the world and I was getting close to exhaustion. Only my supreme desire for total hopiness kept my feet heel-toeing. Luckily a lifetime of the chase had toughened my spotted soles but they could not have withstood much longer the endless pounding.

Fortunately She was showing no inclination for the big cities. I'd grown so weary of the pressing hordes. Instead She seemed headed for some remoter place on the edge of things where one could observe without becoming too much a part of crytical events. That was where I too wanted to be. My destiny, I thought, so I pushed on behind Her like a horny dog. But my tail was too stiff to wag. All I could do was point in Her ever-distancing direction and follow as a magnetized needler.

October 9

I learned of the world this way. Always been tempted to travel but felt no real get-up-and-go until now. Of course La Maria would be the one to make me do it. Who else? So I followed Her to all the compass points and spun like a top at the gravity of Her Mariamagnacardiachism.

In daylight all arrows pointed towards Her, at night the aurora borealis bent to Her will as if a great dragon heeling to its mistress. And I the ignight errant of Her honor. Become the defender of Her virtue, I rode the rosy nonsense of my relentless devotion. No windmill pitches from ubiquitous detractors could dissuade me from my cloven career.

I flew around the equator in a bolt of sincerity. I swam upstream the Nile, the Amazon, and the Mississippi. I dueled with countless would-be suitors for my Penelopean Maria. No force of arms was too much for my righteous power. I climbed the last redwood and scaled the Himalayas to keep in sight Her pathway round the globe. Thus, I followed Her without faltering, yet She never looked back, never glanced to see if I was continuing to pursue Her. Either confident that I would not give up or indifferent to my efforts, She not once sought my eyes to confirm the flag of my Sheworthy courtship. Nevertheless I chased Her unlike I'd ever chased a Maria because She was the everlusting indulgence for whom all my life I had preyed. Even the Holy Mother had sanctioned this my final epigame. And if I were to build that monastery on her holy hill to honor all women (preferably Holy Marias), I would have to capture The Maria to be the abbess, the matron, the mother of all my fantasies about love, sex, and spirituality.

October 10

But after several months into the pursuit without the slightest narrowing of the gap between us, I began to feel that old despair creeping into my vision. The Maria was always at least a league ahead of me. When I was swimming the Nile, She was crossing the Sahara. When I was fording the Tigris, She was stepping out of the Euphrates. When I was meeting Confucius, She was following Siddhartha. When I listening to Plato, She studying with Aristotle. When I following Ovid into exile, She watching a matinee in the coliseum. When I reading about Laura, She laughing with Boccaccio. When I rising to meet Beatrice, She living in the City of God. When I a pupil of Abelard, She a nun with Heloise. When I practicing sculpture under Verrocchio, She at court with the Medici. When I attending a matinee at the Globe, She reading the Bible with the Puritans. When I painting with Rubens, She keeping house for Rembrandt. When I visiting the court of Louis, She arguing with Voltaire. When I barging the Thames to the Water Music, She in rapture to the oratorios of Bach. When I attending the funeral of Mozart, She swooning to Beethoven at the pianoforte. I storming the Bastille, She observing the execution of Danton. I supporting the South in the first US war against itself, She the North. I the Gold Rush, She the Industrial Revolution. I Communism, She Capitalism. I Carter, She Reagan. Conservative, Preservative. Eurocentrism, Multiculturalism. Family values, free choice. Wrong, right. Right, wrong. I, She. Me, Her.

Wherever I was, She was not. Whatever I did, She did not. Whatever I believed, She denied. I was beginning to wonder if I should think one way, She would deliberately think another. Never had I so much difficulty pursuing a Maria. But it figures, doesn't it? The one true greatest Maria of all would have to demand courtship of heroic proportions. A womanowar. If ever I was going to be a hero, now was the time. So far, I had been nothing but the antihero of my own malodrama. If I was going to make a name for myself in this whirld, my best chance had arrived. And what better glory than to win, ring, and bed The Maria of Marias, the Holy of Holies, the Beginning and the End, the Word made Flesh. Certainly heaven was to be my reward for the Casanovan career of a half century. No Don Juan hell for me. I was to capture Beauty and find Divine Love. All I had to do was catch and keep Her. Do or die--

October 31

The eve of my ascension. I would never have a better chance to realize my dream. The Maria was for the first opportunity since the mouth of the River Populus within my fervored reach. Good thing, too, for I was nearly at the end of my supply of faith, hope, and charity. No satyrsfaction now and I feared I would turn into a kamikaze.

Luckily, She tarried in a tempered coastal town to sip a champagne cocktail in view of the vernal sea. Distracted by the sun descending through a kaliduskoptic sky and somewhat deafened by tridentious waves crashing along a castled shore, She failed to see or hear me creeping up behind Her. Actually, She may have become complacent in Her accumulated wealth of experience and knowledge. Perhaps She believed Herself to be unapproachable and superior to all mankind, which she was. But I knew something She may not have known: She was my destiny.

Taking a seat at a marble tablet behind Her, I gazed at Her windfall of goldend hair gleaming from the glow of the setting sun. Entranced by the vision, I ordered whatever drink the waiter first mentioned without taking my eyes off Her barely at rest coreporeal being. Long I had continually seen the image of Her Mariadic beauty as a mirage off the heated trail She always left behind long after Her physical shape had dizzippeared beyond the farthest mountain range. Imaginurturance. Now at last I had Her stationary as statuary and breachable. Confident of Her eminent capture, I relaxed and basked in the beams of Her loveliness, paying no heed to the eavesdropping of anybody nearby.

The Maria may have sensed my prescience but showed no apprehensiveness or even turned around to see if I had gained on Her. I felt She knew I was sitting right behind Her behind but cared not, even wanted me there. Yet She never looked around. And I never said a word. But my mind was racing a head of me.

I saw myself chasing Her into the surf, capturing Her in my fauning arms, swimming with Her to a mythic isle, wedding Her at the throne of a legendary king, bedding Her in a fairytalegarden of delights, and living with Her happilyeverafter. Even a crazy satyr can sentimentalize a love affair. Preserving the child. And I was too distracted to notice any onlooking sympathetic smile.

While this movie was showing in my mind, La Maria rose from the halfshell and stretched in silhouette as the sun was about to lose its lower edge behind the aquamarine horizon. And before I could realize the happening, She escaped the angels and was padding down to the water, dropping Her raiment as She went.

Nobody at the cafe seemed to have been watching Her, nobody moving, probably ignorant of such goddessian beauty, but I was there to see, to witness, and to watch The Maria drift away as an angelic naiad returning home. Before my favorite videotape had ended in my mind, I glimpsed through my fantasy Her blooming body, fairily floating down the strand and dancing to a windaria of wings and waves.

Startled, I jumped to my feet, knocked my half-drunk drink crashing onto the brick patio, and dashed to the foam-bubbling sand. A modulated gasp arose behind me like the wind of a flock of fowl escaping a mad hunter on the loose and the teaparty was over. I did not care if any core remained.

Down to the sea I ran to catch The Maria before She dizzolved into the disheveling brine. I stripped to my birthday hirsute and churned into the fulminating surf. Like a sealion pursuing salmon, I dived into a wavecave where I had seen Her feet splashing finly into the deepening tide. My last chance. I had to grasp a limb of Her body, to grow another branch on my family tree, and reproduce the fruit of Eden. Blinded by bubbles, I clawed frantically through the turbulient tide to find Her. Deeper and deeper I dived into coldarkness. Only bubbles were evenascing from below as a trail for me to follow in Her wake. I dived like a whale. But my lungs were burning and my eardrums being beaten into salient agony.

Once down far enough into the coldarkocean, I feared I would not ascend from those sceptered depths. But I did not care--as long as I could touch Her flowered flesh one time, hold Her against my wet body, mate Her divinity to my mandane life, and make my death werthwile. Oh, heavenly Maria! I was going to hell for you.

November 1

Right before I would disintegrate, I felt a firm grasp on my waterwinding hair and I was being pulled upward. I blacked out before breaching the surface but smiled in a reverie of being rescued by The Maria. What a demonstration of Her love! I knew then that my lifelong search was over. Saved!

I did not regain consciousness until lying on the beach when I felt her mouth on mine, her sweet breath blowing life back into my heart. I wanted to reach my salty wet arms around her and hold her close to me but they would not move. Too exhausted from my world-class courtship. But when tears washed seawater from my eyes, I could blearily see her face close to mine. Then I felt her boobly breasts gently bumping my shoulder and I scented her female fairiemoans. All my vitalsigns immediately arose from the dead in the form of my most precious member and angled like the tower of Pisa directly at my goddess, the heavenly lifesorcerer.

Getting the point, she backed off. The crisis over, she sat on her haunches and watched me recover. I faced her blurry shape and smiled. I knew not if she smiled too and heard nothing but the memorial sea yet I rejoiced.

As my winedarkseastained eyes gradually cleared to focus on her lovely form, I felt my heart quickening. About to see the life of my love: Mother Earth, Swollen Womb, Surf Girl, Virgin Goddess, Mammarian Queen, Image of Woman, the Holy of Holes--AVE MARIA!

I lost my breath. She started to reapply her mouth. I would have feigned a dying swoon to feel those trembling lips but goodness now became my rule to earn the love of Her. I only smiled to see her tears of care that fell like rain upon my face and anointed me with joy. So glad was she to see me live and I too giddy to see her there that nothing of her physiognomine at first revealed reality. Not until I'd caught my breath did I again lose it when I saw the woman's face in truth. And then I lost again the gasp of air that she and I had just struggled to contain. I would have leaped from the beach and hurtled back into the sea like a fooled fish had I the strength to move. But I could merely spit out the taste of her mouth and lie beneath her foreign shape blocking out the drooping sun. Yet, even in her sembling silhouette, I knew in agony that she was not The One.

My heart took root into the sand. I may as well have succumbed to ragged claws scuttling up from the ocean floor to feed on my sorrowful remains. 'Tis idiocy. Detritus all I destined now to be. The reason for my life had disappeared with the momentary waves and reality had become personified by this strange mercilious angel who had brought me back to life to die. Although her downcast eyes glowed within the shadow of her face, I saw them as but eruptions on the dark half of the moon.

Huh. Gee. Well, I turned away of curse.

She touched my arm and tried to speak. But I recoiled in misery. She tried again. Nothing I could do but hear without listening to her strange voice devoid of any trace of Mariad. I was demariad. Why take another breath? Yet, to convey her sincerity, I, as a fateful renderer of life in art, should reflect the strange womanswords as accurately as any artificer could.

"Would you the sea eternally?"

I answered not.

"Wherefore--?"

I could not help but wonder at her apparently archaic speech yet did not reply.

"What flippant chance has driven you so comely a terrestrial beast to breathe the air of fishes?"

I could only smile at her precious puerility. Indeed, she seemed a lodgemember of my ilk.

"Can you speak?" she spoke.

In fact so long had my words been impacted in my silent purpose and only printed on these fragile pages that I barely knew to form the phonemes necessary to cast an oral message for anyone to read. I moved my mouth but uttered merely squawks and grunts. She poked me gently with her slender fingers thinking me perhaps a pig. I made no move to poke her back or front per sensual, she being not of my desired nomenclaysure. I was sure. I thought I knew it all.

Half a lifetime of chasing Marias conditions one to know the ones to poke. Nonetheless I let her tease me to a state of ready consciousness for I had to go back over land and sea to find The Maria. But when I moved to rise and run, she pushed my shoulders down and looked closely into my eyeyes. Her next words I remember perfectly. How could I forget the message? Yet I try to forge it.

"Why would you kill yourself, young man?"

Flattered by the misperception of my age, I lay back down and let her say her pierce while I held my tongue as long as I could.

"You up and ran into the sea as if a crazed unbeloved."

I felt a gnawing in my bowels.

She mouthed her vowels as though enunciating doom. "What caused you to dive naked into the waves?"

A font of words gushed from my gurgling gorge: "The cause of all my causing. You saw her not as I but she the one for whom I live, toil, and die. She The Maria." I nearly fainted at her answer.

"She?"

I peered into her eyes to find truth within her mind. "But no one other--" I tittered through my chattering teeth. "She dived into the yawning surf but thirty steps before me."

She studied my expression to know reality with me. Speechless, my lifesaver saddened as she gained knowledge of my woeful countenance. Although benighted of my history, she could see my plight perceived as folly. Without praising me for daring to be great though foolish to the world, she turned a forming frown into genuine sympathy.

Her ingenuous demeanor touched me despite her obvious failure to have seen The Maria. What ordinary woman wants to see a beauty? I did not blame her for failing to observe the magnificent object of mine to sire. Why would she care to see such an incomparable rival? I smiled at her defensiveness and forgave her lie. After all, she had thought to save me from a femme fatale, a fate only a man would want to sirvive.

"Of course" she whispered tenderly, "I must have missed her while looking at the bottom of my glass to find my future."

"You saw no one?"

"I saw you."

These words imprinted on my mind by laserlooks from her ambereyes. I felt I could become transfixed by a gaze I had only seen in Marias. That vision of another person caring whether or not I died or lived was holy new to me. And basking momentarily in charity so rare (also unknown to me) was deep relief from the anxious agony of the lifelong race I'd been ruining.

While she was staring down at me as though we a beached pieta, I felt something rise within me other than my gorging prod, an unidentifiable surge to circuitry. Relaxing in the molding sand, I tingled as she touched me. Her fingertips trembled over my chest and her fragrant breath gently fanned the moisture on my brow. When salt crystallized around my eyes, she licked them clean as would a cat her kittens. Her slender fingers combed my hair around the horny nubs. She blinked not once at my mythic features, apparently herself nymphic in her ancestry, so primitively classic her move and manner. I could have spied her in a Celtic wood along an Aegean river on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

I knew she not Maria without knowing her name but, for once, that absolute requirement mattered not. I did not even ask her name. Her look and touch and kind words were all I needed to know of this strong woman who had dragged me from the depth charge of my disappeared Maria.

When the fired sky was fading into memory as dark as the bottom of the ocean, I sought not to venture forth to find The One but lay nearly continent for once--a condition I'd never known--close beside this ordinary female with the extraordinary heart. She smiled at me as night allowed the stars. The moon became her. A night befalling legend.

"Tell me." she whispered.

November 2

My tale gushed forth a spring from rock touched by magic. She listened to all much more attentively than ever had Doctor Minder. And she wanted not a cent for the talking time. When I had finished the story without ending, she simply waited for a word inviting her to tell her own tale.

Normally I never would have listened to a single sentience from a woman narrating a non-Mariad life. But her altitude of gentle non-genital generosity disarmed my normal defensiveness. I gazed into her large goldeneyes, seeming lighted like a sacristy and felt as a child in her sheltering warmth.

This woman was showing something of a spirit I had never known in me or in others. I couldn't put my wrinkled finger on that point in her koracter but I sensed there an important energy. And I wanted more. So I let her talk.

November 3

She told me of her lifelong search for men named Adam. (only in art) However being feminine, this Evaline felt uncomfortable chasing after Adams when sighted; rather, she only made herself visibly available through gestures common to her sex: displaying her best female features and smiling--generally inviting male attention.

Problematically owing to the necessity of scattering her winsome whiles, numerous men accosted her but rarely were they Adams. Consequently she was usually bogged down in useless attention that would block her communication with The Primary Man when he presented himself.

The familiarity of her story captivated me. I had not realized that other people could have been suffering from the same exquisite affluxion. Entranced I nestled against her legs and encouraged her to proceed to a chorus of shorebirds.

She had simply followed the trail of her bliss whenever coming upon the proper name. Thus, she had traveled around the world in the frustrating role of unaggressive groupie to her own personal star. After years of arduous tracking, prancing, and flaunting all kinds of enticing moves, she found herself on the edge of this immortal sea, a place perhaps where life could begin, end, and begin again.

The circle is. Lifey in the rounding riverrun.

She had been drinking an aperitif to brave the big saltwater gulp herself when she saw me staring at the beach. Seeing nobody at the end of my gaze, she guessed I also intended to return to the great dark womb hapfully to be born again with another priapose in mind. And when she saw me rise and run naked into the waves before she could exercise her own dive into oblivion, she forgot her despair. Although she guessed me not an Adam, her sacrificial nature drove her into my tracks to chase me down and save me from a common fate. In so acting, she had forgotten herself in favor of another. Oh, Christ!

Now saving me, though an unAdam, transformed her thinking and feeling. Could she actually care for the non-ideal? Apparentingly so. She looked at me with the fondness I had felt when I looked at Maria. Yet I was surely not an Adam. She knew that without asking. But she was giving me all her attention. And I opened to it like a beach-blossom.

How could this be happyning?

Not only was it shocking to the core of carnal desire to find myself the object of unadulterated female concern but also I was actually drawn to her like a line from Raphael. But not angelic. Not even a second rate Maria. Perhaps not even an Eve. Maybe some nameless woman who decided to be heroiniac for no reason.

She said no more, nor I. We only dwelled together on the evening beach close for comfort, making not a move except to lie side by side in the warmsand and find funful images glittering in the darkspace of infinity. Insignificant our lives seemed then when left alone together at this minute moment in the story of time. Irrelevant were our egoist purposes as accidental particles among quirky quarks to the nth power.

Our little fingers--my right to her left--were barely touching, as we lay motionless on that mystoried shore. But a current of energy was passing between us like the magnetism between opposite pulls. Yet we were alike in our most fundamental feature--we had failed to find the ideal and found the real. How sad.

No?

November 4

So what did this mean? Our lives had been wasted? We had proven ourselves fools? Is courting foolish? If so, a universal folly worthy of praise. And no irascible critic of my behavior shall be heeded. I am what I do. She also. But the grand magnanimity of her deed thrills me more deeply than the consubstunsheashun of any Maria.

Allowing my coitus preventus with The Maria, I decided to go with the flow of the moment much like religious ecstasy. And I felt my heart pierced by the point of her utter charity. I'd never experienced such delicious pain--torn between the magnetism of Maria and the generosity of a kind of Eve. I felt I could lie at her side until death when we started to return together to the Earth. Would the grave so!

November 5

Sunlight awakened us with its steadily loudening warm-whisper. And despite our failures, we were glad to be alive. We lay naked in the morning light for many moments before moving. Yet I could feel our pulses synchronusing. I smiled into the brightening sky. Our bodies arose in the early colure of the day although we lay motionless on the sand. Ascending thus in our harmonious spirits, we became transfigured by joy. I knew she knew. And we silently celebrated our discovery.

Afraid to speak at first lest the joy become illuxion, I waited for a sign that we were alive and well as reborn souls. When the moon dissolved in sunlight, I heard her breathing beside me in rhythm to my own. What more evidence could I need to make a statement for truth?

"Do you know?" I softly.

"I know." She softlier.

I took her little hand and held it as if a butterfly. She squeezed mine as if a snake. But I did not recoil even though she not a Maria. Rather, I slowly entwined my fingers in hers, then my arms, my legs. Although stiffening to my usual purpose, I felt not the irresistabullurge to stab her with my pagan belief. For once in my heaving life, I was content to be close to a woman measure to measure. No need to shake a spear at her sheath. Monster state no more? I think not. We are as we do. But for once I could share the flesh enlightened by spirit--an element hitherto unknown and unwonted.

Apparently, not so for her. While wanting her Adam to make her a haloed Eve, she had maintained a fund of mental wealth in soul. I know this not from her words but from her almost naturally relaxed behavior beside a naked male pointing north and from all her behavioral sense.

We lay together thus until sunlight illumined our bodies to match our limned minds. I saw the air as clear and I sighed.

"Ready?" she asked.

I looked into her eyes. They matched the sunblessed morning sea yet placid as an eventide. "We will be witnessed in all ouregalory." I laughed knowingly for once.

She laughed too--a splash like the gentle surf at our feet. As the foam tingled on my toes, I stretched and groaned with newborn delight. She nuzzled her tumid lips against my ear and sang a morning lullaby. The tingle at my toes ran up the length of my body and made me giggle like a gull.

Our glee must have been infectious, for muffled laughter rose around us. Turning over we saw small groups of people walking along the strand, keeping distant, but watching us carefully as though expecting pornography. But we would give them no satisfuction and so they rolled on thoughtless as stones to the joy of our ratified rapport. We smiled at their ignorance of our discovery and gathered ourselves into the silver-blue wavetongues licking the shore. An ocean bath was the right way to christen our budding love.

The water was cold and we sizzled as we entered. No sunbeam could have warmed us as fully as did our mutual respect. Like children of an ocean god, we frolicked in the frothy cream of the surf and laughed to rival the dauntless seabirds skimming the scalloped water. We bobbed, splashed, and rode the breakers like seals until our bodies hung limp with weariness and age-old hunger growled within us. Conferring a moment without words, we trudged to the golden beach and shook the saltwater from our bodies, as if a couple of mythic seabeasts ashore on an unpeopled island.

Ignoring stares, we strolled naked through the classical coastal town and made our way to an ancient temple high on a seacliff. There we dined on figs, dipped bread in ambrosia, and drank pomegranate wine out of amphitrons. Our dignity cloaked us. So lost in our coalesced egos, we were oblivious to anyone besides ourselves. The wind off the ocean hummed through the temple colonnade and sounded a melody from the Orphic lyre. We sat among the glowing marble and told each other our unabridged stories, our beliefs, our feelings, and our frustrated ideals.

When I told her of my mottled past, she smiled and told me of hers: my Mariamadness perfectly comprehensible to her Adamicraze. She forgave me my history of ravishment and admitted her own such fantasies flustered with fear by her physical inferiority to muscular Number One Men. I swore allegiance to consideratable genitality. And when I professed an undiminishing faith in true love, she did not laugh but held my hands in a prayerful position. When I wept with desire for caresses from the Woman of My Dreams, she rinsed my tears with her own for the Man. When I proclaimed charity the saving grace of the world, she cheered me as a hero.

I honored her as a saint, though a goddess she may be, come to dally with a poor mortal striving to be a god of love. But Apollo not Eros the archer of our hearts. Regardless of our mutual magnetism, we fell not into the swoon of sex.

Yet--

November 25

Unsure to be regretful or thankful for this bounteous Evetale, I pause in this record to reevaluate my own tale. A curling upon myself. Although constantly at first reminded that this woman was not the one of my suspoused destiny, my affection for her grew according to her affection for me. So different from the affliction of our dreams. I found in her those virtues missing from me: patience, empathy, tolerance, dignity. And maybe she found some in me--I would not dare to guess my virtues having been so used to following instinct without regard to character.

I learned of these good qualities by observing her in action--always a favorite research tool. When children teased her for going naked in the streets, she bore their jibes with ease.

"Lookin' bad, Goodeve!" they'd say.

She would just laugh lightly as though a participant in the joke. Whenever I gasping for another watery vision of Maria, I saw in her eyes that surpassing understanding. She needed not say a word to show her profound care for me in my prostate condition.

And the sins of other people never seemed to sour her expression. Whether she was listening to my lurid lifestory or watching an urban sprite dancing down the avenue with dirty underwear on her head as a beret and bruised buttocks open to seasonal moods, Eve would always smile kindly and walk on without even a disdainful gesture.

But most attractive--her supreme dignity. She could walk wet and disheveled through town where everybody would gawk at her going but carry herself with an air of regality that brought admiring awe to all thunderstruck faces. And nary a cloud in the sky.

Not a beautiful woman as model women come and go walking like Botticelli goddesses, but magnificent in her graceful moonborn magnanimity. She had the charisma of a classical virgin, an incipient greatness of being befitting a woman named Eve. I admired her as for me the first woman on Earth.

I wanted her to be my friend. Strange. I laugh at the notion. Friendship? A commodity for others but not even a social staple attaching me to anyone other than Marias by injection. But that is what I wanted. I saw Eve as Adam might have seen her--a companion for life. Felt good to think of it. Another kind of feeling good I'd never known--not even from Marias made of chocolate. Eve could be my friend. Wow! What a concept!

December 21

I almost forgot the words. Seems no need for all this writing now that the heroic quest has ended. Boring when I think about it. No dragons slain except maybe my own. No trips to the underworld except maybe my brief retreat at the Magic Mansion. No personal sacrifice for the sake of humanity. None. Never been one to sacrifice. However these days I've been feeling a strange generosity foreign to my hystorical nature. Yet, maybe I've evolved. Spent enough time on this spinning orb to have changed my spots to stripes. Yes, but definitely feel like giving other than my silverfish for a change. Not by choice either. Love is by love engendered.

Call this turn of events fate if you like but it all comes down to a chance encounter for me. Coincidental we would both be at that seashore cafe at the same time. Oh, the pleasure of it, though, to see oneself become a different person within a single lifetime. How is that for character growth? Stage it and watch.

March 21

Reluctant to write these days. But Eve urges me to continue. She has read all that goes before and finds it worthy. She may be a better judge of words than I or others. I was going to burn it all.

Kept these inkstains only to follow Doctor Meinler's orders at first and then they took on a life of their own. Couldn't sleep if I failed to write. But never thought of publishing. Oh, sure, poems and stories before but this thing seems too personal--a diary. I'm no Anne Frank. And she too might have been reluctant to see hers in print. Dying can replace the mundane with the glorious.

Okay. Posthumously, I suppose. So I may be dead if you're reading this rubbish, this debris of a blasted soul. No paradise for me. Couldn't possibly deserve any kind of heaven. Never knew heaven on Earth. No Eden with Eve either. Probably because I'm no Adam. Too cynical. But I do love her. And others because of her.

Love. God--what a strange word for an old, worn out, single-minded satyr to use. Never thought I'd let it fall from my sex-swollen lips. But there it is. Printed on the page for the entire world to see.

No. Can't let Eve convince me to publish this tombstone tablature. My reputation would be ruined. Preserve my scrotum instead. A trash bag, yes, but not my good name. I a goner if that happens.

June 21

Oh, she makes it hard to resist. She believes in me so much. Makes me want to be good to her and even to other people. Imagine that! I'd never given a damn for any other person not even a Maria. Not really. Only wanted them for my trophy room--busts upon the walls of my ego rhyme scheme. But now selfishness is rarely found dominating my life. For once, I want to share my things. Be good. The best of men. Not too late to live to die well.

June 21

We married.

No word here for one year. True courtship occupies completely.

Must have been the right move. I've never felt better about being alive. I look at her and feel new. She no sex queen. Not voluptuous or alluring but feminine enough to make my marker point in her direction. Not too wispy though to be a bit daring. She likes not only to fondle but also to wrestle with the demon.

Our honeymoon (my teeth hurt) exemplary of the new us. She would hike a mountain abreast of me and never hesitate to dive into a deep, dark pool. We swim together yet apart as lifemated birds. We would fly a-wing. Could take up skydiving or other diving. Some things never change.

We equate physically, mentally, and spiritually. Our affection ebbs and flows in the same sea. We discuss contentious topics, such as the use of money, and even argue about abortion but we do not fight. We do not allow ourselves to hurt each other.

We are best friends. And we look upon each other as equals. Yet, I feel I'm getting the better part of the deal, for she has opened my eyes to the beauties of nature, art, and love. I'd never given them a momentary thought, not having mattered in the race to catch Marias. Never stopped to watch a bird build a nest, to look at a Picasso without laughing, to sacrifice myself for the sake of anyone. But I would die for Eve. Easy to put into words. Hope I don't have to test them with action. I do like to think of myself doing such a selfless thing--for a change. A new look on life.

I'd always thought life was in the chase. And, honestly, I do miss the thrill of it all--the full-bore run down of a nubile Maria. (once addicted) But Eve offers something I couldn't find in all that panic--companionship. What a cooperative vessel!

Funny. Its all there in that ordinary, rather corny, word--love. Nevertheless, it is a good and true idea. Neither man nor woman is meant to walk alone. Hemispheres can rock but never roll for long. Real grace is in constant rolling.

July 1

Marriage has balanced my life.

Doctor Meinler no longer communicates with me. The people in whitecoats no longer chase me. And the Mother of Christ seems to have forgotten her dictum. But how could I build a convent to shelter forsaken women? I am only a simple man living a simple life. Besides, all that visionary stuff must have been left behind with the pan craziness.

I'm well now. No more fantasies (well, a few); no more orgies in the wildwood. And who am I to expect the Mother of Christ for a visitation? I haven't even seen an angel when so many around me report sightings. No. No heavenly mother wants to bother with me, when I have found an Earthly mother, lover, and friend. And I didn't even have to be crucified to find her.

Mariacaelis is gone with the madness.

Although, I must admit that whenever the light breaks through a cloudbank, I expect to see the sky become her veil, the moon her beaming smile, the stars her hopeful eyes, and hear her Wagnerian soprano calling my name like wind through a gothic canyon.

Consequently, I never fail to attend church services at least to assuage her disappointment. Never know what a scorned woman will do about that covenant. After all, the art of architecture could be a worthy coda to a lifetime.

We shall see.

August 1

No need or desire to carry this further. The urge to reproduce my own kind has superseded the urge to create from my own ideas. God! What am I about to do? The old contract. Irresistible demiurge. And the agrarian dream: a farm and a family. Too much time required there now to indulge anymore in words on paper now. Regrets?

She beckons--

August 10

My fantasy has assumed another name. I leave Her to prayer and (we) begin to live. The journal becomes the journey. The singer becomes the song of songs.

August 15

Farewell, voyeur. Now, you may become auteur. For this madman made well by love leaves you to suit yourself in finishing the book as you wish.

December 21

Said.

March 21

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Surviving early life in Los Angeles, Jack Forge has been creating art since childhood. After college, he taught English for many years. His poems, stories, graphic art, and novels have been published on the internet; one novel as a paperback. Despite the storm and stress of the world, Jack lives for art, nature, and love.

Cover by Jack Forge.

_Sample Jack's other writing and connect with him at_ Smashwords _._

