Visionnaire

by Alessandro Cusimano

Tragic figure, bordering on madness, driven to extremes by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the poet John Le Strange leads a provocative lifestyle and dies before his true value is recognized. Destructive impulses and attraction to death are elements shared by Domino, a prostitute in New Orleans and favorite muse. Attracted by the mythical hues, macabre and vaguely erotic, his courtly and bombastic lyricism joins surreal backgrounds of Louisiana, death, love, and religious zeal aggravated by the iron taste of horror, the heady vertigo of sin and Satanism. According to Le Strange, death must be understood as an imaginary journey to hell that is life. He is a superior spirit, capable of raising himself and perceiving the most secretive correspondences. And just as his skills become an object of curiosity for common people. John chooses Domino to symbolize this condition, because he places her at the highest levels of perception and sensitivity. The last hold, for the hopeless spirit of the poet, is death, understood not as a transition to a new life but as the destruction and decay to which the poet repairs, in the desperate attempt to find, in the unknown, something new, different from the ubiquitous desolation.

Dead, I walk the city, thirsty for some unfiltered ron from an island I've never seen. My face reflects on each thing I pass, and I can't help but focus on it. Every time I have to see it again. My watch has stopped. Le Strange, my name means something in New Orleans. Le Strange, the prince of Serendip. Le Strange, the visionary. Le Strange, an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Stripped of every wonder and enchantment, the city dies in the silence of a false dawn.

The sigh of the wind takes me to places unknown to my imagination. There, where life ends, starts an adventure that whispers words only the heart can interpret, towards infinite dreams, a magical place where the stories of the future write the poems of the past.

New Orleans sinks into the hypocrisy of the best friends amid the scorn of alligators. The best friends lie, the blend of good intentions quickly lost, untrue assertions spirt the clever arguments. You must make friends with the lie. If you try being yourself, you hand yourself over to the paralysis, to the opposite of ability. The absolution returns a merciful grace, a sugar plum wich satisfies the lame matter. Consciousness is rude, woos the stray canard who welcomes the travail of her woman friend. The falsehood is not satisfied with the peasant scuffle, with the resentment, the amusement. Pretends and hides every policy, opinion, pandemonium, without the deception of discernment, of the wrath.

Madness seizes the sorrow and becomes a flower. It flatters happiness for a moment, The emotion of a different life, meets the delirium and falls in love. Where the soul, that lives life with resentment, does not scare and bewilders the reason.

Domino brings home her puppet boyfriend and plays with him. The tall covex space appears turquoise, draws a sinuous line, sensual on the perimeter, steeped in the events of others. Is the profile of a sea wave, villain of the most beautiful seawater, ensures the persistence of blue. The opposite of darkness is spreading slowly, the wave breaks regularly, long, smooth. It changes the moment, hands out colours. The night owns the future, forgives the guilt, multiplies the fixed and reflected light, surrounds the vaporous game, unties a curtain. After dark, you look and measure the content of mirrors, the anxiety of angels goes on stage, exercises its memory, reminds all. The vibrations are perpendicular, penetrate the skin, A mass of water rises and falls. Is female, able to overwhelm the spectator with the honesty of her sins, under a dim light, so as not to be seen, so you do not see the others. There's a glare, the vision is complex. A comely light, double. The volume of the music is consumed, a ruby-throated hummingbird flies free. Soft folds grow and follow the trend, the long radius, the imagination of reach, the underside of the tables. Steel and water deposit the gray and blue in the depths of the deepest eyes. Wooden puppet head is sitting on himself, his face is opalescent, flattered, inspired by an happy melodrama built on the water.

Expeditious, after a rinsing, a vixen becomes Domino and hooks a wealthy sucker, Next to a Babylon, hanging on a sofa. The big-breasted dwarf takes to carouse, with boldness and elegant rudeness, soaking with champagne. The abundance prods the lout who sinks into the spree, mortified by the flamboyant quagmire suddenly drowning him. Exhausted, he does his utmost, becomes comical and rolls in the darting and whining of the female. The fouling of the simpleton. He seems to sail by his brig, closet of slovenliness and shame of a penitent. Champagne becomes Cain and burden, wearing the excitable and the intemperance out. The brig is wrecked in the trick, soaked and limp. The face stops barking and turns out joke, unfair joy and gloom. Back from the dressing room, the mistress comes out of the maze, snatching the sullen loser's hoard, the discourtesies and the bundle. Slackens the soiled and ragged snare, while, lazy, the ignorant brigand, obscene and minced, cancels the boarding, stuffing himself with glances

The gaze bends the night's damp colors, new anatomies. Bold shapes wink and move under the roses. Tasting strokes, things you can touch, perfect lipstick, clear in the stretch, creamy. Rose leaves sweeten the thorns. In summer, the night put on its coloured plumes, the great silence wakes up and takes away the agony of boredom. The wail of a rose is the cry, at night, of a carnivorous spider, with sweet mouth, showing off new throats with its multiple body, innumerable and victorious.

Holy Spirit is not a church mouse. Is a stray queen, Our Malicious Domino, full of grace and confidences, sovereignty of mirrors and sofas. Heavenly Absinth, fragrant drink of salvation, Scalds and flares up and knocks again, in the dark dirty burlesque. A jewel case for Dionysus, usable misleading, celestial female with a blessed voice, flowing in the shadows, extraordinarily restless, amused, with a principle of faith, absolutely compliant

No woman knows, for sure, if her lover is me. Demon nightmare, Angel fallen from grace, the most malicious insatiable lust. Lover demon, bearing down my vulnerable women, pursuing the longing. Human flesh endowed with artificial life. In her sleep, I am the husband lying beside her, I am the next-door neighbor, I am the young and attractive stable boy. And the nun claims to be assaulted by the prelate. And the unholy offspring takes the image of suspect twins, of evil look daughters, of Merlin the Wizard. Beloved Domino, I will pick up a hundred stones and built a wall around you so high, you will no longer be able to leave your bed if you do not use a ladder.

Hellish exile of the east peacocks, worship of the great flame, ray of the vain vampire. In the pagan temple a creole beauty crosses the pavilion with the half-mask and the rule of the despot queen, winning the pedestal. In the underworld of the ragged little girls, her serpentine allures each sharp talisman, every drunken javelin. In her room, bricks with a transparent bark, tapestries, mats, torn canvases, decorated shutters climb up from time to time, a cobalt-colored carpet draws Chinese ideograms. Oriental lamps similar to distant galaxies with a bright opacity commend the pale meeting of demons and witches, the pandemonium. The stubborn emptiness of chatters attracts the discontent and an intermittent fever in the meaningless space of a vacant abyss. Myriads, gaps, secrets, the profane grants the Sabbath, the small of the abuse, the crackable demonic. The officiants pass the sentence, the holocaust of pythonic. Her hair detains the century, fuity with balsam. The loss is made elixir, Essence and flower. The guillotine runs through the hazel thinness with the rush of maltreatment. Dishevelled, wrapped in a tipsy cloth, the lifeless body on the infamous slope, cold, in the shade of slaughter

Yet I get delicate perceptions, genuine, or otherwise desperate and, however, capable of confessing love, of taking my hand, of making me understand. I let myself fall and see Domino in her poignant naturalness, because I simply yield to her as she to herself. Promising creature of the afterlife, I see her browning, the hair draws her in the most handsome figures, exhalts her wanton malice and the affected exuberance donated by a liturgical Sun

Immortal embrace of a fragrant victress. Caressing, bodily shape mimosa, carnal scent of Louisiane, female equivalent of a tempting faun able to appear bronzed, statuesque. Rising hues verging on rosy, surrounded by a medieval ocean, immense sacred vestments, the courting of a majestic Moon, remembrance in love with a perpetual symphony.

If the Judgment did not lay the blame on me, the defeat. If the Assassin asked for mercy. Under a priesthood of disgrace, the Whitish Light of the Icy God is in love with the beloved first blood in the morning. In the pale carnage, short bodies fall reddish on the Stone Earth. Half a shadow of the vermillion child glides along the blade-beast of a bluebottle-razor. In a rusty and purple garden, the amaranth sting whips the shot and the Martyrdom with the rope flame. If Endless Father shed his own blood, if Heaven had no more blood. If, Enemy of God, I were a butterfly. If, Demon of Devils, I accepted, on a whim, the agony and invoked, sweetly, the madness. If I upheld, I swear, the torment, if implored mercy. If, Beautiful Prince, I tore my teeth and my eyes. If small arms, rich in blood, waved flags painted like butterfly wings

I am the nervous wandering, the arabesque, the disorder. I am the restless story, the agony in cage, the excellent madman. Mementos, still in the light, cast into a bottomless pit, before a regret depicted by the frosty warmth of my pale smile.

Copyright © Alessandro Cusimano 2012

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