Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

97. ONE QUICK AND PLAYFUL THRUST:

The grand piano is rolled in with its curving wing unfolded like a great black butterfly that slowly sails toward charades by candlelight across the polished chasm of parquet the floor the floor unremarked while walked upon hundreds of feet at a time the ballroom dancers useless in their frieze of little time places lived and sought and seen and found like a small eraser rubbing a list of names to bits until the little crumbly pieces of eraser like people are strewn and sloppy over all the paper’s surface JUST LIKE THIS FLOOR so soon they too will be gone and somewhere the Big Guy naps dreaming of westerns and flowers in his hair grapes on some veranda and that fat girl in the toga transformed into a naked beautiful creature enfolding him and feeding him and every one of his desires while inside along the kitchen wall the servant staff is holding knives purloined from the meat drawers and pantries of the deepest kitchen recess OVER BY THE MEAT LOCKER where the cuts are kept and they are staring into ballroom space lasciviously watching the young girls dancing and they dream of killing the mates of everyone they see just to have the girls for their own ONE QUICK AND PLAYFUL THRUST into the ballroom light ‘so have I heard and do in part believe it’ so Shakespeare had a character say and better even than that were the words of POE (whose destroyed and vanished New York City house I once more pass this time while the firehouse across the street from it is bedecked with flowers and notes vigil candles for the recent dead) the Poe house is gone now a vacant gaping hole near where the street once was BUT NO ONE CARES they’ve fought that fight already and it’s been lost Poe said: ‘assigned to live next door because he’s silent though under lock and key because he’s mad’ – To immerse himself in tales where he could be the man - In once upon a time there was a man and marveling -
I watched the face you wore hardened into remote indifference beside my own.