A Trivial Comedy for serious people archives

For your elaboration, Scott:

Lazy she lies alone in clover and sweet grass, seventeen and never been sweet in the grass, ho ho!

Down in the dusking town, Mae Rose-Cottage, still lying in clover, listening to the nannygoats chew, draws circles of lipstick round her nipples.

MAE ROSE-COTTAGE
I'm fast. I'm a bad lot. God will strike me dead. I'm seventeen. I'll go to hell, she tells the goats. You just wait. I'll sin till I blow up! She lies deep, waiting for the worst to happen; the goats champ and sneer.

...

Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school. The sun hums down through the cotton flowers of her dress into the bell of her heart and buzzes in the honey there and couches and kisses, lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast. Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street steaming, 'Gossamer', and strip her to the nipples and the bees. She blazes naked past the Sailors' Arms, the only woman on the Dai-Adamed earth. Sinbad Sailors places on her thighs still dewdamp from the first mangrowing cockcrow garden his reverent goat-bearded hands.

GOSSAMER BEYNON
I don't care if he is common, she whispers to her salad-day deep self,
I want to gobble him up. I don't care if he does drop his aitches,
she tells the stripped and mother-of-the-world big-beamed and Eve-hipped spring of her self,
so long as he's all cucumber and hooves.

Sinbad Sailors watches her go by, demure and proud and schoolmarm in her crisp flower dress and sun-defying hat, with never a look or lilt or wriggle, the butcher's unmelting icemaiden daughter veiled forever from the hungry hug of his eyes.

SINBAD SAILORS
Oh, Gossamer Beynon, why are you so proud? He grieves to his Guinness. Oh, beautiful beautiful Gossamer B., I wish I wish that you were for me. I wish you were not so educated. She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns, in a terror of delight, away from his whips and whiskery conflagration and sits down in the kitchen to a plate heaped high with chips and the kidneys of lambs.

2003-05-09, Circles of lipstick

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