A celebratory poem for two famous women |
… early morning – bloody ‘67 month of June East of mae into the lethal mist – Spanish Trail a mansfield perhaps of tearless, virgin-eyed potatoes across ditches on either side maybe cotton, dark hands-waiting ermine of soil bleeding white but darkly into sedimentary sorrow, Mississippi River splitting the vaginal lips, caressing mud-silent between the breasts of America captioned by a blonde wig maybe a scalp violently flung over eyebrows arched to scorn the bawdy cadences of mae, flagpole erections saluting Goddess Size with liquid smut of titillation advertised as inoculation against jaded wet-dream obsession voyeuristically coiled, silken whisper away from bosom, flesh expressed competing with expression of flesh, ‘That’ll show that other Hollywood bitch!’ ‘Yeah, but when’s jayne gonna’ do it again?’ – oh! jayne is dead! Jayne is dead! emptiness unraveling coiffs of fame East, West, through valleys of aching adoration stalking *Mae’s vaudeville shimmy ’shake it, vamp baby!’ flirting cant of head, flash of thighs and canter of girlish voice ripening to full-womanly husk - - and fly! – fly! – fly! around the Maepole singing the flesh electric until besmirched by mud of narrowness for eight days in shriveled blood-stained minds, Obscene? – Mae West? ah yes! dares she celebrate what genitalia of shame hides in obscene prisons, she, honoring scripture of body and heart Babylonic-blasphemous eros-love of man for woman, woman for woman and man for man, an all-embrace, anthem of sweet profanity soaring once more free above iron-barred hypocrisy and fly! – fly! – fly ecstatic! around the pole in the month of Mae and Jayne’s girlish worship of ** ‘falling out of bed every night to make room in it for God,’ her horse-haired bow shimmying to knit fissures in dreams across violin strings in the driveway of her childhood home sirening passing ears through time seeded by the sands of grief, joy, triumph and failure through the hourglass of womanhood - - East of the Mississippi River caressing mud-silent between breasts, West of Biloxi: ‘my god! she went out into the nightclub audience for a final time after her performance, sat in a man’s lap asking about his wife and kids!’ during moments pursued by the Spanish Trail, Highway 90 her three children backseat-sleeping never to recollect the mother-of-all-horrors, a Mansfield of shattered dreams shredded into steel and glass concrete-confetti ripped from the walk of fame, while the bosom still is full-proud though the girl’s bed now is nightly empty except for her cradle of dark soil, vamp shimmy of her silent bow captured slow-motion in the mist acrid-spiraling toward the sun waiting to Westward-greet the dusk not eclipsing electric dawn-forever rising from the bosom of Jayne and Mae… … America… … morning – bloody ‘67… ______________ * Under the stage name The Baby Vamp, Mae West began performing in vaudeville at 12, later becoming famous for her ‘lascivious shimmy’ dance. As a woman, she wrote, starred in and directed a number of risque plays, and one of them, The Drag, referenced the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first known gay to ‘out’ himself. West was released – on good behavior – after eight of a ten-day sentence to jail on public obscenity charges, the prison warden being so enamored of her that he nightly took her out to dinner. She was an early champion of humanizing all sexual orientations, and during a police raid on a gay bar, said, ‘Don’t you know you’re hitting a woman in a man’s body?’ Like her successor, West did night club performances after her movie career faltered. ** As a girl, Jayne Mansfield ‘fell out of bed several times every night to make room in it for God’, and entertained passers-by with performances on her violin in the driveway of her childhood home. She married Mickey Hagaritay, resulting in his termination as one of Mae West’s ‘muscle men’. Like West, she turned to performances in night clubs after the fall-off of her Hollywood career, her last one being at a dinner club in Biloxi, Miss., on June 28, 1967, after which she left by car for a New Orleans television appearance. While her three children survived, Jayne Mansfield died instantly around 2:25 in car accident on Highway 90 also known as the Spanish Trail. |