_ | \ | \ | | \ __ | |\ \ __ _____________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ _____________ | ___________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ ___________ | | | _/_/_____ | | > > _/_/_____ | | | | /________/ | | / / /________/ | | | | | | / / | | | | | |/ / | | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | |_/ | | | | | | | | c o m m u n i c a t i o n s | | | |________________________________________________________________| | |____________________________________________________________________| ...presents... R.I.P. by Poppy Z. Brite 10/31/1997-#341 __///////\ -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- /\\\\\\\__ \\\\\\\/ Everything You Need Since 1986 \/////// ___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ |___heal_the_sick___raise_the_dead___cleanse_the_lepers___cast_out_demons___| Dear William S. Burroughs, We never met while you were alive, but you shaped my way of thinking about everything from drugs to jism to prose style to loving my enemies. You made me wonder, for all time, what was on the end of my fork. I assumed you would live forever, pre-embalmed by the drugs. Tonight you are dead at 83, and I figure the least I can do is pen a fantasy about fucking your corpse. Pen, yes. This text may eventually appear on a printed page or a computer screen, but I am writing the first draft in purple ballpoint, in my notebook, because that's the way I did all my writing back when you first got your needles into me. 1987, and Michael Spencer and I used to photocopy pages from _Naked Lunch_ and hide them inside copies of Billy Graham's and Jerry Falwell's autobiographies at the Christian bookstore in Chapel Hill. Passages about beautiful boys fucking on a Ferris wheel and shooting their jism over the moon. Tonight, though, I take the big blue mystery pill that's been hiding in my stash for too long. It's an opiate of some sort, and before it began dissolving in my stomach it was embossed with the number 6350, which my friend David said looked like the year I would wake up if I took it. But I just feel all floaty and nice, and soon I am alone with you in the Lawrence, Kansas morgue. They've left us to have our moment, the tactful pathologists and attendants, because they know that death sometimes needs to be eased along with a little pleasure. You might say fucking the dead is one of my "kicks." (_You_ might. My generation only uses the work "kick" as a transitive verb, e.g., "Don't make me kick your ass, buttmunch.") The morgue is small and clean, with that underlying sweet-brown smell I remember from the other two I've been fortunate enough to visit. The attendants have rolled you out of the cooler and placed your metal gurney against the row of sinks -- to provide a backstop for our carnal frolics, I guess. You and I are naked, save for one item apiece: you are wearing a gray felt hat tilted forward over your eyes; I am wearing a leather hip harness with an attached latex cock, black, large, shiny, and (maybe I just think so because it's you I'm going to fuck with it) slightly insectile. Your body is long, thin, pale, intact (unautopsied, not uncircumcised). The faint violet mottling of your fatal heart attack is visible on your shoulders and upper chest. Your abdomen is sunken, your ribs rising out of its hollow like wings. When I touch you, stroking the graceful arc of those ribs, your skin feels loose and soft. Parchment ... silk ... the bazaars of Tangiers ... I don't feel that you are precisely gone from here, that your body is a mere "shell." Nor do I imagine that you are somehow trapped in this meat. But death is an endlessly transitory state. I suspect there may be some essence left in you. Your cock is flaccid and powdery-tasting, but as I roll it around on my tongue, a drop of something bitter leaks out: piss or jism. The ultimate orgasm? I don't flatter myself that I'm giving it to you; at best, I'm getting Death's sloppy seconds. Your hat has slipped off, and I see that your eyes are slitted open. They still look as watchful and reptilian as they appear in photos, but now they are permanently focused on a point beyond any camera, beyond me and this morgue, beyond my big latex cock. I want to kiss you, but am irrationally sure that if I do, a centipede will come writhing up from your stomach and through your larynx and into your mouth, and it will thrust between my lips like a living, chitinous tongue. I take you by your jutting hipbones and turn your body over on the gurney. You are as light as a box kite. Even your buttocks are hollow, the bones as prominent as your shoulderblades. The crack of your ass is hairless and immaculate. Your body seems so breakable, I wonder if you were still able to bathe yourself. Despite the fact that I am about to sodomize your corpse, this thought feels disrespectful. As I knead your asscheeks and run my tongue down the sharp nubs of your spine, I throb with readiness. You're a beautiful corpse, Bill. Allen Ginsberg was a beautiful boy once, but he wasn't really my type after he got fat and hairy. You stayed sexy until the end (and past it). I like skinny old men. I baptize your asshole with my saliva. I kiss it like a mouth, unafraid of the centipede at this end. I can't imagine you disapproving of having your asshole worshipped. I coat my cock with a handful of industrial-strength antibacterial liquid soap and slip it into your unresisting smoothness. You are cool inside, shading toward cold. In my fantasy, I am the last man to fuck you. My tears fall upon your flesh in lieu of jism. You have helped to make a world where this fantasy is possible, and maybe even publishable. Rest in perversion. .-. _ _ .-. / \ .-. ((___)) .-. / \ /.ooM \ / \ .-. [ x x ] .-. / \ /.ooM \ -/-------\-------/-----\-----/---\--\ /--/---\-----/-----\-------/-------\- /lucky 13\ / \ / `-(' ')-' \ / \ /lucky 13\ \ / `-' (U) `-' \ / `-' the original e-zine `-' _ Oooo eastside westside / ) __ /)(\ ( \ WORLDWIDE / ( / \ \__/ ) / Copyright (c) 1997 cDc communications and the author. \ ) \)(/ (_/ CULT OF THE DEAD COW is a registered trademark of oooO cDc communications, PO Box 53011, Lubbock, TX, 79453, USA. _ oooO All rights reserved. Edited by Grandmaster Ratte'. __ ( \ / ) /)(\ / \ ) \ \ ( \__/ Save yourself! Go outside! Do something! \)(/ ( / \_) xXx BOW to the COW xXx Oooo