It’s all about the you
a. talks to b., in pornographic detail
a.
Ah, that frilly ritual of sartorial scarification! You master like no other the art of hiding fetishism under layers of ethnicity. Yet, I can feel the glistening power of unbridled harshness ooze though the gauzy inconsistency of your airy get-up. You look like a Neo-Geo Rococo puppet. Your mystically carnal albedo holds no secret to me. You’re cheating. Still, I feel electric chills running down my spine as I try to decipher you.
Your face is pale, contours chalked out like anatomy was just a malleable paste: a blank canvas ready for Jackson Pollock to drip all over in liberating gestures. Pollock’s possessed chaos always looked orgasmic to me: I am sure abstract expressionists were taken over by the raw energy of unrepressed sexual desire as they painted.
Your long lashes draw glances to the intense blue of your iris. You know eyes are the door to the inner sancta, but your gate is wide shut; your gaze holds a mirror in the face of the viewer. You never talk: you master the art of control, knowing too well that silence is sexy.
One cannot tell where your skin ends and your hair begins: whitened, powdered, backcombed into a incroyable mane, your head is a masterpiece of the aerodynamic. So is your beard. The sight is blinding.
Your lobes are tortured, dripping steel rings that sound like feisty bells in a summer breeze as you move. A giant, heavy ring pierces your septum, circling your mouth. It asks once more for silence, or a veiled kiss. On occasion, I wouldn’t mind obliging.
The muslin shirt dripping lace ‘n’ frills closed with a white velvet ribbon that you tie into a bow at your neck gives me shivers of delight, its raw-hemmed flaps dancing on your hairy chest. I see it as a decayed Masai collar.
You’re naked in all your furry glory underneath those layers, I know. The peak-shouldered riding coat you’re wearing on top of your human nothingness, opening up in the back in the longest, slickest piano tails, pulverises your silhouette into pure whitewashed immateriality; it vaporises your being into a pixilated halo. You’re absolutely, unforgivingly mental. Yet, you’re human, after all: broken gold threads draw scribbles allover your outer shell, suggesting there’s beauty in decay. We will all be rotten some time soon.
Your desires are intensely human, too. Your manhood, PA ring piercing thorough, bull balls dangling, peeks–a-boo behind your muslin high-waisted boxers. Wrapped in candid stockings, your calves look heroic, despite the velvet slippers.
You keep moving those tails. I can tell: you’re happy to see me.
***
b.
That’s what you secretly wish, my dear. I’m just standing still. It’s the blowing wind that’s agitating my billowing ends. Pas mal.
I can’t really get your intransigent sense of bodily architecture. The uncompromising assertiveness of the straight line you’re so fond of alienates me. I can see Bauhaus flirt with Faberge and brocade merge with brutalism. You can’t. That’s why I like you and don’t.
Looking at you I feel like sinking into a dense pool of ink. I’d rather be in the company of Lucy, in the Sky, with Diamonds. Your face is such an enigma. It is so utterly unmemorable, apart from that flashing neon light you hold beneath your teeth, going on/off as if to match your breath and naughty words. Seldom, indeed: you use words and wisdom with considered parsimony. You have so much to give, yet you keep it all for yourself. Avarice is a deadly sin, isn’t it?
You’re a black eyeless sight most of the time. A totem. You make me feel uncomfortable: I can always sense judgment in your stance, even though you’re probably thinking away frivolous equations. You’re vain, but your take on life is mathematic. You’ve frozen reality into an angular mindscape.
Your inky black hair cut in an uncompromising bowl that reaches eye level erases humanity and presence from your gaze. Your shaven nape is powdered into oblivion.
Geometrical grids flourish and fry all over your candid kurta. It looks like a robe: the matching shorts underneath being barely visible. Naked legs and cabochon-encrusted black velvet slippers make you look frail even if you are not.
Your dinner jacket is so matte it resembles a black hole. The unremittingly square shouder line widens from East to West. Jewels are piled up around your neck: a mass of emeralds and diamonds and filigree that’s oppressive to the point of asphyxia. You no less look comfortable. Murderer black leather gloves make your hands look like rabid claws.
You cut a piercing line when you move. You’re both memorable and invisible: you just get under people’s skin and then vanish. How you do it, I don’t really know. Your silhouette is like a scar slashed ‘n’ burned into the air. You keep hiding under a floating cape like it was a Rorschach stain. It is bright red inside. When you push it away, you make a peep show of the passion and the fire burning underneath the icy black surface. Yet, you’re teasing: there’s no fire underneath. Not at all. It’s all red, but it’s frozen, dead cold. You’re a monument to the artificial. Better if you stay on your own. I will send you notes using poisonous perfumed ink.
I have to go.
Angelo Flaccavento is a fashion journalist and writer, based in Sicily.
Eva Han is a collage artist who lives and works in Belgium.