Jill Rapaport: Queen of Spain

Amadeus King of Spain
Vanity Fair Spy cartoon, 1872
(http://www.amazon.com/SPAIN-AMADEUS-Spain-Vanity-cartoon/dp/B008CPV68U)
no copyright infringement intended

Tonight again stuff surged past me with the velocity of fighter planes. Coming home my head banged from too much beer. A young guy with bruises hollered at the police, who waved him away. He screamed that he was not a boozer, hadn't had a drink; he ordered them to read Neitszche.

Two men with round, insolent eyes peered at me from the shadows. I felt the killing spirit. I felt the stuff surge, forward and backward. Had been inundated all day long. What did it matter what I could withstand?

I invented the future, here in my little head. Tall streets, mountain passes, long flagpoles. Words that look like what they are. The lobes of the brain.

I watched women old enough to be my mother content themselves with nothing, the tabloids, curlers, slavery.

The young women carried guns, had babies, died.

Men were either killers or killed.

Some huddled in the shadows, happy not to be seen by the killers and their prey. They had next to nothing, just the shreds of clothes they wore, a butt, pieces of garbage they tried to move in the streets.

I had rooms, vistas, orchards, valleys, mountains, oceans, the gold of eons rippling through my fingers, always more when some big chunk cracked and drizzled away.

Had oceans, seas, huge rolling tidal waves. I rolled in the surf, way out and back again, bouncing along the surface of the heavy, rushing water.

Here I had everything, the crushing weight of too much stuff, abundance, the plenitude of undulant paradise, choking me.

Nothing stayed away from my gardens, my orchards, seas, valleys, oceans, giant deserts and rolling dunes, nothing could be kept out of my world, which encompassed much more than the world at large.

My enormous skies, which dwarfed the atmosphere, dipped and soared above me and below, saw themselves reflected in the shining sands, the marble runways, the booming vastness of the ocean deep.

Little me, dwarfed by the vastness of my surroundings, the massive force of what I carried and possessed.

I was quite unhappy. I could not live up to the magnitude of what was mine.

I wore black lace—the mantilla of Phaedre—and walked uptightly through the lemon groves, the acres and miles of cultivated gardens, outside of which boomed the endless spaces which my property thronged.

My men and women, horses, wild animals, whales, flying monsters of the age of excess surged to be near me, but not too near me, they sensed my unvoiced command to keep distance, not to bother me in my dour mood.

My aircraft carriers carried jumbo jets. One stopped at my unstated wish, bent to have me step aboard. I chartered the voyage to a major sun, dragging my caravan behind me, wild promethean horses bucking and charging. The whole of my possession drooped and swerved in my foamy wake, coming after me, determined to keep up, as I raced them mercilessly into the implosion that was mine, to keep, forever, all day long

I tapped the high hat, stepped on the pedal

Here in the ferocious stratospheres the men with round eyes were behind me, their heads snapping, whiplashed to a bugging froth with no possibility of parole

I cracked the whip of gold

The goofy young ones and the police flipped upside down in the deep holds, miles above earth and the closest moon

The empress of all phenomena on her golden ride, presented with two aspirin by the chief steward of the ship

All of my golden clouds, rice paddies, primordial redwoods gleaming in the sunlight cast by large, wild, whipping stars

My body peeled away and deserted me, afraid of me, the golden monster surging to the fore

Tonight again the sun shone, came to me, golden, kneeling before me in all my deluded splendor

The wet streets' smell peeled away, ran off, deserted the beautiful substitute earth that was my unutterable playground

Ate a Pop Tart filled with rubies, cracked the whip, drove the horses on and on

Tomorrow was Friday, I had to make miles glow in the deluded heat of the sun on its epileptic journey

Called up Mom and told her I was all right

Are you sure you're getting enough rest? she asked, as the phone fell away, blazing into eternity

Drank Perrier for a hangover, in flying goblets of tempered filigree gold

The horses whinnied, their glorious manes whipped the air

Jupiter singed my jeans, the big dipper flew me a wine cooler, hair of the dog

Even the ancient Greeks did not foreshadow modern majesty, the guys on the street, the involution of the flipping rubber saucer that was now

It all came to meet me, presentation-crazed, hungry for the stroke of my scepter, the transformation promised by the golden ball jiggling in my palm

Trapped inside rushing abundance, foaming at the mouth for my sayso, it came bubbling and slopping at me, I who gave centrifugality its force even though I wanted to escape and rush around with them, it, or whatever, not be trapped inside the eye of my own storm

My navel pulsed, and my abdomen throbbed like a hit drumskin

My drinking buddies slept in pieces, the eyes of the guys on the street exploded, everything was as I had wished, back when first I pronounced those words of unbreakable opal and diamond:

they'll see

(Jill Rapaport)