“CLOWN:

Then Use you fair strength skillfully:
The business of Poetry
Conduct as if it were a love affair!
One meets by chance, one feels one’s way, stays there,
And by and by, one is entangled,
Happiness grows, then it is mangled.
First rapture comes, then grief and care advance:
Before you know what happened, it is a long romance.
Give us a play with such emotion!
Reach into life, it is a teeming ocean!
All live in it, not many know it well,
And where you seize it, it exerts a spell.
In motley pictures little clarity,
Much error and a spark of verity—
I tell you, it is brews like these
That never fail to edify and please.
The flower of your youth will come to read
And hear whatever you may be revealing,
And every tender mind will come to feed
Upon your work its melancholy feeling;
One thrills to this, one finds that in your art,
Each sees precisely what is in his heart.
The young are still prepared to weep or show delight,
They still respect your verve, and laugh at dreamlike pranks,
Those who have ceased to grow, find nothing right;
Those who are growing still, will not spare thanks.

— Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann

“I’m Rubber, You’re Glue, Whatever You Say Bounces Off Me And Makes A Six-Inch-Diameter Exit Wound In You.”

— Harley Quinn, Joker’s Asylum II: Harley Quinn

Wax, doll. It’s an imperative. It’s a show title, too—for the Clown Cum Show—but an imperative at its heart, her heart, the wax doll’s. She’s an imperative. She is imperative. It is imperative she be treated as such. And yet. And yet.

A wax doll on a dirty mattress plays with herself. She’d painted “PLAY WITH ME” on a sign in blue and stuck it up in the shopfront, her face pressed to the glass and the latex of a sissy tranny fetish mask. Some shied away from the doll, or stared in wonder, and kept their distance, left her sad and alone, watched and undone, which she already was. Some, however, came forth to the scene of her body and its conditions. She soared into fugue and only understood the confusion when she crash landed into herself at the end of the night. She was an event and its aftermath, a show and its strike. Thank god for the girls who caught her in flight.

The wax doll is the come down, a cum clown. She is an object of confusion, a grandeur of delusion, a study in monstrosity and disorganized identity. She’ll walk through the fire to approach something close to feeling, the fire pulled from her belly and stuck up her pussy. She is a condition, one which invites you to touch her with fervor, with fire. And yet. And yet. Fulfilled yet unrequited. Waxed and waned. How sad. How strange. How happy. How bad. How fun and diffuse, how ecstatic and mad. Her thoughts race in lines until she’s speaking in rhyme. And so when you know, when you show, when you lie, that’s how you know when it’s big party time. And so we find ourselves here in a refusal of pity, on a dirty ass mattress with a view of the city. And so she’s made a play date that’s simply a ploy to give you permission to make her a toy.

Play with her like you mean it. She’s built a theater of her body. Come inside. The stage is in the round tonight, threshold open for you, ready to welcome you to its disconcerting attractions. The latex smells strong when you’re inside the mask. Will you push yourself inside to be with her? In and alongside her? What’s your sense of desire? Repulsion? Dismay? Uncertainty? Land on a choice. You need not stick to it but make one, at the very least. She will know if you don’t, if you won’t. And she will fall to your hands with the grace of a slip into madness, with the face of a fall onto needles and scalpels, a descent into mutilation that’s simply a fall through her personal hell and back out to the one in the public domain.

Take her picture, flash on film, she’ll flash for film. Picture her through the lens of assumption, through the projection you’ve inherited in flagrance, a filth of presumptive feeling accumulating to a lack of touch, a touch of lack in a drought of affection. So give her a kiss with the camera if you can’t bring yourself to give her your touch.

So diddle the doll for a dollar or more. Do something with her, don’t just leave her there on her own on the floor. She’s lonesome, hung up on you, strung up on herself, a puppet caught up in the strings of her heart. Her heartstrings ring, intone mournfully like those bowed on a violin, bowed before you in procumbent submission through which she’s confused the difference between lover, liar, and lord.

So diddle the customer, the client, the court. Diddle the fiddle to whittle the wax, to pluck the strings and suck the rings, to drip the sickly sweet and saccharine slop. It will all, inevitably, fall so terribly short, deflate, flop.

Fiddle the fall of the crest and the coming. Compose a score for her salvation from heaven, her prostration into hell, and her malformation of the two and their difference. The illusory difference between realms screams into itself, going nowhere quite fast, fast just like this slut in a mask.

She felt the stare of the store, the eyes looking in, breaking into her bones. She trusted it too much. She decomposes, sweet and floral notes wafting around her heart like flies drawn to a rotting piece of meat. She’s made of latex and wax, but meat too, muscle and gristle and sinew and sludge. Fluorescent paint for blood, glowing gore sparkling in pools and veins like galactic clouds and city lights pulled out of focus.

She dances before the lights, fluorescent flashes before her, red incandescents behind, skyscrapers and bridges beyond, unseen stars falling into the night beyond. She drops down head first on the dirty mattress, pulls up, drenched still in the cheap opening wine for which she was grateful.

She’s a moment gone amiss, a grave of dreams gone awry. You had to be there. Left-handed scissors. Latex mask. Inciscion. Slice. Rend. Tear. She’s done it again, just another task of many, the mask. She’s lost it again, too, the boundary, the forlorn facade, the channel for vitality, the paint. She’ll find another, different, more. She’s a different thing now.

The candles burn, she blows them all out save for one, one she burns in herself. The camera closed in, she brought the scene to an end, the lights dimmed and cut one by one, until the end. She blew it all out and made another hack into the never-ending cut. Exhale. Smile. How does it feel? Like I was rode hard and put away wet.