Before antiquity, gods shook the columns of their temples, the marble cracking through the clouds like thunder, a dress rehearsal before the buggering of Ganymede.
With indolent grins they allowed the snake to writhe in a leafy copse, a tendril rising with the moon licking at its canopy until the first woman could be born.
ipsissima verba
the rough beast does not slouch, he walks erect while speaking at small rotary club luncheons or on late-night public access channels, expounding on man's dominion over man
he's pudgy and unassuming, hardly a feral child brimming with preternatural powers— yet he's been cultivating his charm since the advent of sin, he moves incognito, a grass roots antichrist, the man behind the man who never reads Yeats
the world won't end with a whimper, but with a conference call— he'll pull over at a rest stop outside Albuquerque with his wireless remote to organize the endgame from a bathroom stall
Camille Paglia edits on the beach
first draft—Tuesday, 3:00 p.m., New Smyrna:
The mermaids are swinging their butt-thonged bottoms beach to beach, (do I dare to eat a peach? Ha!) they can't sense the horror of the water, the sun, the leering boys with hard-ons (jejune…. Òleering priapistic boysÓ sounds more poetic) who swagger like strangers with guns, blasting music into the sun, (Camus reference may be too oblique) striking poses worthy of Polyclitus. (remember to look at Praxiteles, just for comparison's sake)
A group of well-oiled girls (yes!) toss a ball over the net, a network of tan limbs and plump suburban insouciance (connect this somehow to the Marquis de Sade) thoroughly unaware of the forces bubbling quietly under my umbrella. (Òchthonian forcesÓ may be more to the point)