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Elliot Richman |
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ACTAEON IN AUSCHWITZ I dream I am in the standing cell in Auschwitz, the place for "the hard cases," the one where prisoners had to crawl to enter, while kapos and SS beat them with clubs encrusted with barbed wire. Hunched beside me is a dead man already rotting while the other two reek of the dysentery shit running down their legs and the clots of tubercular blood on their naked chests. I have been here before and survived, suffocating now in meager air like a pillow of feces held against my hapless face. And within this dream I dream again, a Chinese box of nightmare, that Zen koan: Am I a man dreaming that I'm a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man - or, even more to the point, Actaeon with his dogs, a full moon guiding me in cold silence, burning with Nature's naked loveliness, until I stumble upon you nude, bathing in the moon, your handmaidens creatures from the Woman's Camp, while you are lithe and beautiful. Recognizing me, your eye lids lower, that dreamy after fuck smile as you raise your silver arrow, using my naval as a target. I cannot feel the arrow go through me, only the brute useless power of a stag before my own hounds rip me apart and I awake to three dead men gnawing on my genitals. |