Paxina: 002	Steaming in my own Soup
There’s something magical about a steam engine:: Eighty seven tons of the Devil’s darkbreath, so dark, so hard, so hot and so mercilessly solid in its grace. Chook - - chook! Chook chok! Choooock It sways not. It bends not. It weeps not. It is its own Law. Doing as it only can. Sheer unadulterated power. You mistake only once. An unforgiving mistress. You are unforgiven to stand here hour after hour firing the very furnace…but IF YOU DO NOT DO THIS – she will die…If you do not feed she will die… if you do not fire her up she will die. And so this is your lifes task to keep this steel barrelling up the track at 120 with no thought of thanks except you thank yourself. Like I thanked myself for finishing you off in a satisfying manner. When was I ever happy with sex – except that it was good when I was complete and you were a rag doll? Complain when I did and complain when I did not – my little gold scorpion. Or was it butterfly Borbaletta. Or the Saint amongst you. I tried to imagine sweating over you as I did to sweat over eight tons of coal – I shifted every seven hours. Porra! I broke you like a horse for the race. This engine? Yer canna break tha engine mann!” We Are Star Trekking!!!! Across the desert flats. Botswana is a great place – But its also crap!!! And this steel barreling up the track ? I live her. I love her. I drive her. She and I are ONE. We are a God in Time…We make the Space. Dream on… we will do the work… All Fahr an’ Steel Yeah! I got you. But she got me. I is her man. I hermano. Beautiful. Step up to that plate with my “shovel” and push it so far up Hells furnace I will fuck wit da devil of devils an she cain stop man – she need me to done well carry on boah!. You jes shovel dem goddam rocks in mah pussy ah’s jus gonna spit you out onna sidda the trakk. Lessen you wanna be real sweet ‘n nice ta me. Then you gonna be my nice home boy. One miss steak ju die raht naow But don leave me….  – I need that fire. I need you. Stone me. Rock me. Never leave me  ‘Sept you Fok me… Shorter of breath and closer to death… I owe my soul to The Company Store So now I am out here deep unnnerground. Looks like stars and sky. But that’s all I ever see. Cept wen Im onna day shift than its all blazing lapis lazuli blue. I learned from a harder mistress than any of you. I recall lifting off that green floral dress with trembling hands, my face against your young breasts (or was it your pale pink nightie) – with my mouth kissing your belly button.  I tore your black lace pants off you as I threw you to the chaise longe on the summer balcony, more than once. Or were they the red knickers in our back garden summer gazebo for breakfast? I can’t remember. No thought control here. Just Memories of Fire… Define your own possibilities: you did that. We were too young to get married…so we went to make love in the cloistered courtyard of a church. On Second Avenue. Down the road from your house. All that black hair on the green grass of our dreams. Sanctified by our passion. “What is your position?” “Undifferentiated lust. Why should it be wrong to be in lust?” “Before governments, Christianity and organised crime – women were in charge of everything… fertility rites were one”. So you say, opening yourself up like one of your ballet slippers, a gaping shell-fish. Conchita. Small conch. Small shell. I watch your petit fingers spreading the swamp and wading deeper into the cosmic furnace. The Cosmos smiles. You smile. When women embrace, their hearts freeze: you explain. “With women and men it is yes, or no. Woman to woman – it’s ‘maybe’ “. “Words are out of the question. The possibilities…” trailing off as you swim in the pink reverie of your rising temperate sea. We spoke at length. “Can you imagine what it is for me, a man, to be inside you. I have tried to imagine being a woman and being penetrated, “punished”, “hammered”, “bounced”, and “raced”. But I imagine that between women – each already knows is aware of what the other feels. Being both women. That’s why women lead orgies. Piece of work? Work of Art? Both. I will prefer to remember it that way. Like The Engine Of Heavens earthly Delights. Sent to test men. And you selected me of all men…to drive me and race me, to fly with me out of this sordid and hereditary stupidity. Shit! Yes the same one I escaped. Pityful you humans… Then we built engines: Hot steel is cold comfort to me for this bitch on a lead role. I live in a city that has streets wide enough to turn an ox-wagon and minds too narrow to turn to the future. Bulawayo. My friend Mark Middlemas and I drove down here for the Expo in a 2000 Rover and a boot full of speed and acid. It is 1973. And here we are, selling to all the day-trippers…at dollar a cap. We just hit a chemist in Salisbury…The Kopje Pharmacy at the bottom of the hill. Me, Curry, Charlie and Leo to drive the get-a-way. Two minutes. Like a clock. Cleaned everything from that place. An now here we are. Fire men on locomotives firing the minds of every club-runner and every dumb ass tourist-brained puta. And I miss you Build an engine….I will show you how… You should have cut and run in the first week. Better to remember a love lost, than a hatred born... I always say.  And we hung on to each other as we always did Because we each knew that we could not live this life with any one else as we did with each other. But now, many years later in my life as I reflect on these moments with the memory of a recent betrayal by another one of you Witches of My Heart – I think of a daughter of mine who is just like I recall you were. The Scorpion in my life imagines that I might spend my life in this box pilled to the gills, not knowing that I have already lost my memory of her, and knowing in my heart that I taught my daughter as best I could. Which was very good. And love her as I still do, and sheltered her long enough to grow up head strong and wise. And also clever. Like You. Like you, she loves me when I do things her way, and despises me when I make her do things my way – such are children. She was not my slave, but she was so clever as I was a not slave to her blind carelessness Thank the heavens none of the scorpions machinations ever touched my daughter. In some ways she reminds me of one of my pearls and I taught her all the things I learned when I was growing up with that other one of you. She reminds me of you. So now she is apart from different life experiences – almost identical in her thinking. Weird. So some small failure, I made I might have made in the past with You... but she is my greatest success, now.