O. sits at the drag bar reading Kafka, as the lady's roll their torsos to Whitney, Celine Dion, Kylie; the lady's have long hairless legs they are better looking women than many of the women. The girls each take their turn upon the stage, rolling their eyes,flicking the fingers at the cutest, walking down to stroke the manliest.
O. reads Kafka, what a miserable writer, he writes of the sterile, alienated
imprisoned manwoman, which only makes his writing a sterile imprisoned prose. O. puts Kafka back in his bag. O. rolls his eyes and films the thighs of a girl on stage
he muscular thighs, tensing as she steps in high heels. The girl has been practising walking in those heels since childhood. Sneaking into her mothers wardrobe, bending the rules, bending the mirror, to suit her image.
The women in the crowd cheer and she spins like a ballerina. The gay men cheer and she spins like they spun in the mirror. The drag queens swoon at the polished move, the crowd applaud, the drag queens cleberate being female and femininity, by impersonating
the women they love to imitate. They worship the women not from sex, from lust, for trophe love, but out of adoration for those mother baring, men enduring, curving landscapes, which raised a nation.
They feel masculinity and femininity in odd partnership. They revel in the contradiction. They dance, each taking their turn, under the hot rainbow coloured lights. The young, skinny, slender drag,
who O. has his eye on. The huge whaling fat drag who does it for laughs,
who is empowered by this ritual humiliation. Or the aging drag queen
who bends and stiffens and swirls in the limelight, and kick the can-can
anyway, and blows imagery flowers to the crowd.
O. sits smiling, drinking beer in an iced glass, he doesn't do drag,
he doesn't get drag, he revels in the contradiction, he waits for the young one
to come to him, to sit on his thigh, to kiss him, to revel in the contraditions,
to threaten the world with odd shapes of love pairing, to pose the question of hemaphrodite gender-bending universal sexuality or some such drivel idealism.
O. waits for the young drag to redress into his man fashion and boyish charm shirt. They will go dancing through the night, through the streets of sand, in the world of amber lamp light. Kafka sleeps soundly on the library shelf. There is no misery like seeking perfection. There are easy ways to enrage people, like being clear and obvious, and seeking only to say in prose what happened while you moved through the years.
*Typical, this is quick note, for short story or poem. Thoughts welcome.
