Spoiled Flower- The Butterfly's Kiss

The commissioner’s son was looking for his toy

And was stunned at the doorstep.

He breathed in a smell of damp wood and soiled sheets

And beheld a lust soaked trash picked from the pits

Death bred in her sad yellow eyes.

Her inflamed lids were peeled open,

Joyless, vile, in meek obscenity.

Streams of bitter smelling white dribbled down her tongue,

Pooling at the base of her amethyst lips, still wet

He heard a faint rustle in her flesh-

Ghastly pale worms without mind or remorse flooded her black veins,

burrowing everywhere greedily through their mouldering monument

Gorging all they can eat and die, until eaten by the next behind

Swimming in her clogged head like a brood of demons.

They squirmed beneath her face, Animating her once divine features,

Until death squirted out of her neck, from scars not meant for mourn.

The cicadas returned him to this world.

It was still summer, it was still his father's house.

But his world had been reduced to a buzzing, waiting mass, hellish vermin and their sacks of eggs. A world waiting to crawl over withered and broken things, constantly biting and gnawing, trailing their slime across aging things. 

The wood he stood on, this room, his father's house, the floors, the walls, the roof breaking, every minute of everything has left, has long being claimed. 

Infected, the boy did not blink.

He knows every time he closed his defiled eyes

There would sit every life’s final shame.

~

When I was in my death throes with my cancer last year I had a lot to contemplate about death, transience, impermanence.

When I read Henri Duday’s The Archaeology of the Dead: Lectures in Archaeothanatology (Oxbow Books 2009), I stumbled upon a black and white print of the same motive from the early 19th century Japan entitled “Voyages de la Mort” showing the decomposition of a corpse in 12 vignettes. In Japanese this motive is called kusôzu, lit. ‘images of the nine stages’ - a sort of Japanese Memento Mori.

The scroll shows the stages of decomposition of the body of a woman, beginning with her fully clothed body and ending with her bones being eaten by dogs. The subject is an ancient Buddhist one, treating of the transience of the physical body, but which later assumed didactic functions relating to the proper conduct of women. In this example, however, the theme is given a new and somewhat prurient twist by its featuring of a prostitute as the subject. The work intersects with the world of ‘erotic pictures’ (shunga) and gives a very useful counterpoint for studying that genre. A prolific and versatile artist trained in the traditional Kano school, Eitaku achieved success rather through ukiyoe works and newspaper illustrations, but his reputation in Japan is not yet as high as it should be. Like many important artists whose careers straddled the end of the Edo period and beginning of the Meiji era, Japanese scholars have found it problematic to classify him.

My Buddhist and Catholic sides raging about permanence and impermanence of beauty...so I thought deeply about my Okinu, crazy thoughts. Damn good haunt.どうして欲しい？

~