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from AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A WANDERER:

This is what truly happened: I was born, I grew up, I wandered, I treated the world as though it were a woman, I was clear and calm and brave, doors opened, women opened, I passed through them like a panther sliding through his jungle, occasionally I stumbled, yes, this is true, but I rose from each streambed my spirit intact, wounds healing, their scars like badges worn on my body with pride. I met Lola, my American Lola, I am now an aging man, I nailed her to the wall, I was destroyed. Is there anything more to say? I swam once too often over the devil fish. My strength has ebbed, perhaps this is merely a function of my age, I sank, sharks took me, scavengers, sinking into the sea I was no more than carrion, dead meat. Shall I repeat myself? I am dead, I died, I descended into Lola, she opened for me, I found death. I kissed her bony face, her lips writhed beneath mine, her tongue, a sour, fleshy thing, pushed into my mouth with a terrible ferocity. The opening that I saw engulfed me. What else is there to say? I was sucked into her. How many more ways can I say it? I fell, I plummeted, this is no panther graceful in a jungle, no eagle soaring on his wings, no shark alert in the depths, this is a man falling end over end, tumbling. I remember watching us in the mirror, Lola bent over, ass high in the air, naked except for her high heeled shoes, her breasts swinging beneath her as the man, it is me, I see myself in the glass, strokes into her, with each stroke his face, my face, my face in the mirror, growing more horrified. How does this happen? The man is naked, I can see his body is stringy,still lean and hard despite his age, there is no sloth there, he has his own ferocity, he growls bent over the woman's arched back, bites her shoulder, takes her shoulder in his mouth, we can imagine him a lion crouched over a lioness, both are tawny, muscles move visibly beneath the skin. Her ass rises to meet each thrust, there is a symmetry here, a collusion, a collision of colluding forces, bodies strain at each other, etc. Where is death? How does death rise from this image? She twists her head around and bites his lip. Blood foams as from the severed carcass of a fish. Her ass pumps with increased vigor. Surely this is life, not death. Is this not the very soul of creation? Yet turned towards the mirror blood drips from her mouth. The face is cadaverous. The body too. The breasts slap back and forth like small animals hanging from her chest. The man is stricken there, his own body arched like a bow, agony evident on his face. He is impaled. That is evident too. What has impaled him? He is dying. What kind of madness is this? In the mirror he too is a cadaver. They are two cadavers, bone and sinew, deathheads, blood still frothing. She is dead, he is dying. The ferocity of death is visible. Visible is the ferocity of death. Nothing else is visible, nothing else is there, there is only death visible in the mirror, nothing else, nothing.