Miss Itsy Bitsy’s Steam-A-Weenie Toast-An-Elven-Throne Bikini

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There’s nothing like
getting high in the woods,
she thinks,  freer at last
with each toke to join
the elves of Silmarillion
in merry sport, swinging
limb to limb through
the dank foreset of delight.

Or so it occurred to her
as she and her bud
slipped into the park
at 3 a.m., the trees gone
ghostly with fog, making
the boardwalk a creaking
bridge through the swamp,
the looming timber
became more sinister
due to all the meth,
dark teeth going bad in
gape-mouth of
addiction’s night.

The owls hooting down on
them became tree-orcs,
gargoyles of warning
sounding like the forest’s
own old law; but Nazi ice
is more potent stuff than
that, confusing nature
with self so much that

it was easy, simple really,
to climb into the oldest
cypress’s huge breech
(hallowed out for centuries)
and somehow feel enthroned,
two Jonahs dived into
to the whale to rule from there,
prince and queen of the
wide blue seas, not
prophetically diseased at all….

You know. Their laughter
became huge inside the
old tree’s hallow, rising
up the 3,500-year-old tree
like gods to broken heaven.
Already high for two days now,
lighting up inside that tree
was like lifting from its crown
the osprey angels of
the evernight.

It bothered her that
the tree’s gut was so dark;
so much so that she lit some
tinder piled up next to her
so she could light a pipe
then blow her toke-buddy
with eyes trained on
that godlike cock
harder and longer in
her desire than any
granddaddy of a tree.

Who knew the terrible
would thus transpire,
desire igniting flame,
become a first tree’s pyre?
Smoke failed to keep
her from finishing him off;
it was he who dragged
her by the hair out of the
tree as the damn thing
frothed infernal flame,
malevolent perhaps
to lower beings;

but meth’s amperage
is infinite, and whatever
gods she called on
from the belly of that tree
she mastered with a laugh,
spitting sperm on its trunk
and then shooting a few
pictures of her crime
with her cellphone.

That will show them
who rules who, she thinks
in exultation as they
through smoke and fog
out of the forest’s
rictus back to her car,
driving off to leave
the old tree slowly burning
up the ancient porches
of its core, the surrounding
trees appalled yet frozen
where they stood, unable
to help or flee or cry
but to the winding
sheets of fog, bladed
with smoke.

Taking a last toke
before firing up her car,
she looks on the sanctum
like prey or a lover she’s
goddam done with –
so much cooling meat.
To hell with you,
our Lady Jonah coos,
cocooned now in
the bottom of bottled abyss,
the burning queen of
an awful bliss
exhaling the pure smoke
of awfulness.

Sweet dreams she sings
to the forest elves
of the smoldering Valinor,
floating above their
wasted realm in the haze
of icy altitude. Ghostly
streetlights along the
empty road lead them
back to her friend’s trailer
where they’ll watch TV
and fuck until the dope
and its steel regime is gone.

That’s me! she shrieked
as they watched the news
about the cypress fire;
from the vantage of her buzz
it proved she was no
fleeing prophetess, no
Jonah of the addict wave
but the goddam whale
itself, bigger than any
old tree named for the
likes of her old man,
bigger than all the trees
from Disney World
to Tallahassee.

On her Facebook page
she posted Queen of Night!
beneath a picture of the
burning tree, sure that
some cable show would
call to develop a series
around her notoriety,
making her rich and spoiled
and as addled as the
long summer she will
spend adrift in a pink
inflatable raft on
shimmering pool-waters,
her yellow polka dot bikini
burning up the camera lens
with all her fuming holes.

Getting busted just
helped the cause,
igniting her fame’s face.
Half her legacy is now that fire,
sure to rake the big bucks now.

The other half’s a lacuna
in the choir of oldest trees,
an emptiness no
amount of meth
can requite or suspire.

We are this, the timbered
soulage sighs in fog:

What’s left of you.

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Submitted for Fireblossom Friday’s “Uniform Challenge” at Real Toads today.

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Notes:

- If you haven’t heard yet, a 26-year old Orlando woman was recently arrested for setting the Senator on fire in January while smoking meth with another devotee of darkness in its  hollowed-out trunk. She told authorities she had lit a fire from brush fallen there to better see the pipe she was smoking from, and things took off from there. Meth-smokers often engage in marathon sex, utterly aroused by the illusion of godlike power. You can read about it here.

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Meth addict and alleged tree-torcher Sara Barnes and the smouldering ruins of The Senator, formerly one of the oldest trees on earth.

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- The forest is elven heartland. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien’s vast dream of elfdom, was written between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; the manuscript was rejected his publisher because the elven language was so teased out that they felt no reader would ever be able to get their head around it. It was published posthumously in 1977. At one time Tolkein imagined the orcs of the Dark Lord to be elves who had been caught and tortured into those grotesqueries but later rejected the idea – how could a pure being become so twisted? Yet if you read about what crystal meth does to a human being, the original idea fits quite aptly.

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