Ladies in Transition: Prey

My feet killed me today, as I walked the city, searching for a goddess

...what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

~ Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"

I know little about America, I'm no Walt Whitman, but I do know something about the scowl of Charon, and the manner in which it rotates one's eyes back from the darkness to the light of the agalmic entity that I've posted at the head of this ... A sweet Venus, born without luck, as if such a thing exists ... A sweet Venus, one with whom I could vociferate like a loquacious bore about Bach and the atonalism of Schoenberg. Perhaps she would smile and embrace me, or else walk away with a smirk ... Either way, I would be living. I'm not living now. I'm a silent form frozen in a monument of sluttish time. But I'll tell you this: Life won't let me go. I'm engaged and enraged and plagued by the very air I breathe. I'd like to pass into the other realm, but I know it doesn't exist. My Venus is out there, writhing in liquid ... It would be too lame to say it's my tears. Ha! Again: Do you exist, my angel?

Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my angel?

~ Ginsberg, ibid.