| Inside a Hand Basket in the Burlesque Theater
As you may already be aware, the Burlesque Theater is upon us, and the granite-encased monoliths of your muscular legs drilled to the sides of the stage are as tall as you are tall between them. They are your legs after all, and Victorian women know it, and advanced syphilis knows it, and the shining temples of the man rubbing pistachios on his suspenders know it’s impossible to avoid the thought of steam beer and a cast-iron stove to read by whenever they are easily distracted. You have never been more happier to be more astonished that those are your legs and those are people too who know your legs more than two people of Moorish personages peopled through twin Moroccan peepholes. Those are your legs, and all it took was a little foresight to realize you couldn’t stay in an Extravaganza forever where performers only act as if they’re acting, they only think to use French obstetrical atlases for all kinds of padding, and they only use their hands and eyes to convey the limits of one’s scope at arm’s length. But you, in your hand basket, use your hands and eyes as if you are signaling in the great conversion from stage lights to sun to lizard skin able to keep what it needs from its past to independently use all of itself until the crowd feels this potential of crests and spines as their own, even in the dark. You, who are flanked by your old legs that all agree are the only lines you’ll ever need, scream about marble statues and how they should never come to life because they’ll never enjoy it unless they can have it both ways, and your song is witchery embroidered in aurora bands of sequestered dusk for this night only and tomorrow too. But the big difference is there is a purpose, three-fold, peculiar, salient, the mesmeric pull of leg and leg and basket commanding all, seducing all, until all comes together in grand separateness, and no pantomime had to translate how it felt the first time you didn’t feel alone outside yourself, perfect and imperfect the crowd clapping singly with the drollest hearts and limbs of leg. |