allan

The soaring phallus that is British air got me into heathrow over an hour late, just in time to thwart my connecting flight to Rome, my connecting digits to christianes extremeties. Sitting right next to the wing, I was one of the fortunates poised to witness a bonafide lightning bolt hit the plane. My bursting enthusiasm for the girl must bide it’s time until Rome now, but fear not, for I have a whole 5 pound voucher to atone for the hassle, and that’s enough for porn.Track forward 5 minutes; the airport bookstore is bereft of porn, what happened to the permissive Europe I so cherish? Lickily, luckily the smoked salmon sandwich at pret a manger sliced diagonally looks and smells enough like a vagina to keep hope alive. And since there are 2 halves, that tantamount to threeway action. Hold the cream cheese, I’ll churn some of my own.I feel like weeping when I see her for the first time, resting against a pillar in the less than first world airport. We pass the turn towards the train, just as we did on our initial Rome adventure, and riding the escalator pressed together, I realize the customs official never stamped my passport. I am not here.

Bloody brilliant shoot of the immaculate Neil Gaiman and the silent but deadly Amanda Palmer, in New York for the eagerly anticipated Coihouse Magazine.  Both a treat, both so talented, I felt like a girl in petticoats kneeling before royalty.

just in time for Alice reimagined, I give the red queen an opportunity to exact her revenge.

The studio had no heating.  Blessed that I can still feel my fingers and toes.

too damn freezing to do much of any sightseeing, this is shot enroute to the studio.

Skin and Nina Kate turn twin and lubricate, much to the delight of my rampaging id.

I stupidly insist on an uninspired walking tour, the cost of which I almost instantly refund to christiane, after she is hauled up beside a squat roman mammoth squeezed out of a gladiator costume like a sweating hairy toothpaste. The building itself is so alarming in it’s elliptical glory, it look an usher in a laminated name tag to shoo us out at sunset. Dueling flocks of starlings undulate and sculpt in the stricken sky above the forum. Pizza becomes a thrice nightly excursion, and we run down a tavola said to have the best, south of ruin in the trastevere. It does, and my jetisoning waistline attempts to offset the weight of my camera and succeeds with this double offering to the pagan gods of prosciutto and cheese. Our waiter looks like a hippy Clive Owen.An opened window stirs the steaming viscera of newly slaughtered fuck.

there is such a thing as too much empathy and I’m a victim of it. In tolerable doses like a ligament that connects to other life, to people and planets, to love for a questing heron and pain for the fish it’s eating simultaneously. But it’s strength can become unbearable, an expanding gravitational well that pulls in all of the sister Pathos, until you suffer nothing for yourself. Your heart becomes a moon in orbit, creating tides inspiring the science and poetry in others, but barren and cratered, uninhabitable. Love the things you can touch more.

Our walk into the town past squat, shy cottages
Along a twine unwinding canal erupting spring and boat fuel.
Swallows tuck and skip nimbly like hollow bones
Against it’s surface
And the cries of distant peacocks
Like children pulled roughly from a sweetshop window.