All the while she stalked and serenaded me with a phantom torch tune that I’d coined so long ago, honey lamenting the lachrymorose riff of my torch hymn ‘The Girl You Left Behind’ and she claimed it as hers by the satanique shimmer of my black stockings, lily fragrance and sorceress’ candles .
And I held on to that song like a lost lover’s memento, a scapula en-knotted, giving me holy water and hope but chokin’ me also.
She, this Shadow Bride, would usher forth on the chain-draggin’ melodies that cranked out of a trashcan jukebox, inveiglin’ me thru the gaseous whirly colours, into my neon haven.
And there she took on the doppelganger images of swing sisters and dead Hollywood sirenes… Lupe Vélez, Nita Naldi and Rita Hayworth, femme fatales and Black Dahlia doppelgangers, all women to whose heels I had once paid penance.
She flitted thru broken cabarets that I too haunted, and her hell raven curves would curse, peeka-booin' out of the slits of Chanel A-line skirts, her garter-belt sling shotting sexual innuendo, with her orbs materialising out of the diamond cat eyes from the back of her black- seamed Schiaparelli stockings, hypnotise hissin' me a route 666 to my yet unrealized hell...
© JIMMY VARGAS 2000 / 2011
From his multimedia dvd / E-Book
“MY SHADOW BRIDE
“MY SHADOW BRIDE
Photo: Czerny / Vargas
