Naked

This comic strip stretches (out of sweater, out of tshirt underneath) five panels, a quick succession, as our hero moves through clothing and emotions--note the lines and divots on his face--to achieve a place called naked.  Here is the variation on the daisy chorus:  Pride, Shame, Pride, Shame, Pride, I mean shame as the last of my petals falls to the ground.  This process, disrobing, when witnessed by another or by others, on a beach or in an orgy, takes on the entire weight of self, and the tense tearing of the self apparent contradictions that those less intimate would never know...

but we know.  We know every mole.

I pose nude at the center of a circle of easels.  Frozen in place, I am scanning a skyline of scaffolding.  Awkwardly exhuberant, this gesture will be impossibly painful to hold,  and difficult to draw.  The foreshortening will warp my outstretched arms and then emasculate me.  

Imagine a nude Jesus, wobbley on his own two feet, in a cotillion of crosses.  These are ringed by the artists.  A variety of types:  dillentantes with their biases, the pretentious young talking, always talking--as if talking could actually achieve these metaphorical dissections of meaning, and then of course their were the Bohemians and their dope.   

Already done judging the students, I set about judging myself.  And in that hour of shivering self-consciousness, my head cocked like a hat is learning the topography of my left shoulder.  There exist geologic consistencies to be considered.  Is this a vote against evolution or is this a vote against God?   I can see my pulse at the crux of my elbow.  It is where the spring breaks the placid surface of the lake.

My skin is paper.  Each one of the twelve is writing on me, interpreting my language into their own, each artist colonizes the model's skin with the weedy garden of words.  Fallen stars are scattered on my shoulder, black or brown, the burnt out embers--and they form a constellation.

"What is it called?"

"What? the constellation?"

"Yes.  What is it called?"

I am on a break, appropriately stiff and sticky with my dense internal dialogue. "More to the point, 

What is it supposed to be?"

"Its called, 'the net'," I offer with unsupported authority.  I have decided that the dozen plus moles on my shoulder suggest two interwoven grids.  They are not exactly straight.  In fact these nets follow fluid lines.  They are submerged under the water.