I’ve spent time with women behind bars,

prisons of relativity, inertial frames of reference, cell doors that swing both ways, impossible to know who’s free and who’s locked up, the men or the women. Like American football or Aztec ‘flowery’ wars staged only for the harvest of hearts, these showcase prisons are decorated with flowers and blinking lights, fields tilled till the till is fully filled and it’s time to call it a night. The fields are of oil and the bars line the streets where soldiers guard banks. The cells are birdcages, women singing for their seed and relieving men’s stress. In a reversal of Nature, the women sport the brilliant plumage to attract the opposite sex, and that they do. Culture compensates for Nature’s brilliant mistake. Islam would like to change all that, putting humans back in their place, putting women under the veil and the men behind bars. It’s all a matter of taste and negative space. All the time that I was talking to them and looking at them, I was really talking to myself and looking at myself, reflections of reflections in parallel mirrors. For the price of a drink, you can talk to a real live girl. For the price of a shrink, you can talk all night.