Val alerted me to the fact that a rough draft of the Song of Solomon has recently been discovered. This is evidently the version that was written when the collaborators were drunk, high, feverish, hallucinatory, sleep-deprived and suffering from concussions.

Here’s the King James Version of the Song, for those of you who need a refresher.

Got that? Now go here, and tell me that the excerpt shown [from the fantasy masterpiece by Ron Miller, Silk and Steel] is a nitrous oxide-inspired, modern-day rewrite of Solomon’s erotic poetry, extended to heretofore-unattained nadirs of metaphor so odd that they defy mental representation. Favorite parts:

"Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon." The moon does not smell like anything! It is in space, where there is no atmosphere to transmit molecules of scent to olfactory glands!

"Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips." As much as I like the concept of mouth as purse, the teeth=bracelet motif just ruins it. I assume she’s gnawing off her own hands.

"Her toes were snails, they were snails with shells of tears." Don’t cry, poor little snails. This description will be over soon. …Oh wait…it won’t? Never mind. Let me join you in your lamentation.

"Her buttocks were [three gratuitous similes]. They were a fist." So not only is she chewing on her hands, but she’s punching herself in the ass? Anything to distract from the mental anguish caused by these paragraphs, I suppose.

"Her nipples rose like mecury in her heat." Only people who have actual writing skill are allowed to make up words, and, even then, they can only make them up in contexts where the readers will have some idea of what the words mean. "Mecury" is not a word.

"Her pubes was a field of wheat after the harvest." Her verbs was incorrectly conjugated. [Best comment about this line from lizblackdog: "So, rat-infested stubble, basically."]