I
I much enjoyed the leather demoiselles,
their streetwise riffs somebody else’s lies.
The blouse of their boyish prey keeps their knees from the damp.
Fling the key under the bed and leave by the window.
Tires racket through gravel then hiss through the first slick of rain.
I remember a photo, pinned above the cot.
Somehow, somewhere, someday, she too will remember.
II
Department store windows reflect back the cloudless skies,
empty as a sphinx’s memorizing eye.
In theaters spotty with lonely perverts,
she has summoned up demons.
The disappeared comfort of her laughter, echoing off public tiles.
In storefront windows, cheek to jowl
with famished available strangers.
I was deaf to hippest trends, the pharmacy
athrong with holiday liars, truth serums filled while one waits.
Jilted for a pocketful of hoarded black beauties,
dissolving between cheek and tooth.
III
Up an imperial cascade of shell-shocked marble
a tomcat tremolos his lovesick medley.
Downtown, domed with blue. The pickpockets
are mostly girls these days, serious as fuck-all.
A black Labrador lopes the park’s gregarious perimeter,
brown eyes searching what his grandmother sought,
unblemished beauty in the refracted turn of his head.
A refugees’ park, where no one quite belongs
but privacy is sacrosanct. Dumbing bluebells
moronize, their patience tested with bowdlerized
postcards and the frosty menus of prostitutes.
Colonia dusted with white, gutters streaked
with detergent, air oddly chillier on the sunlit lawns.
IV
Blue-white chattering sidewalk,
seen through suburb’s slit eyes.
The city’s soma perfumes the mainline.
Contracts drawn up in a languid, air-
conditioned afternoon are signed in lust’s
urgent affirmative spend.
And her, the upstairs harlot’s soundalike?
Fleas leapt the red windmill to a honeymoon’s
orchestral debaucheries.
Who was she, is she, yearning to betray?
All those who seek her out.
Why then, did I ask after her address?
Suave as magnet tonic?
Vices, tearooms, carousels.
Who’s more shrewd for choosing?
Stay quick, dear hours.
V
The fog which catacombs at shin-height
dampens the high-heeled approach,
its sinister invitation. Her reappearance,
the freckles of her adultery,
they sniff a scandal on her breath.
The groaning trolley shrieks its white electric leash,
whips curbside in a backwash of mud.
The gendarmes shear through pools
of diluted mercury, scattering the hordes
of commuters, warning shots the rarest
of rare concessions. At parade’s end
(sleeving her bills, holding both my hands)
our separate disappointments lent smalltalk
a sweet dram of dignity, oddly-angled affection.
VI
Down a medieval crosshairs of mildewed stone
an infidel Siamese gutters its 16th-century cry.
Delicious purgatorial blue, trembling girl
dreaming of perpetual rain, memory
clouding my tongue. I dream,
transcendent with melancholy, waiting out
her hilarities of womanly introspection.
Pollen, curry on cat whiskers,
the moment when light pauses at the windowpane
as if making up its mind.
A forbidden thought in slow exposure,
shy as a starshaped birthmark below the bride’s eye.
VII
Kimonoed in a blaze of alcohol,
strangers couple as prelude to
shaking hands, speaking their
pretended names. Happy Hour
coincides with the guilt-ridden
afterwards, the hotel bar caters
to their sinslick souls. Separate
cheques, separate drinks, separate
kingdoms, rich with fantastic silence.
VIII
Blood smeared on glass slides,
doubt abandoned like a discount lover.
The drowned woman’s wig,
where stars are puddle-mirrored
to spastic waterbugs.
The streetplans of her lover’s neighborhood,
etched in her brain.
Denounced by the snitch of pastel
grown-up words.
I will cut my losses,
scratching the password in pidgin
code and exiting via the entrance,
condemned to boredom’s life sentence.