Vol VI: Hot Mamas and Little Gangstas

Bunny Slippers

I ditched my blind date
a girl named "Cinderella Spice"
from TurnaroundVirgins.com
for a trip to the bar
where this black dude
with green contact lenses
and combat jacket
was selling blue-ray porno flicks
at a discount.
At home, watching the chick
through the V-shaped space
between my cold feet. She refers
to one breast as "Moonwalk"
and the other as “Billy Jean”
and then looking directly at me
says how lonely she is
since her man left her
for some “ugly bitch”
who lives in bunny slippers.

Wishing You Were Here

And I don't know why.
It was never much of anything-us.
Haploid suns and endless days
nothing really with a name
the way we acted
like two Russian prisoners
between cold alabaster walls
only our crime was not political
but existential.
I took your existence for granted
my words, carelessly thrown darts,
you, a melting target
your wounds grew
to floating icebergs
until the blue silence of winter
almost drowned us
and only one of us
made it to the top,
while the other
the one who lives at the bottom of the sea
teased by shafts of dazzling lights
wishes you were here.

The Polio Victim and the Fuzzy Haired Girl with the Gap Tooth Smile

He took three sugar pills and a blue one
that would alleviate the unbearable lightness
of anxiety.

In the wheelchair, she undressed him, slowly,
very slowly, as if one wrong move
could kill them both
or make them repent forever.

She was his nurse's aide, the home health
thing on weekends. He was so needy
obsessed with the nude girls
in Kokoschka's drawings.
She, on the other hand,
fell in love with blue seashells
that were his eyes, then, the sea itself.
Not his legs or arms that were so skinny,
wasting, sickly. In some sense, he became her prisoner
and she became the scatter-brained guardian
of his broke broke gingerbread man body.

Standing over him, she exposed her breasts.
Are you okay? she said.
Yes, he said
as if his eyes would no longer droop

Or his mouth would never twist
from the body's urgent misspellings
for synonyms of movement,
as if anterior horn cells
could become horny with new life.
She smiled.
She smiled as only the moon
on a dizzy surreal summer night.
Like at a drive-in. Or a small town in Texas.
She smiled knowing full well her boss would fire her
if the heat leaked out of this room.
She would not be threatened.
The world so full
of polio victims.

Removing her panties,
lifting up one creamy
thigh after the other,
the color of seashells,
she fell into her own disease
and not being Jonas Salk
she wished for the both of them
a cure.

The Violet Lemurs of Kilimanjaro

If you believe that Mrs. Finch,
now institutionalized at the other side
of Golden Knot Hill,
once had a fantastic pneumatic
robot lover
who never needed batteries
or that your Uncle Fletcher,
just home from a soul-twisting
toupe-raising safari,
had seen three violet lemurs
upon Kilimanjaro
tossing figs
mock Hemingway
in bizarro sign language;
then, philosophically speaking,
you're also the type
who would put his ear
next to the old drywall at night,
and listen to your granny,
the one who lives in her pajamas
and the memory of her first
glorious marriage
to an Ichibod or a Zachariah,
take a stab at the kazoo,
or your granpa
still fighting
someone else's war
on horseback
and with saber,
whose straw pipe can double as a whistle,
calling all the logical chickens
to come home to roost.

The Neo-Hegelian Outlook #9

When Spring collapsed into Flat light
into the wisps of summer refusing
to suffocate under its own weight,
I cut each wrist with broken glass,
something whole I once drank from
when I was young
when I was a god
so gleaming in my suburban lust,
so forgiving of my cheesy
and moldy cross-eyed lovers,
on Sundays
they would poison me
with glazed ham
those saw-tooth cuts
and their tasteless
transparent blood.
I ate and drank
until we almost died
dying
keep dying
and it was no longer summer.

Lazarus

Now
with summer falling back
into four equidistant corners
the hush of mothers
who've given birth to alien longings,
these strange ships
that drift into port
without captain or crew,
the girl made of orange dust
and curving linears
tickles my fancy,
revives me with the thought of life,
what it was once to be,
approaching me
in the nether shades of dusk,
she says:
You can't touch me
but in this ever-distance,
you can love me
or try
try,
and in this way
some part of you
will rise again.

Santayana Plays Guitar Upstairs

I'm sitting at the window
waiting for the world to end.
Everyone who passes by--
the girl next door with her sweet butter smile
and shaggy coats,
her fly-mysterious existence by noon,
my father who plants new parts in antique Fords
on Sundays, but who can never recall
the woman who spurned and numbed him,
a Ninja fleeing into a starless night,
the same Ninja who gave me birth
but not the right,
the Russian lady two blocks down,
who suspects every man is a sailor
and sooner or later,
the winter will lock each
at her Odessa port.
Or  the ex-newscaster
who still pronounces Taiwan
as "Formosa Betrayed"
who has only her Persian
and seven brands of orange Pekoe tea
to blame--
each carries within
an atomic time bomb
and the decoder
to dismantle it.
I strongly suspect
we will all die together.

But upstairs Santayana plays guitar
even though none of his biographers
ever mentioned it.
I imagine it a Spanish guitar
of ebony wood
and his voice is a deep rich baritone.
Who knew that Santayana could sing?
It's our secret.
He sings about a girl he once knew
back in Valencia
and how he gave himself
to animal instinct
but lost himself to the Essence
of being human.
He died but kept walking
trying to make sense of what
he could neither keep or understand.
By the end of his song,
I understand how his world had ended
or how even in the world's busiest cafes
he remains a recluse.

When the world ends,
the sky will open up like a mouth
and the wind will swirl
in shades of black dust,
limpid memories
as if to say:
How silly you all have been.
I am so simple, just the wind,
yet, I will remain
and you will not.

But for now,
Santayana plays guitar upstairs
and when the girl next door
returns home from wherever she's been,
I will knock on his door
and hand him my father's old silver dollar
the one my mother had given him
before she turned into a nuclear wind,
one I promised him
I wouldn't trade for anything
in the world.

The Rape Kit 

3 a.m. in the ER 
just me and a cursing drunk 
with purplish nose and missing dentures. 
The rape kit involves three tubes of blood, 
swabs and slides. 
The pelvic exam makes me hurt 
all over again. 
My body, a mirror of evidence, 
I'll never wipe off. 
I'm trying to remember 
German declensions 
and the name of the teacher 
who taught me Latin conjugations. 
My jaw is stuck. 

Grandfather 

He falls asleep on the toilet. 
He loves kids but not the noise. 
At night, he locks himself 
in the old bathroom, 
and not the newly remodeled one. 

Me, the little girl 
he talks about in his sleep, 
holding me, 
all of seven years 
and still growing 
a crown of paper roses 
and beehive of temptations 
not the woman 
who has stopped growing 
in any direction 
but sideways. 

At night
I knock 
telling him to unlock the door, 
or I'll huff 
and puff 
and blow his paper house down.