Sunday, June 21, 2015

Where the Tropics Begin

  
            I met my love in a place I respected
  Where the music was timeless and the cover invisible
  And secluded enough from ephemeral thunder
  It was just down the street from Concupiscence Corner
  Where you paid one cover and maybe another
  For the fleshfires nestled in everything ribald
  Where genuine beauty was scarcely detected
  We met where the channels were unencumbered 
  I knew it for certain that time by the car
  A face in a transient cluster of stars
  Like the effortless motions she used to tend bar
  A stunning meditation in film noir

            She took me to a dive in Quotidian Square
  A hairy banana farm under the stairs
            In the sordid plunges of shadow beguiling
  And I crawled like a roach under cracks in the tiling
  When the man she had loved like a working class mother
            Emerged from a counterintuitive vapor
            But the graces that won her felicity then
            Could never have sway in her oceans again
  And she whisked me away on a roller skate of sin
  To a little red guest house where the tropics begin

            In the same open spaces where the egrets were seen
            And the creatures of balmy viridian dreams
            In the fertile penumbras of trivial things
            I was stricken with an awe that perpetually sings

  In the cotton candy winter she was still hot for teacher
  And the sugary fluff that was holding him together
  The weather permitted as the air became sweeter
  And they garnered complaints from the downstairs neighbors
  In the sweet old condos that lay by the water
  Where the possums and foxes came out from the flowers
  And she left him her eyeliner printed on the covers
  To keep as a somewhat thorny reminder
  She had moved a little further from the last time around
  To a villa where she lived with the queen of the town
  But on tentative jetties she would still let me in
  To the little red guest house where the tropics begin

  In the world of remainders I have addict behavior
  And I spend my nights wading in a facebook of strangers
  I know she’s among them but I’ve already maimed her
  And I doubt she’d accept my request if I asked her
  So I guess I’ll remain a regrettable chapter
  But I still feel stricken with a ponderous dagger  
  And tied to the relics of a cardinal winter
  And I find myself longing to go back as a friend
            To the little red guest house where the tropics begin