In Paul's Room

What. IS. Left.

I’m sitting in Paul’s room, knees up, eyes like confetti filaments

The shades in this clockwork room itching at half-mass

Starving for light, for color, for the palpable echo of the scented sun

And I’m rolling my aluminum heart in my gloved hand

Desperate for some nitroglycerin to get these veins gunning

Like a Tokyo chase scene at midnight down a freeway dipped in tar, grease, and engine blood

Or the hay-maker finger of a fat priest who’s made it a cacoethes

To underline Leviticus in flesh but superimpose it with scythe reason at one hundred knots

One hundred butterfly knots every bloody time the second hand kicks a body off a bridge-

 

A body off a bridge…

 

-Does it tumble like a memory?

 

-Does the black water swallow it like a dream?

 

Does it matter…

 

                        Could it matter…

           

            Do we-

Matter…

 

An ex-Libertine sits in the corner

A moldy leather bible with a rubber neck sticking out of his cord pocket

The same wormwood-colored bible his grandfather used to trench coat the devil

To keep his affair letters, his Scarlett letters, the ghost of His Dark Lady- hidden

Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and the portrait of Thecla

The same red letters his son finds in an old salt chest in the attic

Under the war medals and pressed Gentile palms

Attempting one cognac eve to f**k it all with sobering flames

But every match in the box breaks off at the thumb

Leaving him exposed to the elements, to the pain of permanence

And the inevitability of what was

The carnivorous rot that ushers in the Belvidere of past ghosts and lions

Who can’t be erased, or forgotten, like tears, like stains on a soiled Sunday dress

And I am left… in parcel… in ash… in eraser shavings…

The shadow, the puddle, the coal bit of he who is

Left to ponder, to ponder, to ponder-

 

WHO AM I?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

 

Or what-

 

And does it- could it- would it-

                                   

                        Ever.

            Matter?

 

My conscious is to god as the weathered dame is to mother

 

For She is there-

 

The palsy girl duck-taped to the fly trap of her wheel chair

Being hushed by a crazed mother with Draconian windows for eyes

Intent on saving her from the dark side of the moon

By flooding her lungs in the autumn ocean-

 

And so:

Sandcastles slip into the sea eventually…

Eventually…

 

“Poete maudit?”

 

It must be French for a*****e.

I am.

Whatever.

Drop the bomb down the well and save the wish for the dead children.

 

“The poet is a madman lost in adventure.”

 

Verlaine, you carpel tunnel potato skin sob

With your litmus paper Hell’s Kitchen kamikaze self

Climbing into the barrel of a volcano to melt you down, melt you down

Damn you

Damn mortality

Save me first

Come with me

To celebrate the highball party where I lean against soap masks

Under a banner in mean Calibri- ‘Welcome to the Machine’

And give me in Cechetti lessons

Do show me where the pointe shoes grace the page

So that I may join Actaeon on the gallows floor in the fandango of dead luck

Of dead luck

Presiding over, under, within, without

No manners, no manners, no manners-

 

(and)

 

DAMN THE CONSCIOUS SALT AND SUGAR SHAKERS WHO HOLD HANDS

HOLD HANDS

HOLD HANDS

And what… fandango?

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

The ruin of Peten. 

The ruin of man.

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

 

Don’t they know?
Sandcastles slip into the sea…

Eventually…

Eventually …