two decades of calling to the muses of love and bliss
The hesitance won’t stop my lumps from becoming horns.
With horns, my third eye gets swallowed up
and sinks back into the recesses of self-conscious predilection.
The devil may care, but demons are more palatable-
jazz animals with no kin nor faith.
Homemade juxtaposition sauce
with sizzling sirloin lizards
on a side of soft shell spankings.
Roast prime devil, venous green salad,
subdural hem-sho; beatnik don’t know.
Meet you in your room at half past
pluming pummels. Plum-laced perfect!
April 2004
Golden serpents reflect clouded aspirations
and dilute enlightenment into dust.
Unicorns on tap,
degenerate horns the same.
Duality collides in foam,
and crystal line faithfully follows.
Red, green, white, brown,
color without ground.
Gold label wishes spawn corporal delight.
I sip, I think.
Tequila drains and I sink
under watchful bartender’s watch;
he barters, I the martyr.
Empathetic refills offer buoyancy,
offer logistics to linguistics.
There, climbing golden towers appear
where snakes once sputtered,
powdering their scales, exfoliating our fear.
Delicious venom lacquers the runway,
eyeballs dash around.
Slithering tongues caress my shoulders;
nub of wing, stub of horn.
Gory gamblers
slap the dice down
for a joint in a snifter.
And for under-the-table tricks, little known
are the New Zealand drifters, the British bombers not quite,
our randy kicks ‘n’ their swingin’ misters,
all convened here in one Portuguese night.
How now, the Castilian escapists, the dance floor rapists,
and somehow, Gypsyified me.
Blarney revelers need not apply.
At the tip of essential Iberia.
June 2002
Winding nights of life infuse our burgeoning blood
with confounded needs and unfounded insecurities.
A neat titration yesterday,
dripping sapphire desire into fidele base.
Tonight magenta clouds bubble through
my cylinder, begging for mutation, for your beaker of molten jazz
to saturate, adulterate, reiterate our implicit bondage.
June 2003
Painting by Randall Paul O’Rourke