I thought it best not to pursue
the nature and causes of my illusions
when I discovered her in the mirror
behind the spirits in a stray cat jazz bar
- one where raucous chapters,
as if written by a feverish
film director, are captured
in the midnight hours by a single
wink of Kegman Kovacs,
crooked on his stool behind
his bandit register – her wide-eyed
glare was the perfect bromide
for this saloon thick with
the accents of moral dissolution:
she’d glimpsed some idyllic
future scene and the thought
remained flushed on her cheeks.
As the creator of this ideal
enlivened with eloquent details,
excerpts from classic fiction
(encouraging second guesses
from Pulitzer marksmen,
compelling in their list-making),
this glossy idol of bourgeois
abstraction feigning realism,
I choose a road that is straight
and narrow, I don’t even need
to determine the direction
I travel – I’m not going back;
She consistently suggests movement,
accompanied by a leitmotif:
the howling blast of a trumpet,
a complex enigma coded
by a triad of valves and the bitter
freedom of a private life
released from public silence.
All this time I accept
she is not next to me
but on stage, amber candent
bulbs warming her face.
The band is her gang:
a vicious platoon enlisted
as a tragic ballast drilled by a single
ambitious woman. An artist,
my essence in my creative capacity,
I hold no monopoly on integrity,
forgetting the monologue,
remembering only the speaker
from the imbecile chaos
of the boot-heel chipped oak floor.
We for the minute are her closest
friends like a chance collection
of driftwood, our scepticism
relinquished from our malt,
for our craving to believe
is desperate and deep.
We beg for reward
like the queue for a soup kitchen
and with just as much dignity.
She offers a flash of information
ripe with sexual suggestion,
the grand spectrum
from love to anger painted
with a vast collection
of colours. This sylph
singing for us, a siren on a cliff
ready to wreck our passing ship,
bewildered by the obscure guilt
of a burgeoning, heated affair,
defending herself
from token wisdom
with a sinister wit emanating
from behind the flash of her teeth
across a twelve-bar riff,
displaying the dagger
but masking its poisoned
flavour with the hilt
In a slow section she leaves a kiss
on the gauze of her microphone,
a blood red smear of lipstick
- she came to sing for them
but she dances for me, hanging
on behind her with my guitar
slung like a weapon.
Before we began she only gave
me a key and a couple clicks
for the rhythm.
My turn, I sharpen my razor wires
on each flinching hat,
a trembling ride, a nickel
wound shake to every kick
from the ground. There’s
alleyway justice in my screams:
a cut to the face if you stray
from your station, every time
I break rank I fear ambush at Cerriglio.
I dissect your mood for the crowd
and find a tune for the words
she couldn’t place but now
lie naked on my operating table.
Bleeding kohl down her cheeks
She smiles at me, having forgotten
the people listening unaware
of the true purpose of our plot.
In the atrophic night-time,
a bluesman hides between
hotel rooms under an assumed name;
a friend once removed
of Harriet Tubman, “You’ll
be free or die.” He mists
a pane to meet the gaze
of a supermodel’s hound
on the street below:
two orgiastic flashbulbs
over a set of opal barbs.
The illustrious are ushered in
as the midnight wind
turns cooked to raw;
an excessive saccharine
of single line anathemas
punctuate the eluting, grain liquor
payola correspondence of
the cerberi at the door, who
with each glance convict
me of loitering.
I elbow-pin the Herald
as a prop only, roll and spark
to employ the hands,
looking down, counting old gum.
They Zippo lick me with scimitar
eyes well drilled from working
the derby Switchboard.
To a scherzo laced with code,
we infect each other with smiles,
impersonal benevolence: an old-style
injunction now just a passing
trick glimpsing teeth.
I’m standing ad hoc,
antonym to this vulgar mode
and so attract the intentions
of the heaped obscenities
- one enormous flexing nerve
counting Houblons; their effluvium
smacks of it, spectres quickly
make them for tea, pectin,
dunking pound cake.
They got cured fitting last
winter’s coats and turning
out the pockets.
One gorged Boa says,
“Boy – you Kasey Jones?”
A fork to his wit, I return,
“The name’s Romano, relax
- I’m only here for the Jazz.”
“Drag about your Dad,
we’ve got what’cha need.”
The waitress thinks
I’m Omar Sharif minus mustache.
Singularly original, a sufferer
from the delirium of higher intelligence,
The Noir Balladeer calmly sits,
plays Rhapsody in Blue
on a comb and tissue paper;
an outpatient from the
mild deviant ward: sectioned
for incendiary poetry,
she wrote songs on her padded walls,
bade the multitudes get a grip,
amongst the tempestuous noises
of sadism in this sparking jive nexus.
Grab a ticket at the desk.
Dr. Cassis, a hollow-eyed
technician from the plague era,
operates here, a conscript pedlar
of syrup and pills to vexed
kinship systems long overdue
extinction: a shamski lawyer
of medicine, errand runner
at the Chaumière de Dolmance.
There’s a sharpening of vision
in his waiting room:
we’re drowners thirsty to our
last breaths, even the reptile
gamblers adopt the stoicism
of wage earners. We discard
our beliefs at the ballot desk
like heavy, plumed helmets
too hot to wear in the midday sun.
Cassis murdered his guides
to be on the safe side,
carved runes of aptitude
in every cubicle until recruited
to the court of the Rubix Queen.
Her Switchboard mechanism
is perpetual, manned out of habit,
implies its necessity
and so creates pundits and enthusiasts,
equally fecundates the angst
of bitter jetsam to its ascribed kismet.
As one of the Rubix Queen’s courtiers,
lost in spontaneous furies,
surroundings seem incidental;
I stretch wide my arms
as if to perform some kind of dance
- perhaps among the antebellum pillars
of disgrace this desperation will fade.
Now, for the first time,
this protagonist can be spared
tedium and relish scandal in her
high-society supporting cast
of refugee artmen, never redden
again in shame when mentioning
the considered prurient in front
of those too desensitized
by talcum to welcome pleasures
stoked close to core desires,
forget axioms and tenets drummed
into her when she was young and Christian.
Some new lover will glide
into bed like a moonbeam
and I will accede entirely,
consumed by the immediate,
no thought to consequence
- tragedy rewards so the immortal
may die, a comedy is torn:
no audience laughs at the same joke
twice – my mind skips as of
a man bred in the wild,
every obstacle met in silence;
only with the caballi
will I produce ravings
of the most obscure kink.
In the thrill of lovers’ gambit
my watch trips backwards
and a casket of weakness
is exposed, drawing with it
an unctuous sickness,
irresolvable in my discomfort,
as when I thought it ruminative
for great heroes to die young;
one of mine said everybody does.
Some lives cuff out as
mis-quotations of popular phrase,
The Colonel’s was one to glimpse
the truer scansion of the iambic universe,
his history spelt out in short, dim
telegrams like the subject of myth.
always fearing to awaken and find
himself dead, he advised, “Kiss the girl
next to you, take upward flight,
forget the cold outside.”
To each charge I show
a new side to my prism,
a simple note in the margin
of a newspaper column.
maybe, like him, one night
idle love will conspire a razor’s
whisper around my throat.
