Notes on Breaking and Entering

You’d confiscated my key

so I climbed the drainpipe;

pulled pork, beets and brandy – I dined

well with the folk inside. With all that whisky

spilt down my shirt I couldn’t sit right.

I brought you wine and flowers;

your hound helped tear the trousers

from my legs. While he and I

were making friends, I found

myself chained to the radiator,

with a pair of silver bracelets

that match the drill sergeant’s

epaulettes – he was braced

against the wall, searching

for the alca-seltzer, pawing

through the kitchen drawers.

While a preacher at the faucet

claimed he was pouring holy water,

in the war room your butler

played checkers and a marching

band circled the dining table

breaking tea-cups and jesters

take the minutes of this farce.

All these itinerants were kept raving

by a the extenuations of an alleyway

medicine tradesman prescribing

alcohol for their sores. Offering

to waterboard me at no extra cost,

your lawyers billed the standard fee:

they’d smelt blood playing Double Dutch

underneath the hanging tree.

I wouldn’t’ve guessed I’d be

contested for your lionized

affections – I’d sooner be rid of you

than a pack of hungry dogs;

even with my dying cough I’d rather

roll between the stables,

with your vaudeville chicks painted

head-to-toe, bathed in laughter

and without their clothes.

A Cold Reflection

A cold reflection on a mirror pavement wet with rain,

I wink my violet eye,

My collar high against the wind.

A dried out roll-up on an empty stomach;

Any comfort, as I roam the streets.

A willing conscript to sign in rhesus positive

For some fleeting belletrism,

I chase the success envy believes me to be,

Like a marionette without strings,

Drowning in this lazy river

Of tepid ink.

A heartbeat flicker like a wasp in a jar:

An alternatina teenager

In tyrannic nothing-dresses.

I court a frankenstitched friendship,

kiss her sweet-sweat neck

She somehow avoids arrest.

The laughter of sidemen from behind their instruments

As i consult the haruspex;

I suggest the motions of a wanderer;

Any disproportion of whisky could kill me,

Waiting in half-assumed stances.

Some miracle of adhesion:

I watch the shirt buttons strain across her bust.

I prefigure my hands in frustration

My guts in a twist

As trying to turn a needle inside-out.

Pin-stripes on all sides as two colts climb

Through ten paces;

I flash a bruised smile

Flip a table smashing glasses left and right.

I raise my .38, plug one through his leg,

He falls to the floor,

another in his chest,

So he knows he’s finished.

Sharp Noir (Part V)

Rubix reported a lingering dread

- an idiosyncrasy of this particular

model, although a noble sentiment –

filed undisclosed natural causes;

we all know what that means.

They’ll gibbet Cassis as an example

for striking pins at this level:

life isn’t all beer and skittles

when dealing decks a fatality situation.

Alone in a hotel room,

a light whisper of a night-train

flutters just above the roof,

taps enough to imply the wind

and talk of the sea it’s from.

Picking at the nightmares between

reality and dream, Cassis, half-

sitting, may become a regular

footnote stranger, dissolving tears

in alcohol to avoid making a scene.

Havoc has been wrought

on his midbrain by alternating

sedatives and stimulants.

Rolling up the tag like

a little newspaper, reining in

a bucket from a mossed well,

Noir retrieves a teabag

from Cassis' mug.

We imagine the procession:

two files like heavy curtains

breezing each other

as the mourners wobble

in their short, slow steps;

Rubix smoking because,

like most actors, she knows

not what to do with her hands.

In our darkest reflections, of love and death,

our thoughts are potent with the Colonel.

Sharp Noir (Part IV)

Noir’s father was a neighbourhood

mensch and Machiavelli

of phonebooth and pocketbook,

“Surrendering his wealth,

he followed the Colonel,

rolled heads at The Palace

(Before Rubix) but left us

without notice one night

as we slept,” – his calls blocked

as his friends stopped turning

up for work, their absurd

time-cards gone, their letters

cropped; at their doors

he’d morse’d dead knocks

and uttered dusty whispers

into lobby tin-speakers.

“His documents, photographs

we had to burn; medals

in a tin buried beneath

a birch by the railway

bridge to the steel mill;

I’m a girl fixing the memory

of a long line of railmen.”

The Balladeer cuts an expression

into her harmonica and begins

to play with messianic hint;

the milieu echo Cecil B. DeMille’s

name in the realm of question;

with the roseate breath in her lungs,

she appears to paint freely with

the caustic saloon air.

The mass of canines without

eyes in front, dripping entropy,

produced from the bar

on some vast Martini loom,

swarm to her like flies

to the sweetness of rotting fruit.

Dusted by a pollen of kisses,

lovers stretch gratitudes

toward mistaken donors, create

illusions later perceived false.

A stewardess hands out scented towelettes

to mop our cephalic sweat

(not a flicker of interest

across her vampirically pale

features). Appearing in seriatim,

sciatic dancers null our osseous pains.

The green pharisees turn and run

to The Juke but he’s wreathed in love.

His body speeds, all bravado,

feet barely beneath him,

the slender amandus dynamos

around her, lashed by pinball

awareness, running wild and bold

- a distracted chatelaine failed

to tether this restless colt.

I’m tipping brown sugar

in a filter coffee, sighing

at a saucy type in a fur collar,

as some of the crowd begin

to fumble for their chalk,

pull at ties, palm their lips aghast,

become fixed in poses

stricken for no purpose.

The Juke on the floor:

three bullets sewn through

his chest – he wouldn’t

have died in the matinée show.

He really makes mosaic

of the music box he was

leaning against as Noir

pulled bashfully at her dress.

Rubix claps the revolver

into Cassis’ hands and

everyone knows it was him.

Troubles not original

in these parts, the paranoiac

revelers, the pleasure sucked

from them, become

brainless insects, delve

into the battle waged

knowing nothing of the aims;

as a general is forever

enacting stratagems

from the previous war,

I pluck Noir and Dr. Cassis

from the vibrissae

of the dimensionless beast;

we hide among the pixie women

in the street selling trinkets

ankle deep in peduncles

and hat ribbons, waving feathers.