Tender is the Flight

We don’t really have to remember what’s sketched in below a moon that’s always full like the parking lot at Paradise where we could skim a few pesos off the top if we weren’t on the bottom punching in a PIN code that rhymes with luck but can’t keep the wheels of darkness from burning rubber down the deserted highway that tears right through your soul.   Anyplace more or less like the other although I prefer sealevel & a place to park my books.   So it was, & may be again, as I knuckled under “The Poems” & accepted the camouflage provided by a handful of glassy eyes.

That distance held in place with duct tape & string could for an instant be spanned by a phrase, so measured, in its time.   With what weariness hath given, neatly hidden behind midnight shades, to slip so effortlessly through the security checkpoint & move freely within an alien nation.   “Just keep your shit together & wear matching socks,” someone said, “& you can go anywhere.”

In the smoking lounge barroom, beneath the giant flatscreen, I lit up another nail & ordered another beer.   Behind me a couple of country western roadies discussed sound mixing & The Tonight Show.   I smoked & drank & waited.

All dramatics aside the pink velvet & tornado warnings & Han Solo rainwater with a morphine drip

              She sings the music
                              tapping a saltwater mirror
              keeping time like an abalone pearl
                                                between her breasts

& with stunning indifference then, where I might cast the glance, giving each winged visitor a name appropriate, or stagger the session accordingly, to sequential fits & rumors.   Life underwater as seen through seaweed & a pair of drugstore sunglasses anticipating a velvet mirror fadeout with that number 4 expression on your face & those empty swimming pool eyes like six pound shadows.