In the Dark

I’m not sure how it’s done. The opera’s already going
and I know nothing about the music let alone language
so I park my posterior under the Santa Fe stars, the only
sky for me, and dream I’m in Italy where my friends go
to die at home after visiting Venice. Where do I travel
but here? I need no more. It’s always past sundown but
raucously beautiful in its lunar vowels, meterotic, I mean
meteoric dipthong-defying consonants, and I am randy
at your side, you have more love than any woman ever,
and you’re no Cenci, more Shelley with her Frankenstein
creation, only it’s you you make delightfully and so fully
mine. I think it must be prearranged, these affairs of heart
quakes along the lifelines of both hands and all the body’s
raison d’etre, what some call love we name as our own
and isn’t it always like that? misunderstandings, loathing
where once love was laughter and shimmy and schadenfreude,
that shivery word that prickles the skin and sucks you off
soixante-neuf and how do I know when all I hear is operatic
promises in the dark, where the beauty is all between my ears
and if that’s lightning in the west prepare the body to be born.

(18 October 2010)