Sunday, November 28, 2010

Vinyl

Plush, upholstered booths
Shadow the slender silhouettes
Of red-lipped mysteries,
Breathing smoke out of velvet cigarettes
And sipping liquid sex appeal
As if they’d been paid to photograph
Black and white –
Their fingers muse along
The ashes of a dark morning,
Their gaze slipping between ice cubes of ecstasy,
And down the throat of a jaded bartender
Who’s seen too many candles burn out to the night –
They seemed to own the place.

Raspy melancholy wraps its thorns around their heels
Like a needle digs into vinyl;
Jukebox violins begin to play
From the mouth of a mechanical change-purse
As midnight men reveal their faces
Under dusty luck and charm
To find that tonight won’t end
In placid conversation.

Finely woven legs uncross
One by one,
Sinking their toes into the tapestries;
Red and gold tassels
Wake writhing
From the unmistakable caress
Of illusive grace.
Stroking secrets from beneath the concrete floor
Like the satin touch of working sensuality,
They tease the nape of each habitué,
Willing to tempt himself
Of more than the regular invitation.

Their spirits seemed to do the talking,
Their clamour seemed to do the smiling,
And with rose-stem heels
Untangled from the weary threads
Of seamless mosaics,
Coupled legs slip out of stillness
To sway in musical time.


Hazy in smoke-filled attraction,
Their casual seductions 
Begin to rise above the nightly lyrical,
Stirring a lucent mystery
From the comforts of her plush aesthetics
And the debris of lonely red-lipped filters.

With a raven curl rolling loosely down her cheek,
She dips into the carpeted ceramic
To lift the needle off the vinyl

She did not want to dance tonight.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

sleeptalking

Fleeing time won’t end this fight
When you’re fishing for words in a desert well
Waiting for inspiration to bite
And nostalgia to lift its spell
So that the body can remedy
The drought of propensity
In its north to west trajectory.

Its scintillating circuitry
Reroutes of pasts and histories
What today’s weatherman cannot forecast:
A logic left to gypsies and barefoot arts,
Alleyway pocket change and lucky pennies,
Coups de cœur et coups de foudre,
To explain why our lips never move
As fast as our hearts.

We spin webs out of dreams
To slip under the silk
Of what unconsciously frees
The truth from its pages,
The mental manifestos
From their lofty cages,
This writer’s block from a canvas’ empty spaces –
Because falling asleep
Needs neither charm nor eloquence
To relieve the mind of its mysteries.

And so we fall in to feel free.

We fall asleep to create
Perfect dialogs of sentient intimacy
Where speech beguiles
Every bone in a frozen body –
It makes the blues blush silver
Under the moons of fairytale eyes,
And paints the shadows of their irises
With brush tip syllables;
All to let its nighttime creativity
Make us believe that we love better
In our imaginary.

Pixels of three
Weave their primaries
Around our artist dreams,
Our static screens of faded l-ve
That live lightless and silent
In unawakened vacancy.
But the dark can only keep us quiet for so long
So bundle up baby
And press your lips against mine,
You don’t want your words to catch cold tonight.