Spinning out,
the wheels burn against my skin…
flesh erupts and carries blood
to golden secretaries in the sky,
their bouffant hairdos gleam against the sun.

Rings of flame,
a shot past this:
I hike up my skirt,
tighten my stockings,
flip a book of phosphorescent matches
from my garter into hand…
the pedestal grows and grows.
I thumb make-up away from my one
slanted, six-foot, plastic eye.

A world man burst up with brain
shudders as he grabs at a stray breast.
A bullet slips between his twin hearts,
and now I’m trying to erase disposal
from my conscience.

You didn’t see it coming,
even when the sirens shrieked down,
lips blue and flapping with blood.

The train kicks up a spark of disappearing light,
the porter closes down the oven too late…
a bullet whistles between my eyes,
motion, this hand to luck and fortune,
beneath a Catholic bed,
beneath a secretary giving head,
beneath a God-given A-frame,
beneath pine-driven forest skies
(your own acreage on an L.A. close lot)
beneath a Hollywood newsstand
after the call goes out,
beneath a missed opportunity
that costs you your sunglasses while in exile
hot pants to crack the skull.

She can’t escape,
she meaning I, from the private world,
she meaning I, from a lover drunk
had a smoky den of shaking heart,
the joint a ‘shakin’,
moving part concave, part just black hole
and a lack of relativity…

Planets blur against a universe
of the lipstick-smeared mirror,
loss of self-confidence
and no train of thought…
she meaning I, in a caboose
of lurid, pumped-up introspect,
trade paper phallus,
stairway to black sky,
she meaning I, clapping her hands
for the Pyramid-leap,
legs spread-eagled on glass floors;
the deafening blast heals the heart,
raises sight out windows of my confused brain…

chalk on the sun-ban,
gas-charged and delayed
from a rusty hot spring ring,
the link with the corpse,
a quizzical kill-woman,
a blow off the fraction it takes
to visit royal and flushed with dog-heat,
a menstrual delusion,
a continual derision,
a meaningful profusion…

she meaning I, in a catatonic headstand
against an unsympathetic…


 

copyright,  © 1989, 2008 Chris Desjardins pka Chris D.

composed circa 1975-78; originally published in DOUBLE SNAKE BOURBON, reprinted in A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE.    

A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE is an epic, career-spanning anthology of Chris D.'s writings, published by New Texture. Buy it here.