smack at the intersection of an upright
piano a taxidermized swordfish & a rack of pool balls exploding
like a basket of rotten fruit
1 of those joints that’s crawling with axolotls &
lobotomized sombreros
& a dozen Hummels in need of a lithium script
Rita looked irrationally lovely too
like a pair of cat’s eye sunglasses worn lopsided
by a bruised columbine sprouting in a junkyard
I don’t doubt she had her troubles Existence
determinism & eyelids held open with
needles in the orange a m It’d get here
someday she looked sad as a
napkin pink lipstick’s smeared across & under that anti-freeze green
& conjunctivitis pink bird-of-paradise piñata strung up on a rope
I had a few things on my mind
& they all had names
Gasoline Alley & Rosie & Rosie’s dejected
sunglasses burning chemical
blue in Gasoline Alley xmas eve about
39 hundred miles past
You can’t forget Rosie that 5 foot 9 redheaded mourning dove
said time to time she felt like a Minnie Mouse watch with both hands
reaching for the sky Christ
what a honeymoon that provocative &
especially toxic rendition of Bach’s Toccata &
Fugue in D Minor giving the Greyhound
bus the shakes Christ it was really a sun-bleached conch
marooned in the midst of West Texas & just about now
Jimmy was stumbling drunk & he looked just like
a dimestore knicknack burro with human
risus sardonicus teeth a brutal paintbrush slapped
onto its kisser He tells me I’m better off Christ
it was 1 one of those joints makes you feel you’ve got to be lost
inside a Bosch triptych the joint was swarming with
refugees from the Personals’
Wild Side section