stolen kiss motel

 
passion is a pariah, & poetry, deceiving
let us speak no more of love, or leaving

there is much dark in the daylight. you feel your way through the benighted
nebula that assaults logic like a cannabinoid. when you trip on stones, you
find a broken thing & take it to replace your lost heart, that was given to a
lover, who was unutterably a stranger.

you used to care for music, until the concerto became a dirge & the song
was the beguiling ballad of a siren; & the churning sea, & the rocks so close.

can’t stay here, the walls walk toward you on perilous feet & your bed is a
cold Sahara because you sleep in it alone. there is one road out of town & it
always leads to a lonely place.

after a long drive with particles of air colliding in the headlights, you approach
a sign that says: no not here keep going. but signs were written to be ignored.
you pull into the lot of the motel, where the flashing neon hints that maybe
this is it.

in the motel there’s a coffee shop, & in the coffee shop there’s a woman in a
booth. she can give you a break or she can tell you to go to hell, so you say, ‘I
don’t like doin’ coffee alone.’ her eyes want to push you off, but her lips are
dire for a kiss. ‘sit,’ she says. ‘we can be lonely together.’

there isn’t much talk, in the way of strangers. the only desire is desire itself;
it’s the compulsion that takes a man & a women out of a café & into a rented
room that remains unlit.

you’re coarse in your lust, it’s why you never had a lasting affair. but maybe
she’s tough, too. ‘I can take whatever you got to lay on me,’ she says. ‘no
man ever loved me & no man ever destroyed me.’

clothes are removed in smooth accord. you appraise her scars, beauty like a
desert mirage that shimmers into stimulus. she investigates your eyes, to
realize that the weapons you’re armed with will carry her to the raw cliffs of
her agony.  & her ecstasy.

outside, the night dissolves tragically, like the lovers in Wuthering Heights,
& the descant of the rain serenades…


(Art: H Gitel)