kobieta

 
they said she was a thief & a whore, but she craved only
to be the kept woman of a soldiering poet.

these bellcherry spectacles drop out of my head like a distressed
maiden falling from the architecturally miscued balcony near the
top of an ivory tower  –  a place of temptation from which dangled
the blonde steps of Rapunzel’s raging tousles.

lay with me in a bed, she says, a bed made of poems & sketches;
we’ll stain ourselves in graphite & ashen charcoal, & be the burning
remains of clandestine romance, perilous as love is.

her kisses are shell-shocks that blaze like the fiery trails of old whiskey.
her lust marauds across the desert of my flesh like nomads in need of
water.  but there is no oasis.

sometimes I tell her things, the vague sex fantasies of another no-one.
& sometimes the silence between us is the deep well of sorrow, where
we drift in loneliness & cabaret tears.

the night breaks over us like sullen rain.  from a distant nowhere,
I penetrate her with a beautiful trouble as she sleeps  –
to make her dreams wet…


(Art: Albert Arthur Allen)