The Gaslight Hotel

I am deep therein inside a hot and wet slide,
and many identities mingle in that frame--
but I am polite and I do as I am invited to do.
I observe the room around and the ceiling fan--
breezes a pant and another slithering moan.

Her throat is my perfect house and in adoration
does metaphor become metonymy-- eight parts
light, three dark, firm in a circle Euclidian, all points
tongued toward perimeter’s lay, equidistant from where

as a child she walked through the house
in heels, dressed for Opera in corded slip
paduasoy, fingernails painted to flick
at grooms holding Coach and Four.

Nearing her eighth birthday day she set cups of tea,
flat crackers and pretend cakes of dainty cheese,
and from down the lane pigtailed girls came to dine.

Once, when she was nine, 30 years ago,
her mother gone, and she was home all alone,
the fever came. Each tonsil scoop by doctor and pluck
by nurse brought the blood-- but nature’s clot
brought her back and now my life is but a stage
where she lives, and where she plays.

Yellow glisks of eight candle flames lend shadows
silent and pallorous light across my face
and heavy on the walls. My flesh protests delight
in the algebra she assigns-- I blow whiskey steam
above her Boolian lips. I hear her mummering whisper
and I see her righteous eyes and three crescented moons
ride their leisure in arcs above a carousel's peal--
above a kneeling sway of bending lombardy trees.

On the street oxen bells lead wagonloads
of poppy’s dream to the wharves where laughing girls
and pirates drunk wait sail tomorrow
to Singapore’s poon floating atop the China Sea.

Perfect her throat’s hold on my flesh
and my calculus of pleasure is sucked in mad swirls
of saliva and tongue just so-- a child grown
to a woman plays the abbacus in slow frenzy
seeking exogamic interplay with a cock,
and I counting the strands of her matted hair.

We were anxious that our guests complete
their fucking and leave. She made polite compunction,
zerodian inclines toward our evening guests-- now,
so perfect that all is quiet, our orgy complete,
and my face turns to the cross-eyed moon
curling beams down to the wide invitation to straddle
again in the traceries of her fine lines.

Elegant shadows in elephantine delight more than drear
and she is perfect, Muratorian, apotheosized, angelic
in her manipulations of oral musclulature-- she dines
on me as if I am ocean scrap and fine lobster
in Venetian spume,: and her pussy mingles scents
of kelp and paste iodine— her lips are scarlet dye,
and madder lines the scales shutting the droop
of violet lids--makes bulging her eyes.

My cravings for sums and divisions of things
are sorrows I fold inside sachet cloth, drawer
away inside her mouth, hide them by day away,
but at night I unfold to wave at trees and flag the wind--
I catch her rhythmed song soon as it pales
as through a closed door where I cannot see
or hear her words anymore. Entranced by her body’s
soft design, I watch her softened cheeks shallow and puff
while I decay, disappear— for I will never
again
see the sun.

##
Don Taylor