anket heat.

***************************************

Page 43
ENDING UP

reads like
living down --
a coconut arriving with the tide,
bottles perched in sand
the blue glass
colour or imprisoned dreams
genie of a bottle cap.

Ending up.
the brow or a gondola overturned
sees memories squared away --
the window of the envelope
an all too foggy membrane.

Turning out like
ending up
no check-out time or
non-existant room service
in a flea-bag motel.

***************************************

Page 44
OFFERINGS (A Movement in four Parts)

The night is folly without the moon,
trees blank space against a frontal sky
where lattice work from a bled fish reveals
skeletal markings will not administer
the red jack of hearts to a mistress sea.

Most fickle, the ways of a cockroach
(I don't recommend them) to offerings
of white linen, cold squares atop
a stone diamonded floor.

Palaver shacks drone in ghostly light
communicating some message about eel runs
up the black river, the equivalent brush
of tombstones against dark nightsoil.

Tiny bars open as cubicles.
proverbial flashes of the coming evening,
haciendas to count every blessing.

The road to such places
snarls a dusty pleasure
and will heat thin blood
to boil in the daylight hours.

Page 45
II

Sweat corrodes the cork's emplacement
about green bottlenecks,
its azure breath tossing back
pools of sparse liquid.

I picture ships placed within such bottles
as bannisters along corrugated highways,
seawater rusting from within the steamfitters's
tonsorial edge.

Haze thickens as sails blur to an artist's brush,
then squiggles in the oilpaint of memory --
her sides fashioning red wounds as pigment
surfacing from robotical crustaceans
lancing the bottom of a deeper crevice.

III

My steps clank to the gaoler's key
to become, within, handmaidens to thorned plants
acting as fuselage along the building's exterior.
Afar, a white seagull sits as a bespectacled tourist
gracing a buoy like a madras shirt.

Early stars in an afternoon sky
are expansive in Chateau Lafitte finery,
the Rothschilds of the universe playing
a cosmic baccarat.

Page 46
A girl in a brandy snifter of a dress --
dark, sensual, runs through tomes of my mind.

It's a hall of mirrors there;
the radiating glass of the sea,
twilight splendour in tall grass,
the hands of thick mahogany chairs
grimacing against perspiring walls.

I sponge water like a good midshipm