Cocktails With Kelly
Everyone watch the blonde fondle a horse.
The table is set for six hundred.
The ancient symbol staked on parchment paper;
light from tiny candles; cattle farms
Cascading across the most beautiful tracts
Of small-town repetitive West.
Just try to peek inside the tent.
It’s like a lost world in there
with the blinding flashes of a photo booth
Spitting passport pictures of women
Stamped across the smiling visa of my face.
Dig yourself another grave:
Lie quietly, not knowing
Sunday or summer
Lover or space heater
Conscious effort or circumstance
Manipulation or honesty
Truth or truth.
If I get one more glass of Chardonnay
Maybe we could make right today:
The old friends’ fiancés eye-candy stares
At long distance lovers suddenly entrenched
in the clinking glass futility
Of self fulfilled prophecy.
Let someone else drive us home.
Dig your heels into the dirt.
Hold onto your resolve in the confines
Of hurtling steel ribbons spanned by plastic.
Meet the spastic spinning
with hands increasingly clasped,
Folded across a lap.
Tremble as they trail over ass and thigh
touching the slick warmth,
Tongue tracing nipple,
Taste of sweet white and cake,
Tattooed you arching and moaning
Braceleted hands twisting through hair.
The piano buzzes loud enough to wake us.
The car alarm cuts off a promise, a prayer.
A goat bleats and these dreams just turn stupid–
Mary’s little lamb lays beside a plate.
Door jams are magnets for shins and skulls.
A raccoon could be a gopher, giraffe
Or god damn pygmy elephant because who is left
To decipher this language—
The repose of dry, the passion of wet?
And what of those standing
in the graduation line doing both,
Doing all: speeches, sex acts, heavy mornings,
Phone calls that cloud the head,
Fingers you can smell all day?
And where does it lead—
this avenue of anxiety
unamused,
unmeasured?
He whispered
‘Do you want me?’
And she hugged him
as if to say ‘no,
but maybe I could
turn my head this once.’