[I courted her, that musky tart, dusk personified, she of the purple prose and yellow]

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I courted her, that musky tart, dusk personified, she of the purple prose and yellow

journalism, her claws the color of Gaugin’s Christ, pee-pee yellow with a dash of green,

like that algae called Xantho-something-or-other, missing its Fucoxanthin, thus yellow-green,

like poor-people teeth, like the finger and toenails of boozehounds, come to me, I said,

her mouth like Day 2 of a bad period, can hardly get up from her stool without that wooden

cane with a stiletto in the tip of the shaft in case somebody gets local, but to quote my cousin-

who-looks-like-Moses speaking of Etta James, she’s old, she’s fat, she’s sick, she’s mean,

she’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, like this girl who showed up at my door, she knocked

and I answered and she just stood there in her tatters staring at me and picking her nose,

sized me up like I should be the one ashamed of myself, she had a point to make, I guess,

something about the grotesque, and Caren whose head was too small for her body who later

became a cop and then a minister, said that I embodied that song “Femme Fatale” by the Velvet

Underground, “false-colored eyes” and all, well now I’m barely femme and fatal only to some,

my kidney hurts, I debrided my own burn, that loneliness I once lusted for I have become