Carillon Tower Murder

Looming white in the blue January rain, it is so "Buck Rogers," bound by rounded rectangular arches and odd gutter streaks like blaster scorches. I am Colonel Wilma Deering, reporting for duty, in a skin-tight satin flightsuit and helmet fit for Esther Williams. I stand on the round retro balcony. We attend the after-party. I slink in gold lamé Halston, one sleeve and a hole in the side to flaunt my belly chain, my henna hair ironed. He grips my shoulders with tan, Courvoisier-ad hands, and turns me. My flute spills a sparkling rose trickle; it tumbles through the railing... He kisses me full on the mouth and pushes. My eyes return to the wet pavement; it rushes upward. These bags are heavy, my fingers numb.

Subway

Plaintive notes from a two-stringed
Chinese violin wend their way
through box-like corridors underground.
A well-dressed man views his reflection
in polished blue tiles. The clang
and clamor of a crowd rise upwards.

Cyclopean

It is true I have tunnel vision. I see what I can be expected to see. An old man, I have one eye blue; one is gray. One is for the ridiculous, one for the sublime. Appalling brown-streaked skies take me, and the land, wreathed in smoke, writhes miles beneath my feet.

Cigarette Bitch in an Ashtray

Cut to commercial
cut him in half.
This laser beam
should lose his legs,
wheat from chaff.
Men throng the streets
of San Francisco
and clamor for blood.
They will beat
his torso with a ton
of bricks -- their
only way to fix
a break with reality.
The evil Doctor E
and his piebald following
of the sober and coldly crazy
miss several beats
on their arrhythmic, unmelodic tour
of the lower forty-eight --
maybe they meant to,
maybe they didn't.

Equestrian

They shoot horses, don't they? Yes,
a lot -- not so much for broken legs
as when they backtalk. Trash bags
ride Mister Ed, who floats like a mote --
Brownian drift, then through a wormhole
and out the other side

To the jeers of average Joes.
"By the by," et cetera from heads
on a talk show. It's way worse than you know.
This sour nag pissed off plenty
with that razor blade on her tongue.
As for the anonymous "them":

Inapposite others with buttons to press;
they scattered her awareness
as a price for failing to focus
on her own reflection, which they tried
in vain to give. Their stabs
sprayed snow off the car hood.

Like A Gold Thread In A Western Shirt

I stink like horse dung
and muddy geraniums.
I love that stench,
to smell like a man
arms bronze, back tan
sweat on sweet salt
rivulets trickling
down past shoulder blade
where an interplay
of muscles tense and twitch.

You Said It, I Didn't!

Do they sit, patly made up
in a cable access studio
under a popcorn ceiling,
a perforated cubicle wall behind?

Or are they in a bunker,
headset clapped to a sergeant's
Cindy-your-time-life-operator head:
"Sir, look at these response times"?

Or are they, hands on lap, instead arrayed
around a carved oak table,
bowing heads and whispering past
candles and fog machines --

A seance, perhaps? Or do I hear players
informally dressed and reading
from a script or ad-lib
in a room soundproofed and black?