The Dance of the Do-Wrong People

Joe-Boy goes to Mahogany Hall.
He sees Lulu with the red-flame wig
& diamonds on every finger.

Moonlight slips through louvered blinds,
a double shadow on the wall
like Lulu's octoroon décolleté.

Joe-Boy won't tell her
he picked cotton
for the plantation penitentiary.
Before that,
he spread the flesh plague.

You're the strangest man
I ever knew, she says.

Three Tabasco drops
in every tequila shot,
Joe-Boy dances the Grizzly Bear.
He stomps out blues
like cigarettes on that floor.

What makes you think
you know me?

I'll keep you from going blind,
Joe-Boy. I'll keep you.

I heard better, he says,
but you sing just
like you pay the bills with it.

I say yes to everything,
she says,
your skin-sin & shit-words.

I want you, Lulu.
Be my taxi dancer,
my yellow-song girl.
Be my first-night virgin.

Yes, you be less
than a buck, she says.
You be my five-
&-dime man.

Songs My Mother Never Taught Me

Dos Madres Press

Small Press Distribution

Two For The Show

London's burning, brave & fair.
Day tossed a coin; night called its fall.

Misery loves money begets law,
begets words nor listen to betray.

Crowd every penny-wise night;
crowd every pound-foolish day.
Render unto Caesar the things,

pander unto God who brings 
low what Rome built in a day --

built in a day,

a day, a day,

built in a day.

Pelota

Light a match.
Drink some water from a glass.
Look directly at me.
Look at your fingernails.

Take the false equation,
the one I hid behind the bookcase.

The morning I'm no longer
able to deceive you,
that's when you'll learn
the secret to strategy

and discover we're all at once
our original selves
with a single word.

I'm Not In Love

Hello?

Your number's been disconnected.
This is how it is in the current
political landscape, she said.

Here's a thin pamphlet --
the Holiday Book of 1885,
an entirely new edition
of Lord Byron's Childe Harold.

She remembered when she held my hand.
She felt the arthritic lump on the first
knuckle of my left middle-finger.

She said:
Everybody goes to parties;
everybody does all 16 dances.