can he have one here and
there and everywhere,
at each restaurant,
at the pool,
at the river where we felt
free, but most importantly we felt
we felt
something
tactical
and knew things
instinctively
later we all forgot
and had to learn again
surrounded by youth
dressed in stripes and red
so many colors,
a sprinkler and a rainbow
with high shoes and higher
elbows hoisting up
two filled fists,
cups to the brim with
ales and sherries and,
oh, for him,
perched on its black dome, pedestal
sits the pink liquid
bird of paradise,
his yellow plumes
taking
up
space
at the rim
his lips meet for a taste
and she rejects his call,
we all coo
we caw
we we we we
our song
his dance,
his lips,
his balls where she dribbles
from later
and the next day
drab body draped against the gilded
the toilet bowl
drips, smells
faintly
of blossoms
or buttercups
or something else yellow and piss-like
lovers’ bile
maybe the real thing:
the stench of perfumed
bodies tied
together,
slipping
from the sweat
beads onto the sand,
the whole
shebang
smelling like salted fruit
like his piss dripping
onto the bathroom tile
like bile
stuck in her hair and a scarlet
feather tucked in her teeth
and the orange of the sunset on july 5th.
the bodies,
freed
from
their
knot,
see the red,
orange,
purple layers of sky and cloud and feel
kids kissing for the first time in the woods
friends giggling
and hushed
now there is only the bird
and the paradise
the two
and no other
the sand on their ass and soles of their feet
and bent elbows like the waitress who checks on them next,
after his mating call,
his crushing call
she presents the sherries and sets fire to them
lovers who met themselves in the woods
and each other in the brush
and they
burn
and
burn
all orange and crisp
with the sunset
and the sex and the sherry
and the flames.
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