DISARRAY

Forgive the indelicacy of today’s post, but it is all in the service of delivering some important information:

Poetry can get you laid.

Prism

Dance a broken step with civil disguise,
Give not a handsome tremble to the blacking rise,
Lay no bed in the violet waves of winter.
Things established are demonic vice,
Disarray, a ritual blend.
Dance with me angel!
Dance a broken step!

A couple of years after I wrote this piece, I met a girl. She was a statuesque bottle-blonde surfer, entering her sophomore year. She liked LSD and scaring her parents.

We spent only a couple of weeks in each other’s company, and I’m left with a disjointed collection of memories:

A night spent house sitting, in a den that was literally crawling with crickets...

A night out with some of her friends to see The Deceivers...

Meeting her parents as they sat and watched Matewan on video...

I thought back to this poem when I first met her, so I wrote it out longhand and dropped it in an envelope, along with a crystal prism I snatched from a decorative lamp.

She melted, and I confess I did not discourage the idea that the poem was custom written for her.

When she went back to school, we continued for several more weeks with a flurry of regular phone calls, effusive letters, and new poems.

But soon she returned to her broken steps, and I to my civil disguise...