By

You walk by the open room
and a skeletal hand
shoots out of dark
grabs your too tropical, too parroty shirt
You hear the diamonds
shaking like all the ready girls
the journals of Paul Gaugin
The moon comes down the hallway
and panhandles company

It is a horny courtesy
to smile at you

There is even one young girl
dropped out of vampire school
combing her long Lana hair
will tell you there is no use
spinning the radio dial
in the family cemetery after midnight
She’s tried this for years
until her feet turned to golden hooves
She became a mother, wife and child

so now she hides from every world

The radio dial is spun again
by _______ (a drinker)
on a night so cold it crackles
like the static between the stars

Stephen Hawking is floating in that space
in the form of mathematical equations

Say “hi,” will you, as you float past him

The skeletal hand starts dancing
in its own way over the body
“The Mortel Bedde”

(hence, motel)

over the body which can no longer dance

(says the boy kept prisoner at the center of the bone palace)

Oh it is terrible to be seen
Oh it is terrible to be unseen

says the skeleton seeking a dance partner at the lame singles party

left out with the stars on the window sill

whose eternal complaint of the cold is desire home

like a t.v. dinner