1680

Sometimes with the Heart
Seldom with the Soul
Scarcer once with the Might
Few—love at all.

In a forest clearing deep in wood,

I spied the grace of doe and fawn

And stopped my track as I should,

To set my gate about face in song.

A blouse droops across my moonlit breast, scarred horizontally
one                                 two                           three
Stars disappear beyond eyelids; they’re too beautiful to view.

He unveils a balded below with vertical, light strokes from his knuckles.
one                                 two                           three
Flames freeze any hesitation floating upon my heart.

I twist to turn the opposite way, to create crooks in my spine, I bend
one                                two                            three
Pressure rises against my bladder, pounding in fervor.

Sterling silver scorches a line around my left index
                                                          engraved with a contrasting verse
“flee from youth
desire the pure”
         I moan
         and moan
             and moan

Rouge, threaded dragons intertwined with oriental cherries
stain a mockery of silk spread across an unsteady table.
The lady, dwarfed by the redwood counter,
has skin stretched taught across the bones of her temples
only to softly be drooped and draped around her jowls.
She caught both my eyes in the little dips of her palms
but wrinkles worked onto her face are focused on receipts
and she is obviously oblivious that her hands, veined with sickly blue,
had struck me so hard that my head is thudding numbly.
Her nails are narrow and naturally long,
set into the spotted skin of her delicate fingers,
pulling at a memory bathed in red by the Chinese lanterns
hanging over me, the couple near the kitchen and tiny Mrs Huang.
Her hands gesture to me after calling my order twice  
and I walk towards them to take the sterile, plastic packet
so that I can finally exit to the alley and spit into the gutter
a touch of an image much too familiar
to only belong to Mrs Huang.