Jeff Clark

  

My Interior

One bordello, one hookshop in the buttock. 
One two-bit nightery with Wurlitzer in the back. 
A theremin, a pump, the rubble-heap of a palace. 
Siamese traps, and little pink cocktail umbrellas 
for the little blowsy ones who tramp the boulevards 
and sepia byways of my interior, tapping the asphalt 

with their parasol-tips, unfurling their wings 
to daunt paramours, tipping their fedoras to show their horns. 
All day they pull cottons from the inhalers that come down my conveyor. 
But in my night, they bolt home and lock it tight, and move inward, 
and begin to sniff by their armoires, and whimper 
We feel his first libation now, his hands on the hookah.

We hear Opal, we feel the bloodpump slow, 
we feel him slouch, and know his miserable vespers begin now. 
We prick him with our horns, we piss in his marrow. 
We fill his belly with a pall of hoary feathers. 
Before dawn, debauched, 
they try to stroke me to sleep in the bath . . . 

High noontide in my interior: the red deer 
wends out of my ravine when I wave, the little goat. 
The shadows of my Frenchmen annihilate my little night-womps. 
In my back-of-the-eyelid cinema: arabesques. 
My best records are all hiss and moan and tremolo. 
Your shadow annihilates my little day-womps.

Languor keeps my body from the desk. 
Languor keeps the stocking on the leg. 
Glare keeps the little ones at the conveyor 
and out of the head. But then, from way off, with cranking 
comes my night, and when it arrives 
I go to it like a callboy to a c-note.