Oh those grey eyed ladies,
Satin backs and good advice
To quit this and start that.

Lamprey with sucker teeth hanging
From a rump, just pulled from the water or
Beached with his mates fleeing the Navy’s sonar sounds.
Who plumbs the deep vents but she and her friends, the whales.

The ultimate lungs of the past and the deep
No longer able to live on land,
Having changed irrevocably
Like a bet made by ancestors
That the infinite deep was endless too.
That our yoyo submersibles with hoses attached could,
Like bubbling meditation, settle on the truth.
And so it is the truth of limited means, constricted concentration
Like the lung of the landed leviathan
Choking up blood and hooks.

Advantages of price and process hook the labor,
The bare backs of tortoise shell and puma prints and alligator bags.
Her lover left the convertible out in the monsoon rain, top down
Waiting for the canals to rise like Venice and take us away
On a barge of classical beauty and virginity.
Leonard -never let it last,
The flower, the bird song and the bee.
Let the trawlers cut their losses.
Even the human fishery is bereft and defeated.
The night club piano bar can hold its sticky floor until morning,
Until we come back from the beach
With our tools, long blades to cut the blubber and
Old wooden barrels for the spermaceti oil.
A little further out from the Tower of Song,
Your light house is a rhythm of turning mirrors
Directing powerful light beyond to those in need
But within, the blackness has its rules.

To cut the ties of this world and
Die like a big cold swallow of water.
To know the place first,
As on the moon someone left an aluminum chair,
Some black heart of cold discipline
Specializing in thin or non-existent atmospheres.
The die hards take their turns
With pikes and long blades to make it right,
But this is just a bar you know,
A way station where single use stir straws clog the plastic urinal screens
And everyone wants to go home, especially the ladies.

Follow out, file away green dreams for yellow.
All leaves brown eventually,
All soaked upholstery and trunks of letters from New York houses and
The libertines have their best when it’s one on one, tete a tete with the
Black sack of Universe yawning over its fatigue with us,
Clever no more,
Silent in anticipation.

By Rolf Stavig
3/16/2024