my cavalier’s sword’s become just a dirk,
and each of us are laying bets on the precise time
there’ll be only a puddle left on the floor.
Outside the hall girls with indigo scents
and spearmint breath are walking crazy-eight patterns
all over the parking lot, getting ready to reward guys
they’ve been stroking to huge erections
fluffy towels to keep their blue jeans dry,
dry to the touch of folks who really count.
In the Mall
and while, yes, he didn’t ask you to do so directly,
believe me when I tell you that’s what he wanted,
and the fact that nothing came to pass between you
two (for you, busy like a trap-crippled wolf
gnawing her own foot off, didn’t come to aid him),
likely contributed to his firing a Luger
into his own right shoulder
and then laying down in the walkway
like a grimacing, bleeding marionette,
begging passers-by to locate
his several, scattered, clear-thin strings
and to please re-thread them through
his outstretched hands and legs,
that he might, by someone else in time, be
pulled up and on his multi-colored feet
to jangle-dance his way once more
in front of shoppers young and old
sluicing ‘round and past him in the mall.
he shares many of my neighbors’ interests,
and he claims to have been born in one of Cibola’s
seven cities. He whispers he’s stayed alive and hale
by keeping up the search for Coronado,
and that’s been regardless of the weather,
his attitude on any given day,
or his means of transportation to and from
the necessary places on our planet.
Concurrent with this questing of his,
you’ve raised a solid-gold Dalmatian
whose bite’s honest-to-God worse than her bark,
whose temperament toggles ‘twixt sour and sweet,
and who’s stayed alive and hale thus far
by circulating moods like blood inside her metal.
William C. Blome writes poetry and short fiction and fabricates collages. He lives cramped and wedged between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he once grabbed a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars while the getting was good and easy. His work has previously spotted the pages of such fine little mags as Amarillo Bay, PRISM International, Fiction Southeast, Roanoke Review, Salted Feathers and The California Quarterly.
