Josephine

The venereal disease billboard

reminds me of you.

For there’s nothing I couldn’t cure

or wouldn’t contract from you.

To share alike, share as two.

For that is what love and lovers do,

I write from my bus view.

 

The dead deer, torn and strewn,

she too, reminds me of you.

For there is no road I wouldn’t cross

to get to you. No danger too severe.

My bowels paint the asphalt, they do.

They’re picked by vultures, birds of you.

 

I want you like the bum wants a buck.

Need you like he needs a bath.

Like the street walker wants a trick

and the junkie wants a fix.

To shoot you. Overdose, too.

She twitches and scratches, my desires do.

With blistered skin, without you.

 

The elevator reminds me of you.

Going down, down, down on you.

The fountain that squirts your brew.

The unzipped zipper, the untied shoe.

The rain, the sun, the moon, too.

Wet, it rises and sets, a total eclipse

from a kaleidoscope view.

 

Amos says colors fade without you.

But that is weak. It will not do.

For there are no colors, absent you.

No light, perspective, prisms that are true.

All that which paints life, red to blue.

Black-and-white, days without you.

You are your own color, light, the infinity

of a universe, all made up of you.

 

What weak love came before.

Skirmishes and parades. Hullaballoo.

Practice drills for this glorious war.

And I, Napoleon, conquered love for you,

my Josephine, until my Waterloo.

This poem, scribbles, to say adieu.

 

The mosquito and the blood she drew,

straight from my heart to give to you.

To breed in puddles and gutters

and multiply my affection for you.

I don’t desire to adore you. No. No.

I just do. I have no choice but to see you

in my coffee, in the pot that brews.

 

I’d give all my blood, all my life, for you.

And as they say in the nude,

in dirty Penthouse letters

in purple swollen words so lewd,

“I swear every word of this is true…”

But erotic fake women will never do.

My fantasies are all of you.

My love, my life, my passion, too,

bleeds beautifully on a highway for you,

I write from my bus view.