Low Star

Low star, pull your pants up
Low star, slippry and dense
Low star, walk the rooftops
Low star, impervious.

Because Kevin Reynolds experienced the miserable smoking child cardiologist as a deity, he overcompensated its malice with allowances, which were tithes. The meat divinity could slip along the gums of the spa mouth, a critical tongue clucking a roller-coasting ticker tape of praise and affront, while Kevin stood locked and branked in one spot twixt therapeutic jets and offered up a stance which looked relaxed (on a commercial for a 900 number or a mustang ranch).

Low star, a mud bottom
Low star, or a searchlight
Low star, banana trees
Low star, not high season.

Kevin looked like a statue in a grease fountain lamp, with stray dog hair, hanging on a chain. Stitching through conversation and anaesthesia, the skin-masked and sterile stethoscope imp had trapped him in a crib of adoration and scorn. The bars were taut suture wire, twisted like candy canes or stripers on poles, down which the serum ran in dizzying regular spiraling drips. A suffering physician took Kevin Reynolds's needful swell under advisement with the assumed entitlement of a faith healer rigging a magic trick or something you could plug into a cigarette lighter.

Low star, where are you now
Low star, surface drifter
Low star, moth ball in pop
Low star, gravid ardor.

When he awoke afloat in four-hundred-thread-count sheets, the message indicator on the telephone flashed like a red lighthouse beacon. There was pea seed in his hair, and the oracle was still ignited, drumming out that morning’s urgent crisis. There seemed to be no air, just a tobacco-y sealant which even caught the future and held it still. The Other Presence had left this disco-cabana world reemed and vacant as a church. Kevin Reynolds was once again a gentleman alone in society, but his manhood was broken in two.

Low star, you were fragile
Low star, melted cupcake
Low star, bloody s-curve
Low star, meanderer.

Auspicious Battery

Sated but still licking at shivplate from a round, girlish stone after the fact, horizontal poolside in a white rubber chaise, it's easy to call: Fool's Blessing, Chump's Paradise. After a 16-ladder climb up to the corner shade cave, it better be good, and it better be bad. I had to apologize to the valet-wench when the tip of my hard Italian duffel chipped the "bronze" trunk of a sentinel gomphotherium, stuck obnoxiously there in eternal trumpeting siege too near the beads like a high-security hole sniffer. Then appeared the living creatures.

It hadn't been three steps after checking in when I spotted it across the water, between doric plaster columns among a copse of senatorial nudists with towels, hunched over its tray of ashes. The chest was sunken, and the face was drawn of limits that all spelled bitterness and spite. It could have been so posed at a maiden's breast on a canopy bed, having sucked all the life with her breath, yet still wheezing for truth and light and sympathy. Its toenails bit into the cement. It watched me.

Later that night, I stepped out of my room for a jacuzzi. There was something glowing blue at its lip. Some bodies pose naked because they cook with religion, and he was a doctor of carnal gospel. To take the waters and behold him was to sit in bubbles of pornographic faerie children. His blue light and severed heads, caught in their fright and wonderment, dangled from every nipple, hypnotized all moral superiority. His youth and self-regard, krishna art and wicca, made that night the start of my final auspicious shakedown and battery.

Miserable Smoking Child Cardiologist

I have to tell the babies when they're dead;
It's all the universe needed me for.
It's like bending horseshoes into poodles.

I find survival with access to jets.
Clown white before complementary drinks,
I take my hotel suite and sob and sleep.

I am totally hypnotized by cock.
The Pharmers pay me all in stock,
But I tremble at the size of their teeth.

How could I cart a young husband around
Near parents glowing with hysteria--
Explaining that he's just my Playtime King?