Jazz

She’s been in my lap most of the evening.

The memory of our mechanical kisses
Burns like a cold sore.

All eyes are on the stage,

Straining through the silver cigarette haze
And darkness
At the dilapidated planks
And the red rusting mic stand.

He brushes black-licorice dreadlocks from his face

And mounts the stage.
His threadbare shirt barely holds in his ribs
That protrude like steel girders.
He coaxes the guitar from her case
Plugs in and strums an open G.

He caresses the fret-board,

Easing long resonances from this tender ecstasy
—Wails that whip across the crowd,
Eating away the anger of rush hour traffic,
Unpaid alimony and last month’s rent.
Nothing exists but their foreplay
Nothing exists but their sighs.
Their tears
—Our tears.

Now.
With frantic urgency,
He tears his fingers along the shaft.
She screams arpeggiated obscenities.
Harder and harder!
Faster and faster!
He claws into her frets.
The amplifier smokes from their unrelenting rhythm.

The tempo eases.

His fingers trace lazy along his lover’s neck
Sated. No longer urgent.
Prodding the strings gently,
Plucking out soft moans
That echo over us like memories.

It’s late, but I linger

Until the silent press of her hand on mine
Prompts me to rise from my chair
And float across the battered, scratched floorboards
And into the cold, gnawing night air
Leaving behind the velvet sheets of smoke
And the lovers
Who sweat upon the stage.

Even now,
As my feet float
Above the cracked concrete
Of this downtown, city sidewalk,
Their post-coital notes brush softly against my ear,
And as she and I make our silent,
Separate way to her apartment
I think of her ruffled, silk sheets
Tossed wantonly to the end of the bed
Bunching up like buckling tectonic plates
Forming peaks and valleys.
Crests and troths
Which rise and fall into the shifting fluidity
Of the mattress springs.

And in that moment,

She and I will be what you and I once were
A hot and urgent microcosm
Our own personal big-bang
With no more rhyme or reason
To our pairing
Than the lonely atoms
Who forged our universe
And whose initial heat grows
Cold, expanding infinitely
Until not even the memory
Of their heated union remains.