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Richard King Perkins II
Finding Pauperdom in the State of Eureka
We couldnt afford a hotel in California
so we found the cheapest motel in a ten mile radius.
Ecstatic energy bolts me to the bed;
a smear of darkness channels through me like a caressing riptide.
We try to recloak our technicolor history.
We only seem naked after the fact.
This is not the dull shadow cast by familiar objects;
but I hear the same parable with its homespun morality—
the old wolf, the cackling scullion lie dead
with their guts strewn across the cordilleras up thrust daggers;
where the sweetest flowers have been over-pollinated by mutant bees
and their thuggish entourage of sycophants.
A matrix of bitterness, lost in her deluge,
keeps me stranded on a mountaintop near Petaluma.
Kestrel hymns foretold the decline of conjugal integrity,
releasing the throttle of sensual dime store drama.
I can stand here for a near eternity,
manifest in the key of duality;
vicious in wisdom, sagacious in the bartering of virtue
deftly hidden by earliest clouds—
caught in the act of self-pleasuring; in the thievery of moonbeams
stealing wads of silver from midday, or here;
in the small escape of light crumbing its way beneath the door,
the first thought of me, returning.
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