Where the Tropics Begin

  
            I met my love in a place I respected

  Where the music was timeless and the cover invisible

  And secluded enough from ephemeral thunder

  It was just down the street from Concupiscence Corner

  Where you paid one cover and maybe another

  For the fleshfires nestled in everything ribald

  Where genuine beauty was scarcely detected

  We met where the channels were unencumbered 

  I knew it for certain that time by the car

  A face in a transient cluster of stars

  Like the effortless motions she used to tend bar

  A stunning meditation in film noir

            She took me to a dive in Quotidian Square

  A hairy banana farm under the stairs

            In the sordid plunges of shadow beguiling

  And I crawled like a roach under cracks in the tiling

  When the man she had loved like a working class mother
            Emerged from a counterintuitive vapor
            But the graces that won her felicity then
            Could never have sway in her oceans again

  And she whisked me away on a roller skate of sin

  To a little red guest house where the tropics begin

            In the same open spaces where the egrets were seen
            And the creatures of balmy viridian dreams
            In the fertile penumbras of trivial things
            I was stricken with an awe that perpetually sings

  In the cotton candy winter she was still hot for teacher

  And the sugary fluff that was holding him together

  The weather permitted as the air became sweeter

  And they garnered complaints from the downstairs neighbors

  In the sweet old condos that lay by the water

  Where the possums and foxes came out from the flowers

  And she left him her eyeliner printed on the covers

  To keep as a somewhat thorny reminder

  She had moved a little further from the last time around

  To a villa where she lived with the queen of the town

  But on tentative jetties she would still let me in

  To the little red guest house where the tropics begin

  In the world of remainders I have addict behavior

  And I spend my nights wading in a facebook of strangers

  I know she’s among them but I’ve already maimed her

  And I doubt she’d accept my request if I asked her

  So I guess I’ll remain a regrettable chapter

  But I still feel stricken with a ponderous dagger  

  And tied to the relics of a cardinal winter

  And I find myself longing to go back as a friend

            To the little red guest house where the tropics begin