-elope

-Elope

Penelope skips through beads of jazz
drinks saxophone grease and gnaws bass
gets rained on by oriental stringed instruments
wipes her face with photographs
she lives in a larger-than-life, lurid heat detector swirl
where hunger pangs evaporate at the shot of a pistol
that red headed girl, her exhaust pipes would steam
something you can see, smell and even lightly hold
the universe’s palm is being burned by Penelope
whose self-consuming smoke is a color halfway between
a sense of social propriety and an inside
wanderlust

Oh, Penelope, what a type!

I saw her today, and she asked me
why I had to be so discreet, always!
I told her it gave me an edge
then I flipped out my pocket knife
and hilariously pointed to the blade                                                                                                                                                                but the joke was lost on her

she’d been writing a book called
“my father was Lothario and my mother was Margaret Mary Alacoque“
I thought the title was god awful                                                                                                                                                                          and made sure to apprise her of my lukewarm sentiments                                                                                                                           this, too, was lost on her

the protagonist was this girl Alaska
who wasn’t afraid to die
her catchphrase was asking
“what country shall I say is calling from across the world?”
when answering the phone
but that’s another world–kind of tempting, I guess
just not mine                                                                                                                                                                                                                and I was secretly infatuated with Alaska

Penelope was afflicted
with a mind that alternated between                                                                                                                                                                 languor and fanaticism                                                                                                                                                                                               a nasty case of depression that reeked of
woefully ignorant coddling and too much ecstasy
she was made by a dyslexic creator
who accidentally stuck her in
angular blue ink vistas
although a soft pastel sprawl would have been much better for her nerves

that’s really the only reason she was so unstable
certifiably deranged                                                                                                                                                                                           explosive, every now and again

oh, but those explosions!
we had nothing left to burn
and had to set ourselves on fire
we both agreed that we needed to compensate
for our underwhelming induction
into this world
but for some inscrutable reason,
Penelope was set on starting with her pubic hair
I was thoroughly intrigued by this pubic pyromania,
but I assume it’s
some kind of metaphor
for birth and death
neatly converging at the tip of her match
but I left before her groins erupted in flames                                                                                                                                                    covering my eyes

Penelope is a sedentary beast
her voyages modest, and her short breaks increasingly frequent
she’ll retell the story of that one time
she met Lou Reed and Nico in the Jewish quarters of Berlin
Some people call her a liar
but I think Lou Reed and Nico
could plausibly have been there

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