To Salome with love

I’ve given myself away
I have nothing and can do no more.
I’ve spent days waiting
For my milk to be delivered.
To let her in and make a pot of coffee
Without obligation
And start talking
Watch her move slowly
From the kitchen, to the piano, to the bed
Brown hair curling and swinging
Like a caveman’s arms
Breaking the still air
With jingling bells and eagle feathers
Then on the horizon, the captain spies
The enemy sail.
A pink bed sheet, a t-shirt, socks.
I want to swim in the ocean and,
Like a whale, not come up for hours
Perhaps that would be enough time.
Guitars play in the cave
Lit up with fire and wine - hashish smoke
And she is there, waving hair deliberately, playing some castanets
Or some god-awful thing
She is awful, awe-inspiring, like God;
Cruelly beautiful.
Likewise?
No, I am ugly and kind.
But there is this Apollo 13 passion
(Lift off, explode, you know, go to the moon anyway.)
That still manages to leave me all baroque and sad,
7:30, Sunday morning, ready to puke.
I am week; oh, too human,
And painfully so, my one hope is round orbit that moon and bring it back home
My music? My love?
These are my too competing theologies
Without them I am lost in space; the superhuman realm of emotions;
Imagination without an outlet.
There she is in the cave, head swinging,
Hair all syncopated with her arms that hold the terrible castanets
I hear over the guitars, over the old gypsies
(all gypsies are old, either they are old or they seem old,
that’s how you know a gypsy)
I am drawn into the cave, out of the valley of expression
Into the depths of copulation, domesticity.
The gypsies growl and force me out
She shrugs, apologetically, continues her dance
I am no John the Baptist.