Iced at the Ward, Burned at the Stake: And Other Poems

Eternal Digression Symposia are rosier in heaven than in hell. In heaven they're a series of hotels. The women in the corridors wear toreadors and gowns and shorts. Some men wear ties, others jeans with button flys. We are uncorrelated

here.

Corrugated faces show the pain and character of who we've been, but are devoid of fear. We vibrate to each others' bodies, meanings, minds. We've come to burn some bridges with our friends and all the holy strangers of our past and future

lives.

In one hotel, God's in the suite called Honeymoon; his prophet is in 504. Call girls whisper past these gilt-edged doors in stocking feet, wade the carpet ankle deep. At 3, Room Service brings a bite to eat. Beneath the great white beehive, the buzz of silence is like

ecstasy.

Hum of symposium fills the days. Ballrooms are auditoriums where we speak, play, listen to the eddies of our blood. Flood of memory pools in every fingertip; we touch each other's lives like relics, pass them, watch as neighbors fondle our

regrets.

Her chest the sun, her back the moon, Goddess rising in a glass-walled elevator. Floating a corridor, I enter the arms of a dark woman in white. In another hotel, I fell from her theological spell to find a daughter of noon who named herself

Hope.

We dine in a Room at the Bottomâ€" red-flocked wallpaper and lingerie fashion shows. Rows and rows of banquet tables recede in memory. Progressive

dinners in the Lafayette, the Grand, the Bonneville, beneath-tri-colored canopy on sloping green. Aftertaste is

dream.

Chartered buses move us in a night; interior lights are out, our destination blank. Across the tracks, City of God's urban underbelly swells with loneliness. All those ballrooms. All those banquet rooms. All those bedrooms. All those

hotels.