kenyon

"someone give me a topic and i'll write about it"

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THE REGAL SHOW WORLD: WHERE YOU ARE KING

The mafia owns this place you know
she bullhorns through a cigarette in the dressing room.
Who do you think funded the mayor's campaign?
Other dancers nod from their posts: chomping
margarine sandwiches, dangling off payphones.

I wait in a chair onstage,
topless, red-lit
for urgent faces to cling at the glass
and feathery bills to elect me.

Its dark in the hollow of a tree
where the ransom money is flung.
I work at the crotch.
The city crosses its legs on me and forgets.

2

The first customer arrives as music fills
a speaker by my ear: Our hearts are empty but we are free, hips
wedged apart like a nectarine
split by thumbs to its waffled pit,
trickles of spit draped over a nipple.
I reach for the knob, turn down my intellect,
grope for a pose that he can bite into,
study his eyes (Ill do the same tricks
for fifteen that I do for five, depending),
pressing my skeleton faithfully through the same routine,
fumbling at a new door
for an old key.