Lust swelling beneath your tweed,
crying as you stare from a paper mache balcony,
you sing the wrong opera
and I hear every word.
Your heart pours out,
like we vomit humiliation,
I inhaled your childhood
and now you are pregnant with illusion.
Don’t we fall in love
with the most vicious of rivers?
They rage into morning
and torture weeping rocks.

Blindness lights your earth,
wine sends shocks to your fingers,
you wait until closing
for me,
the exquisite singer,
a broken record
who scratches a modern flaw.
Later,
with the wrong chin between my thighs,
an abyss with a tongue,
my head hangs back,
as I imitate heartbreak.

© 1996 Laura Dinnebeil