IN AMERICA EROS IS A BLACK LIMOUSINE

by J. Stevens

In America
Eros is a black limousine
Traveling toward an international airport
Driven by a Negro chauffeur packing
A ham sandwich & a gun
& before this poem zips itself up
That ham sandwich will go off & almost
Kill Janis Joplin while the gun stays warm
In the warm shoulder holster of History's driver
Who can usually be found, this time of day
Idling outside the Shoreham, in Washington
Earbuds in, reading Chekhov -- an actor studying ?
Or waiting for the lone gunman
The gloved assassin
There's always one around somewhere
Sidney Reilly. Mark David Chapman
Everything is timing

In America
Eros is the poster of a shark
Watching a girl swim naked in the dark
Dark shape hanging low
Under the billows
Watusiing in the slow slow chop.
It's not just a shark it's not just a poster
Old fish knows only one thing
But it's a big Thing

In America
Eros is a room full of neoprene pelts
Identical models hanging in the vault
of a futuristic furrier
A whole wardrobe of new selves
Every thirty years you turn seventeen
Get brand new download of love
Grown in petri dish
or infernal machine

In America
Eros is lights in the high desert night
Outside Palm Springs --too dark
To see the limo but this is big
A whole convoy rising up from a nowhere
You might call the middle of nowhere
Ground zero zero hour swift silent men
Easing out earbuds in sober alert
Apprehensive grim, are we ready
For what this is the return
Of the alien or only the un
Loved assassin

In America
Eros is a shark
Cruising into a pickup spot
It could be McGregor Park or Dayton's
Old arcade that corner up in Bellingham
Any lonely place where out of the dark
A cute ham sandwich fresh buns lotsa mayo
& meat a yum yum twink earbuds in
Comes watusiing over to our cold
Clear mirror hanging there in time's
Slow dark chop about to learn
One big thing. Maybe two

I'm 55 this is America
What do I know about Eros
You're out in the billows every day
The shark rising & falling
Waiting for the black limousine
That's waiting for Janis Joplin
Who's giving head on a bed
In the Chelsea Hotel to Leonard Cohen
While outside in the street the nothingness
Takes care of business with its usual
Quiet intensity

Hey maybe those French existentialists
Were onto something
Maybe life really does have meaning
Only when you carpe diem & catch
The black limousine carrying Sartre
and De Beauvoir to Orly to Lisbon
To Havana to dinner with Fidel
Stories of Che fat montecristos
On the Revolution’s tropical verandah
But what kind of meaning is that

We're nowhere
No where we know or recognize
Sun in Scorpio Mars in Aries.
In America Eros is always a metaphor for war
and more

These sheets must be storm clouds
Not fine linen
Last night they rained
A beautiful woman

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