Another lifetime ago, i would perform poetry at punk rock clubs, with a dance partner adding sensuality to my ragged words. The audience usually did not know what to make of this at all.

”The things that we’ve learnt are no longer enough
No language, just sound, that’s all we need know
To synchronize love to the beat of the show” Joy Division Transmission

The beautiful blonde and I
Practicing words and movements
To be performed later to a bunch
Of very drunk rock-n-rollers
Bemused and befuddled by us,
As they waited for the next band to come on.

Practicing in my tiny room, wooden floors and wooden walls
The former creaking like a tired ghost
The latter sly and revealing in the shadows made from
One tiny lamp upon the desk.

I was wearing a suit
She was wearing this silk apparition
Loose flowing changing shape like the weather outside

Well talk turned to silence turned to kisses turned to touching
We fell down onto the bed
Began that peculiar clumsy ballet
Lips and fingers traveling from one side of the soft stage
To the other
And she became brutal as the passion increased
Frantic and violent and needing
I asked her to slow down

And she
Just stopped.

And suddenly I knew everything

What man had done this?
What father or brother or hero

If I had gone crazy like she had gone crazy
We may have had something

The birds were singing in the trees outside
And she stayed my friend
But a possible world had blown up
In an instant
Because I saw her, and she lived to hide
In her sexiness, her flirting and our desire

I met her years later
At a party
She stood upright while I was trying to fall down
She was a nude model of some repute
Still that unknowable beauty
My one time partner
Putting dance moves to my stuttering words

I think we waltzed to The Cure
And she said she saw my play at that tiny theatre
Down the crooked lane down close enough to the harbor
And that she enjoyed it
And
Then she was gone.