Lightning's Dance Floor
by Ronald Wardall

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

From the beginning, having first been drawn,
                        then quartered, his mouth stuffed
            with intimate bits of himself, and still disoriented
                                                by the taste of his own geography,
                        he took her personally.

She, herself, full of brain-porridge and blood snot,
                        crammed as a mad man’s wallet,
                                    quick as a dead tree fire, even with
            boulders in her lungs and shod in manhole covers
                        swayed light as a child’s loose tooth.

She bred hope like a teenager’s tented sleep. To scratch
                        her naked back with the jagged line
            of his name. She, rich beyond Midas in empty rooms,
                                    bruised with goodbyes,
                                                the sky-carved fist in Heaven’s face.

The Saracen blade of dreams, granddaughter
                                                to a tailor’s scissors, rain-bright
                                    the long night lines piled like black
            panties round her ankles. She, deeply read in psychotic
                        shut-ins. Remorseless as the coffin beetle.

Catalogue of alone, cockroach-diamond, an unpolitic
            honk of geese in dark suits, the Hudson’s vampire moon-
                                                gowned, weighted like the gallows
                        for sandbag endings, devourer of visionaries,
                                    slipknot town.

She who, even bleeding, could dance the world
                                    up and down the stairs, night’s red eye,
                        the silver wolf sweating with her tongue, the wind
                                                blowing through him, labyrinth
            of dragon teeth, star climbers’ womb.