Awkward Testimony

The skull contains many rooms.
Push the button behind the books
and the shelves slide, exposing yet
another door, a hidden room containing
lifelong testimony and celebration
of the women who left a mark on him.

The mind beyond the bone, an exhibition
of sorts, a gray-scale museum, shades of black
and white, platforms, prominent circles
and squares, a man’s museum of the women
who conquered him.

Fractured disunities, women on chairs,
on pedestals, captured in frames. An orgy
of parts pasted to parts of another, sometimes
disjointed, leaning haphazardly against, a black
stockinged leg kicks for the sky, suggesting joy
of free movement.

These are the favored aspects of women
he mothballed to memory long ago.
The framed picture is of first love.
There should be a wall size photo of her
complexity, captured in her eyes, fixed
upon his, demanding uncompromising
honesty before she will uncover her secrets.
Not in the picture is the moment just after
when she shifts into her wild animal self.

Awkward Testimony

There is the blue haired woman with a tattoo
on her calf and another on her thigh.
When she bends her leg so, shows a man
and a rooster interacting. He plays an accordion
while singing to the bird. There is laughter,
movement, and held poses. High-heeled shoes
encase delicate feet. Is that a small rodent
or a stuffed animal on the chair back or
has she thrown her panties to the post?
She is making pleasurable sounds only he can hear,
so lost is he in the anarchy of remembrance.

But the mind wanders, stumbles. He stands before
a white plaster statue of a mature woman
dancing in the nude, her arms above her head.
Lost in the ecstatic moment, her hips sway
from side to side. As he looks on her torso
reverts to its original form, flesh on flesh,
and she, a wunderkind, dances him to his knees.

He could bask in this reverie, but no,
out of nowhere, in full color, his hand
appears, manly, knuckled and calloused,
clumsily attempting to insert an object
of no consequence, a gesture or an utterance
that has no place or significance, causing all
to spin and fade toward a vanishing point,
conjoined into trivial meaninglessness.