modern melancholy, etc.

            elegantly taking one’s clothes off before a sensuous woman

            unabashedly, flamboyantly beautiful •• more elusive, historically •• it’s that faded sense of beauty you long for and forever hold onto when you behold it •• liable to be derailed at any moment and required for a debriefing •• after every fleeting, triumphant moment…stricken— •• opera gloves; a red gown, snarling as you pass, nowhere else so erotic •• scrawled prayers on the back of holy pictures •• these harrows are daydreams rended by indiscreet drama and inapposite passion… •• you suspect “no girl was ever seduced by a book;” •• the torrid narcosis that filters through the candlelight, the East Berlin amphetamines •• a searching fire, subsiding from a rosary, under chemical light •• the gears of an Antebellum pocket watch, in which you begin to interrogate clarity •• the velocity of a departing angel through the vor of autumn leaves •• incongruous is the horizon •• the hallucinatory hymn of her portrait •• “romance is a mournful beauty,” she’ll say, confuting the cute squalor of yr nostalgia •• as you taxi to threnody the treble in her throat •• it’s the most dangerous of moods: a desire for complete isolation of an all-consuming romance •• the ghostfights and other nude scenes •• exotic mirrors late in the tension of acquiescence toward the threshold of the absurd •• the elusive cartography: a stethoscope to the chest •• tonight brings what is left of auscultation •• melancholy may long for a samurai who gives everything up for the love of a geisha •• red carnations and the glamour of being a shadow •• a mannequin wearing an ornate wedding dress w/ an antique birdcage for a head •• Billie Holiday singing along to a Remington 5 typewriter •• an Astra Constable tucked into a folded New York Times •• it’s a rainy Tuesday morning •• remodeling interior gods in a Gledhill Halifax cash register •• which is to say, if the rumors were true •• speakeasy brass bands from inside a velvet chesterfield •• that just documents the diamond heist behind her eyes