Here

Here at the pulse where the blood brings a blush

Here at this tender spot

Here is the heat, the scent
Here the flesh awaits your tongue
Here is where I want your lips
Here at the beginning
Here

The Talent

I've sealed myself away from love and ceased
To live with passion, hiding where once I wore
Cobalt silk and saffron, where once I stood
In hot white light and stayed up late to have
Martinis.  Eating mussels at the cool club with
The fashionista girls in full throated laughter
Heads thrown back, necks exposed, lips glistening red
We were the ones, the last of the smalltime superstars
In this cozy little world in the good times when money
Flowed like Champagne at midnight, and then one day
It flew apart, and one after another, life took us by the throat, the lovely
Pulsing throat, the long neck, exposed just when it all comes
crashing down, and one by one disappears to babies or booze,
One gets her PhD, another a divorce, one checks her bottom line
And makes a marriage deal worked out by
Lawyers in a conference room.
In agents terms we were the talent,
We seemed to have it all out there on the
Catwalk in the blinding light, bright women
With talent and brains and appetites flying
Smoking through the evening on the phone
As we drove to the next booking for a big
Show wielding a mascara brush in the dying light,
A flash of red lips and cobalt silk.
You see us in your rearview mirror gaining on you
As the sun sets just behind the island we flash by
We are laughing and oblivious to any danger
We lived on credit like the rest of you waiting
For the good times to return.
And then in resignation get on with living alone in a small house
Kept company, protected by three dogs
Existing only as a cyber link to an outer world I will never likely
Enter again with anything but words typed on a keyboard late at night
In anything but a naked face and beige at the grocery store or the bank

The Sound Of Crickets On A Hot Summer Night

In Arlington National Cemetery the night they buried Senator Edward M Kennedy there were
crickets chirping and the low murmur of voices waiting at the gravesite.
I, an unbeliever, was moved to tears by the prayers and answered aloud
Hear our prayer
Hear our prayer

It grew dark and lightening off in the distance over the hill where
A lone soldier stood gun held in white gloved hands waiting for the
Final Salute flashed off and on as a gentle wind blew the
Eternal flame in the growing darkness
And then it was over