RODAK

A DECONSTRUCTION

He was so bad behind designer shades--stolen

From the hot dashboard of a trendy car--

In bright studs and black leather,

In need of a shower,

High on beer and himself.

She brought him home from the bar.

He stalked and slouched, peering

Into corners, a pointy boot looking

For a pet to kick. As a boy, he said,

He'd french fried a blind litter

Of peeping pups, like a basket

Of breaded chicken parts.

She kicked off her shoes, stretched out

Her legs, and wiggled her pretty toes.

Ovoid flares seared off the lenses

Voiding his eyes: lightening reflected

From the windshield of a hearse.

As a young man, trapped, he said,

He had rowed his wife

And her brat at dawn

To the center of a crater lake.

Setting the wooden boat aflame,

He had dived into the ice

And swum back: free.

She switched off the electric overhead.

Setting several candles about the room,

She slipped a gold tipped cigarette between her lips

And waited for him to bring fire.

He had answered an ad in the back of a magazine,

He said. He had fallen from the sky,

Mercenary angel in the hire of dark powers. Engulfed

In a symphony of the damned, he had raped,

Disemboweled, butchered, roasted and consumed

A breastless girl in the ashes of her village,

Just because he was hungry.

She left the room. She returned in shimmering silk, offering

Wine in stem glasses possessed of the tiny voices of prayer bells.

He had made $85,000 in less than three weeks, he bragged,

Selling speedballs to mental defectives beneath hoops without nets,

And had blown it all in Vegas on yellow whores and black jack

In seventy-two hours flat: unlucky at last.

Pulling her belt, she rose, and her kimono hissed and puddled 'round her feet.

She moved, and her fluid forms in the orange glow danced, like lava over rolling hills.

He said he had abused a certain celebrity blonde

Outside a famous restaurant, until urine glazed her loosened thighs,

And he had her over the fender of her Rolls, dog-wise,

As a Chorus of Mexican parking lot valets

Chanted and masturbated beneath the blue Hollywood moon.

She lay back and opened. And in less than two minutes time, she had reduced

The vast simulacrum of Hell he had constructed

Down to one little lie.