Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa

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Pleasure Dome - Yusef Komunyakaa


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hundred purple rooms

      in a mirror of black water.

      I must enter each,

      interrogated by a different demon.

      In the distance I can hear

      the sea coming. A woman at Laguna Beach.

      Her eyes now seashells.

      Her arms two far-off sails.

      Like a tree drags the ground on a windy day

      with yellow & red fruit too soft to eat,

      she comes toward me. Stars cluster

      her laughter like a nest of moth eyes—

      her focus on the world.

      The closer she comes, the deeper

      I work myself away into music

      that I hope can save us both.

      A man steps from a junkyard of chrome

      fenders & hubcaps,

      pulling off masks.

      At least a hundred scattered about.

      The last one: I’m him.

      I’m the warm-up act.

      I punch myself in the face

      across the makeshift stage.

      Fall through imaginary trapdoors.

      Like the devil, I turn cartwheels

      & set my hair afire.

      Contradiction, the old barker

      drunk again on these lights

      & camaraderie. The white poodles,

      Leo, Camellia, St. John, & Anna,

      leap through fiery hoops

      to shake my hand.

      I make a face

      that wants to die

      inside me.

      “Step right up ladies & gentlemen,

      see the Greatest Show on Earth,

      two-headed lions, seraphim,

      unicorns, satyrs, a woman

      who saws herself in half.”

      I can buckdance till I am

      in love with the trapeze artist.

      Can I have your attention now?

      I’m crawling across the stagefloor

      like a dog with four broken legs.

      You’re supposed to jump up

      & down now, laugh & applaud.

      For you, sweetheart, I’ll ride back down

      into black smoke early Sunday morning

      cutting fog, grab the moneysack

      of gold teeth. Diamond mines

      soil creep groan ancient cities, archaeological

      diggings, & yellow bulldozers turn around all night

      in blood-lit villages. Inhabitants here once gathered seashells

      that glimmered like pearls. When the smoke clears, you’ll see

      an erected throne like a mountain to scale,

      institutions built with bones, guns hidden in walls

      that swing open like big-mouthed B-52s.

      Your face in the mirror is my face. You tapdance

      on tabletops for me, while corporate bosses

      arm wrestle in back rooms for your essential downfall.

      I entice homosexuals into my basement butcher shop.

      I put my hands around another sharecropper’s throat

      for that mink coat you want from Saks Fifth,

      short-change another beggarwoman,

      steal another hit song from Sleepy

      John Estes, salt another gold mine in Cripple Creek,

      drive another motorcycle up a circular ice wall,

      face another public gunslinger like a bad chest wound,

      just to slide hands under black silk.

      Like the Ancient Mariner steering a skeleton ship

      against the moon, I’m their hired gunman

      if the price is right, take a contract on myself.

      They’ll name mountains & rivers in my honor.

      I’m a drawbridge over manholes for you, sweetheart.

      I’m paid two hundred grand

      to pick up a red telephone anytime & call up God.

      I’m making tobacco pouches out of the breasts of Indian

      maidens so we can stand in a valley & watch grass grow.

      The Gypsy gazes into her crystal ball

      to see a rooster drop in the dust.

      One note of samba still burns

      in the skull. The white-haired orator

      has fallen asleep in his fireside chair,

      & it’s now out of my hands.

      Even your dear mama has taken the gold

      crucifix from around her neck

      & dropped it into a beggar’s tincup.

      The seal is affixed. What can I say?

      That informer, I bet his hands

      are now on your sister’s legs.

      I want to wash mine. Seven times

      today the guards have chased children

      who shout your name. You are a saint

      to them, but blood isn’t yet dripping

      in the courtyard from mango leaves.

      The hole has been dug & a blindfold

      cut from a lover’s nightgown.

      It sits lopsided

      in a cage. Membrane.

      Vertebra. This precious, white

      ceramic doll’s brain

      twisted out of a knob of tungsten.

      It bleeds a crooked smile

      & arsenic sizzles in the air.

      Its eyes an old lie.

      Its bogus tongue, Le Diable.

      Its lampshade of memory.

      Guilt yahoos, benedictions

      in its Cro-Magnon skull

      blossom, a flurry of fireflies,

      vowels of rattlesnake beads.

      Its heart hums the song of dust

      like a sweet beehive.


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