Poetry: Muse | clivejames.com
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Muse


I’m the dame, and you’re the dick.
My eyes are greener than the new kid –
Why does he look so damn familiar?
my legs are longer than the San Andreas Fault,
and it’s a call. But it’s my heart
that’s flawed and hard and colder still
than all the loveless bodies hard-knock cops
fish from the star-crossed, moon-lorn Bay
and blacker than La Brea’s blackest pit.
That’s how you see me.

And I can see that you’re about to pour
that bleak long inextricable worn look
stiffer than the drink you just passed up
into the endless pitch of my impenetrable Ray Bans.
You’re screening Stairs of Sand again.
The old print ticks with fraying static threads,
the murky script rises and surfaces
out of the soundtrack thick as blackstrap with cliché
like fresh rot from the dark
where I’m the con and you’re the mark.
I’m the kiss and you’re the tell.
You’re the how, I’m the why.
I’m the blinding booze, the sucker bet,
and you’re the loner with the heart of gold,
that fatal yen for just the kind of trouble
you know better than to stick
your supersensitive neck out for
and in spite of which,
because there’s no such thing as love,
because no one ever does anything for nothing,
because you can’t even begin to figure out what the hell you’re doing here,
and I never asked you,
you won’t stop until you save me.