The blue room turns like a cat-scan machine
over my head and around my belly.

On the porch overlooking dirty sands
the brochures had called golden,
mosquitoes drift over our skin.
From dawn beyond midnight,
she looks at me, fear and hope
bound in the bundle of a knife.

Outside, the trees drip sweat.
What could not live here,
where all things are fed from the air?
There is no need to breathe.
Hot vapors are shoved in
by hot hands, her hands,
her tongue, her arms, her bosom,
pushing everything inside.
But our thoughts are squeezed out,
and lie on the floor
beside my underwear, and hers,
and the ceiling fan goes foom....foom....foom,
in the blue room.

I am forced to think about love,
what it isn't -- to think about dreams,
suspicions and regrets,
as well as honest thoughts
that get thrown out with the garbage.

We said we’ll go to Mexico,
and be rejuvenated
among the pyramids!
The next day she is sick and stays in bed,
and I dreamed I grew old quickly
and fell down, almost dead
on a road in the slums,
where they tied me up and called the hearse
because there’s no cure for duplicity.

But Calypso music is soft at dawn,
out over the silver bay,
beyond the palms and dark skinned boys
carrying yellow drinks on trays.
Out where the sun rises, and the breeze is born,
fresh and cool, over the heads of dolphins,
there is always a mission of wealth and redemption.

How beautiful it all could be
to someone who is with passion.

She turns over.
The blue room turns.
I see a sliver of painful trust.
Please, take away trust.
Bury it with the Incan treasure,
give it back to the burning sun.
On her face it hangs like a noose.

Where am I? I know I'm not here,
with the sheets gnarled around her body,
her hands clenched, her feet, black on the bottom
from dancing in her dreams.
I am up north, alone in the Sierra,
climbed out to a point where I can see
a hundred miles through the clear sky,
and think myself on the verge
of something like peace.

Or, if not peace,
a moment of untarnished reflection.