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QUINCY TROUPE The Allusion of Seduction even when you sat in the glowing embers during that day as any other, the sun, sinking quickly as the breath of a dying man, who felt the light dimming in his sunken eyes, lingered, as the sweet touch of a woman’s lips you loved, lingered, like a cool breeze on your flesh after she left, her perfume hanging in the air there like seduction, you remembered her incredible tongue licking so softly, so feathery-light across your keening body, was so electric then, is so electric now in your memory, as this moment is electric when you feel the beauty of language growing inside a poem, inside the incredible music of its reference, on the other hand it is a different moment now under this black sky filled with stars silent as people walking around down here imitating zombies, where you sit, sifting through the wreckage of memory you hear voices swelling from somewhere deep within hidden crevices of an invisible stillness, a plunging hush where once there was a clamoring, a nervous cacophony filled with agitation, were marching people around the globe speaking in one voice, waving banners, thrusting fists—of all colors— into the glowing air like pistons, when the light dropped over the edge of the world during a sunset you remember, when the police surged forward wearing gas masks, they looked like darth vaders swinging steel batons, cracking human skulls as if they were piñatas QUINCY TROUPE ✦ 85 & hidden behind their sparta shields made people dance when they shot them with garrulous, voluble water hose’s, in the glowing light dropping over the edge of the world at sunset, in this moment here, this eerie silence the presence comes rushing at you with the urgency of that garrulous water hose, drowning out all nostalgia, & you think of guantanamo, guantanamo, O the shame, of guantanamo, abu ghraib, the silence, the creeping national silence of voices ignoring the known, the cold-blooded depravity of it all, the insulation we freeze ourselves into so we won’t recognize the horror in front of us, so familiar as apple pie, the graphic scenes of a tarantino movie, the impoverishment of spirit we find located inside ourselves, we have no language that speaks & yet you remember still the sweetness of her lips brushing over your flesh like feathers of a bird’s wing, her incredible licking tongue lathering your body with its honey, its seduction of your keening body made so electric by her touch, her wondrous perfume hanging in the air like beautiful language inside a poem & you linger over the memory of all of this, feel hope is still there, as long as there is love 86 ✦ QUINCY TROUPE ...

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