The City She Was

Let Down My Bucket

21 The Grand Tour The king is slain, small death since we used his porn as atlas. Each scene was our next frontier and we crossed it. Now he is all tumescent cat eyes, petulance. He says, My mother never smiled, I’m always lonely. It’s blah blah blah. It’s therefore, therefore. The headboard’s made of driftwood and Xmas lights, and I just want to kiss and smoke clove cigarettes like we used to. Give me the hasty shower and the smell of Dr. Bronner’s. I want to be the thinking I invented last night, but I’ve already run out of disguise. Instead it’s some amour, plush velvet, some pretending to read Proust. We’re propping up the corpse of romantic love. This king is really here to cut his teeth on our asymmetry. Everyone smiles, I answer because we’ve already split the floorboards with our ruckus. We’re in the shipwreck on the deserted island and the king’s a parrot cawing shore, shore. We’re containers told in clay with nice faces when they orphan our hours for maps: exteriors to decorate with unction and indigo. We get sexy over island domination. The island is inside us: the birth of empire, its crooks and its courts. Islands, always the story. ...