The Gothic Playhouse

She knows we are watching …
The rows of flowers, I mean.
They feel us, our hardness
Beneath impish petals ..
O how they lean. You can just
Burn them in permafrost temptation,
Stunned solidity, escapist solutions,
Theatrical human glue mendings,
The box office disconnects of love,
The heart, the sickened old heart,
The swinging rhythm of the play,
Held over, the amputated hand,
Held taught until it applauses,
Bursts out, busts out, held tight
In the embrace beneath the sacred
geometric Etherian proscenium stares,
Shape changers in the spotlight,
Masonic brick, stone, barbed rebar,
Twisted by the pleasures of rain
Soaking down to the center of the earth,
This hearth, denying Manhattan heat,
Rising equal to the brown cloud,
Distributed in leaflets into a sea of saline
And walking meat, all to the benefit of birds,
Pushed around by sensational breezes …

They come, cloistered here
In this downtown Gothic playhouse,
Sit still, pert, filling up red cushioned seats,
Grinding down their fine eats, whispering
In penumbral light, vanishing into bliss.

The Diva stands, soaks in the night,
Empty inside, a messenger, a portal,
A lacerated vessel of both dark and light,
All sponsored by corporate angels
As the demigods of ego and desire
Blow through her flaxen hair.