The Star Maiden

Faces swim up from the ocean and faces swim up from the deep. Memories cannot capture forever, the pleasure of infinite sleep; I'm weary to death, sick of the fight, and tired of the harvest I reap.

In rooms full of insolent children, a beautiful maiden there dances; in hallways of drunken angels, where devils put old men in trances. We'll drink to our youths and drink to our deaths, and weep for our hollow romances.

This maiden with the face of an angel, with clothing so baggy and coarse, is Buddha deep down in her belly (and is beauty incarnate of course). Her beauty could slaughter an army, with her ravishing lack of remorse.

She dances on into the cosmos, hits each chakra with a trembling toe, becoming a Hindu goddess, but her beauty I never will know. She dances on into the infinite, in a place that I never can go.

In water closets of pristine virtue, the girl with the stone-chiseled face erupts from within, made demented with sin, and vomits her truth into space. I hold her and share for a moment, a respite from a lifetime's disgrace.

And yet as I toast to the heavens, and swim into gutters and crumbs, I think it shall last forever, the pounding of the bacchanal drums; the twisting of girl-flowers lost in the haze as the zither and sitar still hums.

It was only a poisoned beauty, that rang out like a bell in my heart. It was only a drunken maiden, that gave idiot motion to art; it was only a little drunk human, that caused logic and words to depart.