An End-of-Empire Feeling

The swingers wear name badges
like gameshow contestants. All prizes
are parts of strangers: flanks
covered in bed-of-nails cellulite pocks;
the bone-bone-potbelly-picked-clean-legs progression;
spidered lips requesting unfamiliar cock -
"I bet you're cut" -
and a spectator spot for their semi-hard spouse;
flabby pairs from Wisconsin playing at Romans; balls slapping like dancehall handclaps.

The Texans have waited all year.
Marsha says Kris convinced her
to hold out for the Big Easy jamboree
before snatching randoms to bury
in the pussy they just attended
a shaving methods workshop for.
The streets have been cleared,
but no jazz casket has processed.
It's all for the couples
who break gleefully like domino halves
in the slap of humidity, who bring
such desperately snatched dollars
to throw into the well, who fuck
like the kids will never come home.

Meanwhile a journalist pleads immunity
as stray hands cup him; protests
that he's trying to photograph debris,
to meditate on the Ninth Ward, to scratch
something in writing - a link between
the bulbous cemeteries and the shacks -
but 'shacks' is misheard and 'bulbous' fires up
a Bette Midler mouth to holler
"Ah like scratchin' too!"
so he flees back to the Marriott
to type up the salvage and run his wrists
under a lick of water.