To the Artist's Page                   To our home page

To Jason Paul Fox's previous piece     To Jason Paul Fox's next piece

A Smile of Bone 

I demand an explanation.
Yesterday's sunshine lit the darkest recesses of
my honeycombed synapses like light that strikes
a cathedral's stone bound altar with gold.
New hope flitted hummingbird-like, failure to
failure, drinking lessons from each morbid cup.
I demand an explanation.
All felt lovely, cased in a velvet sheen
with no threat of peeling off. Yet so it has-
and beneath is brittle, ugly bone.

Today, 20 degrees, night fell on afternoon
with a resounding silence quite unlike
Spring; I stumbled through too many dreams
alone into public like some psycho Robert Lowell,
all new perspective lost in the shallow grief
of loneliness and watched the students dance
out of the bar and into each other's orifices
over a cooling cup of coffee. My bones
clutched the cup, my flesh swallowed smoke as
a sorority girl divulged to me a smile of bone,
bulging flesh painfully stretching her veined skin.

Explain why visions of soft bodies curved
in inspired rhythms struck me then, with
a wet slap like a banana peel across the cheek.
Profusions of over-luscious breasts,
cherry-aureola peaked like a sundae,
smothered washboard stomachs. The chocolate
mounds below whispered their dank mysteries.
It's unjust to undress the whole mass of bodies
jammed in the bar rush for my eyes. Yesterday,
so many sweet hypocrisies slithered unperceived
behind the oh-too-perfect scenes. I applaud
this facade that swathes the soul with skin.
To see below to bone, a meticulous map of sin,
is too foolhardy for one so image fooled as me.
What, what forced me to chart each light chat,
look beyond the core to darkness where blood
pumped more air to each pair of lying lips?
Tell me; I'll buy it all and burn it.
Those brains must have withered smothered
in the hairspray that fakes airy mountains
on each girl's expensive scalp. Brain must feed
muscle as fat hardens with beer in arm-wrestling
boors slamming Coors with funnels
down yearning gullets. Nothing is worse
than to look beyond the mask, and find nothing.

Why steal innocent illusions of truth, take
the naturally floral view I mistake, and crush it?
I demand an explanation.

To the top of this page