Salome,

(The original Femme Fatal)

Lets fly seven silken and softly deadly veils

From the hands of this also comes “The Kiss”.

Few are immune to its vice.

Not even the draped damask Roser of beads

Can completely throw off it's clawing, and yet caressing, grip.

It is the self-indulgent smile of the Mona Lisa,

The name of a chant,

to the mirror on the wall, of the infamous step mother,of white driven purity,

A message tattooed on the owner’s obsessive I,

A thin marbled vein of conceit in the Master’s perfect statue,

An alchemical spell of poisonous pheromone perfume,

Composed of the mixed crushed flower Narcissus

And a reflective pool of tears from a rejected Echo.

It is as hard to catch and cork

as the escaped bubbles of a flat champagne Full of flattering phrases.

Once released, as Ms. Eden from her genie bottle,

It consumes the humble devotee

as a flash fire devours the purest breathing.

It flies, this sheer and flimsy veil, down to the depth of Hades.

A journey that is only skin deep.

***

Like a slim Erte` She carouses in the corner of the eye.

Just that same place where the sliver of thine is

Looking through the knothole in the bored of her own.

She is the vision of the original sin of her gender.

Mistress of the coffee shop hop,

She smokes her cigarettes like a classic black and white,

Crushes souls with her stiletto’s

When she puts her coffin spikes out.

Sits at dinner parties,

Spouting out of demolition red lips,

Orders a round of molitov cocktails

(From a weak-wristed waiter)

For which she is dutifully unwilling to pay.

Shatters hearts like Vitrified Waterford,

And never quite licks the plate clean,

Just to prove she can afford to waste

Her taste on even the finest china.

From the spitted and caustic accusations of gossip

(Whether other’s or her own),

She uses her stigmata

To hang her wide collection of piercing paraphernalia,

And declares mere earrings a passe` fancy.

She is fashionably late when arriving on time.

She often claims the bell tolls for her alone,

To signify, she assures us, her awaking from beauty sleep.

Burning Steinham like a bra,

Dripping, dipped in her own intuitive mystique,

She plays “Woman” as a leading role.

She is everything from the ice carved matriarch,

To the frailest frigid snowflake lace,

A snapshot of a fractal

A tamed tessera tiger.

She is as impenetrable as the sides of a faceted stone,

Bludgeoning faces with one sharpened and cutting glance.

She looks as clear to the uneducated eye

As a still summer spring,

Caged in the gilt gold of a diamond ring

Concealing class five mountain capped rapids beneath.

Her distilled fuller bodied flavor

lent by the darker depths of a Minotaur’s Maze.

She catacombs her woven net of concubine snare,

While tangled languid labyrinths of ghosts

Plague and haunt the silent solo sax of her world weary soul,

She is singing her siren song,

Within her,

There in the sacred subterranean caverns.

Her body is a plucked string,

An instrument,

A musical thing.

She is,

The taunt intensive note busting free of the ensemble.

Her Truth

Is like her veils,

An onion

Peeled back in the thinnest filmy layers,

To reveal a liquid salty ocean

Beyond sonic depth

Of blue neon tears.

An expressionist,

She searches frantically for her favorite pair of under wear,

Gypsy dervish.

Stark Naked,

She cannot find her Self,

Still