The City is My Mistress - by Riccardo Berra (c) 2012 all rights reserved

You know you're out there walking
 and one line,
then an entire UNiverse sneak up to complete in your head?
send a shiver up your neck, and a shine down your spine,
So beautiful, accurate and bold of you
You should
whip out that bloody smartphone or stone tablet
and get it down
fast as you can,
But you don't

You tell yourself 
You'll remember,
You set to remembering,
get home,
You set to forgetting,
Till later when you discover
You no longer have anything.
At all

To recall
That you were once inspired
But aren't any more.

Teeth to edge and hand to heart you beg the bitch.
Kiss her feet. Promise to write.
Promise to be true.
Stop smoking, drinking,
Stop fucking other women
Days

Several
(Hurtful angry shitful low)
days worth more
of staring you down
She relents and returns one line.

Which with
Grateful, beyond words,
you run.

Even if
not even close
To what you had
You get back nothing
More than you deserved

This city is my mistress
I know her so well in the dark
Blindfolded,
She over me
Pressing into her
Til the complete
Emptiness
of release
Begs
in the solitary spaces where nobody but she and I go
For the things I do in her I can tell nobody
For her skin in winter,
Reliably cold and firm beneath my feet
I do not come home
I only am home, in her

So even when she's distant grown
And I'd, retired, banished for another become
Lost in unrequited miscollections
Another anonymity
Some dumb cock
Forced to redrink
My own shabby breath for inspiration
Hers to the last
Is the name
I'll call out.

 

rbb 1-8-2012 all rights reserved
---------------
My latest, written sorta in reverse, pretty much as described above.
Two poems sorta written as one?
Erotic or not? I'm up in the air listening to

Mississippi John Hurt from D.C. Blues - The Library of Congress Recordings, Volume 2

Clipped on 7-January-2012, 11:34 PM from I'll Fly Away - YouTube

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Limerence

copyright © 2012, all rights reserved

by Ricc Berra

It's been six months, fourteen days, twenty hours and forty-five minutes since we met. 

How often have you heard this story? 


A man walks into a working man's bar on a hot city night and approaches a girl seated near the door. She pretends not to notice as he rakes her up and down; her new Manolos, black pencil skirt, natural pearls, and the seal gray silk blouse unbuttoned to flaunt just a little more than enough of what she's got. He looks like he just stumbled out of a bowling alley. Her hair is freshly cut and styled. His is tousled in unruly ringlets. Her makeup shows attention to detail. His face, though handsome enough, needs a shave. She sips a Cosmo. He buys a beer. Offhandedly, he announces, "I don't mean to offend you, but you don't belong here." 

I act offended, but in truth, I'm not. I know what you mean before you do and I love you almost instantly for saying it. Still, I play coy and won't give you the satisfaction. You do not present well on first appearance. You will need to earn my trust.

"I've as much right to be here as anybody else," I address my own reflection in the bar. "And who are you to judge me?" My inflection rises convincingly toward the end, but I give it all away when my eyes flutter, pulled to yours in such a mad gravity that I blush and look away again. It's too late. You know you have me like bait on a hook.

You say "Sorry but you're so beautiful" and repeat that I seem out of place. It still sounds like a line, but when delivered with conviction, it works. I let you buy me a drink. And another, then a third and before long I'm at ease, laughing at all the right places, touching your forearm, resting three fingers on my thigh, biting my lip. All the signposts are there for you to read and interpret. You need no roadmap, no website seduction tips, you needn't bother, I've already read them all, practiced diligently in my mirror, everything from the perfect angle to avert my eyes, to the swivel in my hips as my bare knees brush yours when I turn on the barstool to face you. Everything has been planned, orchestrated, choreographed for you until you, emboldened by drink and by what you see down my blouse when I lean forward, brush my hair away from my ear and whisper a secret, how you'd like to take me home with you and what we'd do once we get there. 

There's no cab fast enough.

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