Begin with the grandeur

the luxurious documentary contrives
when I share my spoils from love, laughter and dismay
with a world hungry for glamour
inside this dream thrust into the dawn,
a cosy dream the sun strokes
with each tempting finger,
before the grimy morning slices open this fresco
and vomits the stale fruit of the new pop models
from a million ears
across the hazy words
I bled in drops onto this page while the night lived.
Now smoke drifts from my scowl
as a fresh lament builds inside me like breakfast.

Touch the grandeur
immortalised in concrete, in posters, in lively books,
or sitting in a café on the cobbled square
with my nonchalant comrades of glamour
the dream tourists admire,
before the eclipse
when elegance trespasses the calm afternoon
as the skeletons jangle the hour,
breasts and legs in the shadow of a fey smile
as she navigates each table like a butterfly;
suddenly the unfamiliar sunlight evaporates these absinthe visions
I retreat to my verbal fortification
bristling with a reputation unpublished in this bar's chatter,
when the manifestation arrives to deposit her flyer.
My sensual flag flies up,
she glows in sultry code,
already a matter of publicity.

The evening flirts with grandeur
raised from the frenzy of language
torn from the literature of sex
full of captured fantasies still shaking with glitter
while the sumptuous sunset remains to stain the air,
she watches her reflection like a stranger
where the phantoms' dance enters the night
to collect the dreams I hammer out
in another struggle for words
to describe the perfume
leaking from her sensuous tears drawn from sunshine
that flickers through the windows of failure.