Dangerous Woman Walking the Streets of Atlanta

Dangerous Woman Walking the Streets of Atlanta      
Written in 2002 (Edited on September 29, 2013)

Sultry. Seductive. Delicious.

 A man can look at her one time and he shall be all hers.

 She is the sordid type who causes miles-wide traffic jams 
On Peachtree Street at rush hour, 

Sometimes resulting in the deaths of motorists 

Heading home for the ubiquity of a nightly family dinner.

 Only an intellectual sort should, could, and would 
Devise a plan for solving the eyes-affixing 
"Ailment" that "haunts" mankind; 

They note her beautiful body contortions, 

A parabolic assemblage of her, appendage-by-appendage.

Still, we must never forget the fundamental truth  
That all of Atlanta is under siege: 

Men suddenly ejaculate and leave golden-brown reminders 
On the crotches of their briefs and, 

At worst, bleeding through to their work slacks 

To remind them of their wandering eyes 

Not just to themselves, but their families, 
As well as an alarmingly high rate of fender-benders. 

Yet, the harlot continues to caress the city streets 

With her high heels screaming that sex sells absolute,

 And to arouse wandering eyes in the near-certain assumption

That a case of inadvertent chaos, 

Mostly on the part of the male driver, will occur.

 If this were to escalate into a war of the sexes,

 The female gender is predestined to emerge victorious 

Based upon the premise that their looks kill,

And I, like any other man, am but enslaved 

To the fairests' widespread whimsicality as it shall so suit.

She (2002)

"She" Written in 2002 (Edited on September 29, 2013) 

A Man's Humble Introduction of His Lover:

Ma fille artisan bohème is enamored

With only the eclectic and refined. 

Elle est un artisan du quartier français

Where Pontchartrain and Mississippi merge,
And of the Delta Queen's riverboat ride;

Elle est ma tramway nommé Désir.
But now she paints cross country

Out in foggy San Francisco Bay, 

Conveying the philosophies accordingly,

And all in which she doth foray. 

She taught me to believe that in life,

All things shall be as aesthetic as in art, 

And all I can say here today is, 

"Well, God broke the mold with her life."

A Man's Humble Introduction as the Object of Her Desire:

I was sired from humble souls in Tennessee, 

In the foothills of the Great Smoky Mount, 

Grand stage for fiddlers and white lightning, 

And home of The Grand Ole Opry. 

Like every boy, I stared into space

At many splendid objects galore, 
And Heavenly Constellation's gifts, 
And always the humanities dearest to my soul.

But never was I prey to a lady's amours 

Until she showed me my lack of foresight. 

That assuredly completed moi, et tout le monde;

It was laissez les bons temps roulers from there.

The Crescent City's beignets 

Never tasted to me so profound,

Till I whetted my tongue her way
And she reciprocated me in kind.

She taught me to look beyond the book cover, 

Though even that was beautiful, too. 

She could be a supermodel or Reubenesque,

Yet, she is my muse to my poetic heart,

The artisan of my soul and my lover!

The Point of Rendezvous:

We met at Lake Tahoe, 

In the snowy Nevada Rocky Mounts.

The locale embodied great pulchritude, 

As she did so herself;

We were lost, yet in a heat, were found, 

Beneath the auspices of billowed clouds,
And gracious cherub blue skies
As our eyes were watching God.

We seemed to strike a chord of the lyre

In our predestined amorous plight, 

And our flirtations emerged as a sonnet

As if decreed by the Sermon on the Mount.

The Muses' Omnipotent Soliloquy:

'Twas love at first sight,

'Twas what it was, indeed. 

'Twas love at first sight, 
O' Yes, it was;

Aye! It definitely 'twas what it was. 

When the Sirens Sing and Their Ardors Fly:

We locked lips together in a deathly clasp,

Firmly ensconced in suction and salivation, 

And sparks sailed the skies like doves from Heaven

Carrying olive branches as Gabriel's trumpet heralded! 

O'! How our Independence was thus achieved! 

We kissed each other so mercifully! 

O'! So tenderly beneath the heavens,

Yet sans wings, we levitated into the wild blue yonder!

O'! If Sir Issac Newton had only been around,

O' My! How he would be so astounded!

We were just amid fancying the conjoined soul of two

In each other's enamored ubiquity: 

Two souls dancing sans a worldly care!

We embraced the other forever in one second

So long as we could stall the Season's change! 

We were intimate whilst we could 

As unabated Love deemed that we should. 

Love deemed that we would, 

And we did, my friends, and so we did, 

For three days and two nights hence,

We passionately frolicked in our bed! 

And then the clock struck midnight 
On that fateful Sunday morn,

When Father Time announced the time had come

For our diaspora to our respective tribes!
It seems as tho' our fairy tale
Had our carriage morph into jack o' lanterns,
Laughing at us in their devilish glee,
Whilst we, the downtrodden, lost our riches
And our souls in an instantaneous scant! 

When we were separated from the other, our whole,

Our conjoined heart was torn asunder;

Like a babe borne from his mother,

Love's umbilical cord was severed;

My sustenance had been deprived of me! 

A Tryst Never Seems So Sweet As When Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder:

We promised never to douse the Flame

Quaint Love betrothed to us prae-matrimoniali. 

We exchanged addresses of our humble abodes, 

So, too, did we inscribe it into our hearts; 

To my best guesses based upon our ardors, 

We consumed each other's slumbers;

Tho' I fear our dreams hath flown
 Past the bewitching hours' hexes;
And the Sirens seem to haunt with their lyrics

Many a night beneath a nocturnal moon.

Thus, I would lie awakened in despair,

In a desperate sweat of Depravity,

Visualizing Route 66 as if a paved River Styx,

With the asphalt hotter than Cerberus' coals.

My soul had absconded to the hinterlands, 

Away to her quixotic studio bohème abode,

Where Haight and Ashbury crossed their fingers

Within the fog's cloak in the City by the Bay.

Much to my dismay, ergo, and too,

I trudged home to Rocky Top at the break of Dawn,

Tho' no longer is it my spirit's home, see you not?

Ma maison resides within She hither:

This fried poet's muse sojourned West,

As She is the artisan and lone muse

Who shall always mold this lyricist's soul!

Two Lovers' Denouement Towards an Amorous Resolution:

Years marched along like soldiers deployed,

But have we progressed other than via age? 

And we have communicated vicariously 

Through oratory and our written script.

And we are two souls, so young, yet observant, 

The Embodiment of the Socratic sage!

And yet Divine Providence seems not to care!
But I shall never protest too much
As I hath her memoirs in my hands.

But as I am a young man of twenty-one, 

My future still laieth ahead; 

I have yet met a belle in subsequent years

So gracious, so loving, or so fair. 

She is God's gift to me so far as I can see, 

The angel of my heart and soul She be. 

God has summoned me in His Decree: 

''Go West, young man! Go West!" 

And it will be that I shall do

As it is at both His and my behest: 

For though my body may now 

Reside on the peaks of Rocky Top, 

She molds my heart where Forty-Niners rushed:

On her Pottery Wheel of Love,

And I, her amorous clay to knead:

She manipulates my amours 
With her sophist's hands,
Devising our Bayeux Tapestry as if 1066,
Born of Aphrodite's Clay!

Epilogue:

If Love's lone definition is that of Fool's Gold,

I shall remain sophomoric till my death;

For when my breath stills so silently and yet bold,

Our amorous etudes are governed by Cupid's Clef!

Not Treble, Bass, nor even Obscurity's Hither

Shall delay my playing the lyre at Aphrodite's behest,

Nor a Forbidden Fruit from the Serpent who doth slither!

Tho' what, pray tell, is the best?

I listen to the tune of fair Dionysus 

As in her theater, we wine, dine, and sing!

For never shall we descend into Eternal Crisis;

We are Our Dominion's Queen and King!

Let there be a forever and always a day,

So long as each day descends into night;

And so long as I have you, as shall be my say,

You are my damsel, and I, your knight!

God hath betrothed our amours in matrimony

Lest our misgivings be more than a few,

But the Bay hath played its harmony

As you are as only can be you!

Love bequeathed to me most kind

And as I tarried onto another Day's Trifle;

Never shall the daily grind

Dictate our life in a painful stifle!

And you, my Aphrodite, and I, your Eros:

An amorous serendipity predicated upon ethos:

Erato never penned a greater epoch of impassioned love

Till Calliope scripted the lyrics from above!

Smithville, U.S.A.

(As this was authored on the same night as the prior poem, titled "The Roller Coaster," I must have been reminiscing over my experiences on the Powell High School Scholars' Bowl team from the fall of 1997 until I graduated in May 2000. While playing, we traveled through East and much of Middle Tennessee to compete at tournaments against the best competition the state had to offer. My senior year on Spring Break, the team traveled to Vanderbilt University in downtown Nashville to compete with teams from all across the nation, and along the drive west on I-40, one passes an exit for the very small town called Smithville. As I understand what others have told me who have actually driven in the town, it is essentially a one-road, one-restaurant, one school for each of the major age groups community. It seems to me not just bizarrely-quixotic that such a place exists, but that I began hearkening back upon my thoughts of Grant Wood's rural American Utopian painted masterpiece you and I both know as "American Gothic." Below are both the painting as well as the poem evoking my ardors for this lost vestige of Americana.)

(Above: "American Gothic," as painted by Grant Wood, circa 1930. Housed in The Art Institute of Chicago Building, an example of Modernism.)

Smithville, U.S.A.                 Written in 2002 (Edited on September 29, 2013)

Drive down to Dixie on a warm, sunny day, 
See all the common folk walk, and how they meander astray!
This isn't big enough for you or me to sin, 
And heck, it's barely big enough for the Smithville Inn.

Shall we pull up to the city's drive-thru and park?

I'm loathe to bear its simplicity and quiet harmonious spark!

*Refrain: This is Smithville, Smithville, U.S.A., 
Out in the middle of the amber waves, blowing away! 
A place where life's so simple, you'd wonder, "What's the deal?" 
For Smithville is so real and quixotic because it's surreal! 

At first glance, one might consider this God's Country, 
For all the thrushes of farmland flourish, 'tis an agricultural sea! 
The Smithville library, the Smithville school, the Smithville restaurant, 
So, who could see the beauty here other than a true savant? 

* Refrain: For this is Smithville, Smithville, U.S.A. ....

The ghosts of antebellum times past doth loom, 
Some might look at Nashville for all her gluttonous gloom. 
Why drive on a 7th Avenue when you get by on just one? 
General Jackson's ghost survives in how Smithville was done! 

* Refrain: For this is Smithville, Smithville, U.S.A. .... 

*Refer to the second stanza for the rest of the lyrics.