Velvet Hours
Marcello Cortese
I
On the concrete, I think of my sister.
While I sit beside a sister-like fire hydrant.
It is so warm and so soft, glowing like the fireplace
Of the moon.
And because the moon is out, I think
I have fallen below the line of stoicism.
For the past week, the marriage of my life has
Been insomnia and splendor, both the two smiling grooms
To my groomsman.
It is only out here, where it is
So warm and soft with kindness, that I take
The moment to acknowledge my pride. Not in the terms
Of my vanity, no, but rather of a simpler cloth that I am
Cut from:
I. Am. Romance.
And I find that within anything I do, anyone shall find praise
So easily, like the expected pill bug under a shallow rock.
Those who see it, too, demand the elevation of my breaths and thoughts;
Things that dance, just as we all do,
Under the streetlamps of ourselves.
I do form intention, and for that reason,
I am precisely the alchemic mixture that bubbles up.
And up. Then over.
Another day, another week, another waking dawn before we roar
A bus is filled with cater waiters: black and white and red-
Socked things drinking themselves to death and back
With corner store coffee and old fruits.
The cigarettes come later.
Later in the yawns the smoke replaces within our lungs.
Later, in those yawns before the sun, after the moon, there is a gleam
Of patent on the leather of the street,
Which is surely to be piss up close
Which is why I look from a distance.
I’d rather the shine be leather.
No one can wear heels here. No one can wear anything, really.
Boston was an angler fish, just dark enough so you can’t
See it coming.
And New York is a waning gibbous,
Both will take you by surprise, like the English coast.
Of course, that’s what my sister says.
She’s been fond of the moon since birth.
II
And under those dimmed streetlamps of distant provinces
There are cataclysmic cha-chas; one, two, dancing feet.
Like a Tuesday afternoon.
The women’s barren legs are at aphelion
The men’s prepared wrists in perihelion.
Where Charleston used to be the rave,
Now, In the dark, there is Russian Roulette
Just outside of the oil-lamp glows.
By the ferry building, couples and throuples take
To the sea by means of their shoes
That should not be exposed to water.
We have danced under a sculpture before.
But now, it is only carnivorous cries that kiss the laughing
Of the tapping dance shoes.
No one can see the bow now.
I step aside and away from it all to look at the party-and-church-
Goers of my life, unfolding themselves.
They are drunk on revelry, excitable by the aqua stars, and
As they sing and stumble on their arms and voices,
I know that they all belong to me.
Their loveless and soundless humping,
I know you would like the image.
Because before the morning there will be a gun
-Shot of excited and eloquent insults,
But, for now, there is only us. And them.
I am not in love.
But I know what I mean
When I speak of the party of my mind
And those that attend it.
Outside, in the opulent champagne
That is a puddle of New York’s finest yellow,
I find a glimpse of you in the whoop of a drowning woman.
Where once there was a beauty from afar,
Replacing it is only the reality of the coming daytime.
And the daytime has no shine.
It was better then.
Wet and happy, they all return
To dry land.
Then, in the open air of the sky,
The guests have long checked and taken back their coats
And now is the hour that their jewels rise
On necks and things
Into the wakening white pinpricks
Above.
Marcello Cortese is a New York-based novelist and poet. His prose and poetry reflect the silent beauties and verbose cynicisms in life, exploring the enlightenment of human intellect and expression in a diurnal capacity. He has written a handful of poems and two novels to date, with a third ensuing.