Ashley Keyser

Don Juan Astray

A man’s empty hands

means he’s somebody.

Baggage

is for daddies who lumber

froswy through a world

shrunk to

tinny singalongs,

bridge and a mortgage.

Unencumbered, I lope

like this room is my room.

Any arrival, an arrival
to my native country.

I carry on nothing
but a twenty-something

nuzzling my collar

(starched, bespoke). Why

belabor it? I speak

without thinking

and sound sure.
I stray, but never get lost,

because my couture

is a map: Irish linen,

Indian muslin. GPS

won’t leave me spurned

(what the bitter wallflowers

call Golden

Pussy Syndrome).

All my roads lead

down loosening thighs

to hot, marshy Rome.

Under my Oxfords’
polished leather, clouds
froth up champagne weather.

Another for my friend here.

Toast the baubles I bought her,

and the ecstatic career

of bubbles that color
our plastic flutes in a prism,

then leave us

with only a jismy residue

and on her tongue,

sweetness.

Is it a crime
if she’s an accessory I’ll

trade for a brunette to offset

my hair’s lighter notes?

No pretty lily will graft

to the root of me.

When the heartwood’s

not got much heart,

how light it floats.

Don Juan in Winter

Your wish and your question

swim in the mirror
of my quicksilver smile.

I’m so familiar,
I feel closer than family,

as if we have watched

each other grow up

between garret windows

in The Snow Queen.

What would you like to hear?

Compliments
blurted and tender?

A double-entendre

ribboning scents
of wax and cigar smoke,

or a modern,

voluptuous self-loathing

to show I’m woke?

My performance glows
but I can’t fake a fire, burning

with outbreak, not ardor.

I’ve been the man
who catches the magic fox

in his arms: Charm,

its copper and smirk,
but I go pruritic, prurient.

Herpes simplex lurks.

Do you know how many
ghost partners you have? a poster

in the waiting room inquires.

Ripples of desires skipped

and sunk. Ten beddings

(illustrated via stick figure)

= ghosts in thousands.
Like snow bees or dander,

my (million?!) ghost partners

flutter and swoon
if I reach to unfasten

their diaphanous robes.

Stung into modesty
by my polar vortex touch,

they vanish in ether

with my stuttering sexts.

Come here,
I want to make you cry

into my fuck-me eyes

to flush
the ice out.

Don Juan in Hell

A man of stone
clanking in chainmail

lugs the end of my story,

clasps me in a grip

which freezes and burns

like a lick

of February metal
while a hellmouth opens

to digest me, impenitent.

Not to say sorry
for decadent
appetites several lifetimes

would take to exhaust,

not to renounce
my plucking and gorging

is an act of courage.

But then, I got used

to not saying sorry.

Strength comes so easy,

it has settled like tetanus

into this lantern jaw

no one ever pried

an apology out of,

my apogee

flung too far. In my wake:

rusty penumbrae

of sloshed tumblers

eating into the finish,

unmade tumbled-in sheets,

trysts and divorces.

I drained the earth

of its resources,

grew worn and worse.

Could I have a universe

to scorch through? Wept:

No more girls to conquer.

If you saw me hand
in hand with the statue,

you might mistake one

for the other, wonder

why our chiseled gleam

smacks of the valley

of uncanny beauties,

thread green by serpentine

grains in place of veins.

No brimstone will thaw me.

My hell’s sunk in drizzle,
an undecided climate

where we errant lechers

stumble in a stupor, no one

to seduce but us.

If I’ve hardened,
let me come back again

as flint

or even the sparks

appearing as you squint

at climax’s relief.

Let me be
your brief
and dazzling crown.

Brian Clifton