Hello darlings,
I haven't posted in a while because I have been writing poetry, but 
here is one you may appreciate.  This is about getting romantically 
and sexually involved with a customer whom I met my first week dancing 
at the Chez, all the way back in January 1997.  It is over now.

***

A Way of Meeting

Your luck that if I spy a butterfly,
a Monarch's legs so tiny and
obscenely delicate on Oakland's gray
cement, I think of you, and Montreal.

You promised piles of butterflies would land,
politely navigating through my hair,
like parrots.  When eleven Monarchs hung
like weary bats, we quickly detoured, found
preserved exotic samples: vinyl pink
original prototypes of skirts
admired in sex boutiques of Montreal.
You fancied extra-long and curling sleeves,
kimonoed, refined, linen-colored moths--
antennae not unlike our neck-tied French
Canadian stripper's silky hair, which grazed
then sheathed my own red curls. Beneath her, eye-
glassed, reeking awkward adolescence, I'm
unpoised, unlike our San Francisco first 
encounter, when I'd danced on stage for you.

Concealed by drapes, undress me now, and lean
against this chair, describe what kind of bug
you'd be.  Eternal sign of winged change,
collected, pinned like memos, unlike me:
I'm pinned beneath you-wriggling-stinging cunt
from tight cocoon on cock.  Your stomach's clenched--
uncoiling tender rolls of belly make 
me cry again, that you're no insect, man.

I stared at caterpillar's stumpy legs,
astonished not at all that this befalls 
those chosen worms.  Returned from Montreal,
I've undergone it also, but I can't 
deny my childish, bug-eyed wonderment.

(c) 1998 Rita Rich