Victoria Ramsay: Santiago Circus

In a sand casino we devour the sun
standing like two dimensional cut outs
spinning roulette under a three hundred degree rainbow.

I leave friends orbiting the night.
Neon lights with cues
push me into traffic's deafening rune
where subways converge.
Now, I slam against a naked human pyramid
balancing so high
I think it might spill
as simply as my last martini.

I meet a corpse in a dinner suit
he feels for my pulse under folds
of this green shantung frock.
It's a place you can't film.
His hands tap the fandango.
Spindly branches tangling my high fidelity.

The corpse in his crumpled dinner suit
corners Los Galapagos Boulevard
calmly stepping to a conga line's limbo.
I'm bent in tai chi's harmonising languor:
lost in dead spaces
between my minds fix
and a nicotine rush.
Some faces flick past
pages from a book I've never read.

He thinks I am like him:
he checks my vital signs:
says we're facing the wrong way.
His double breast shields me
from a city's metallic rage.

Later, at the sand casino
I order grilled parrot
from a waiter who juggles watermelons.
The corpse isn't hungry
he's shredding clouds
pleating napkins into geodesic domes.