BAR GITANOS

The funk gives me a headache and the tape deck spins,
Janis Joplin requesting we take a little piece of her heart.
My shoulders massaged, I'm begged to dance
in the narrows twixt tiny tables and long bar
but I'm not drunk enough, or too drunk with soda scotches
and say I only dance when inspired.
The small neat brown-banged woman says
"I'll try not to take that personally".
The entertainment, she'd sung lines she wrote,
folk and country, a church organ tucked in back of them.
She notes that I look very much at home. Anyone would
had they come in out of a snowstorm or drank as much as me.
The olive-hued barmaid prowed like a coastguard cutter
spends no little time discussing with the girl darker than most
the comparative heft and carry of their breasts
and I'm invited to feel my way to judgement
though not of the barmaid's unfortunately who's
serving someone else while I chat with
a slim trim single mother who comes from
a village in the deadly glades of an old country
on the topic of her dysfunctional family,
telling her she's wasting money on a therapist.
She should spend it on the barmaid who knows
everything there is to know about happiness.
The night's intended to launch a young artist,
whose work's mounted on the wall but who in a washroom
mounts or is mounted by the girl darker than most,
or so she tells me with a certain pride later in a taxi,
her story linked to smoky air thick with dismaying outcomes.
It could have happened because with gypsies anything is possible.


CIRCUS

A travelling circus with a four-pole big top tent, the spotlight on the trapeze platform, the trapeze, the trapeze artist. The artists climb the rope ladder by the main entrance, an attendant stands to the side. Over the entrance the bandstand, the band playing. Around are the seats for the spectators, the circus manager and agent sit in the circus box by the entrance and exit, and the steps leading to seats. Inside the ring are clowns doing their comic turns, the bareback riders. Acrobats build a pyramid, the liberty horse is rampant before the ringmaster's whip, a circus horse performs the levade, passade. A vaulter leaps on and off his horse. In the wild animal cage the lion tamer makes his lions and tigers leap through hoops. Outside the tent are parked the caravans, trailers. No one's sitting in the seats.

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