Don'T Let Your Mouth Write A Check Your Butt Can'T Cash Poem by Jane Springer

We should all be
so sure the check's in the mail & the cash in the bank & the bank
in the black—forgive me the promises I took back:

For I could not keep you, lover, entertained—I would give you the circus
but when we walked past, carnies pulled up their stakes & down the tent
came—to stubs in the dirt, crushed papercups, one blue sequin stuck

to your boot heel.

& If not the circus I would give you music—a flamenco ukulele jamboree—
sounded good from the highway but entering late, we just caught the encore:
Heart & Soul played on one instrument & one string—

(a shoestring).

& if not a concert, I'd give you knowledge—of the physical attributes that
make raptors such excellent hunters. From the eyesight of eagles to the
silent light of owls. But that, too, went fowl—at the aviary, falcons died
mid-flight—so all the way back to the hotel

we swerved to miss the bodies of falling birds.

Then the hotel burned.

& the bellhop fed a rope of sheets out our third story window to lower the
cleaning girl down. & the ring I said I'd give you melted beside a plastic
fundeck of karma sutra cards.

Watching them from the street

you noticed the last knotted rung of rope that saved the girl was your silk
blindfold & the bellhop might have flown out on a black plume of smoke—

had not flames caught
tail feathers of my boa clenched in his teeth.