Jasmin's Guitar

Into one's life, people come and leave
like passing seasons
rusty golden falling leaves
they disappear completely
Their crispness crushed to dust
No way to rediscover lost lives
There was that constant reminder
The old guitar sat in the corner
still painted with flowers and
a colorful string bandoleer,
Jasmin's guitar

I wasn't musical, nor was the guitar in tune
tossed and tumbled, a sad reminder
of when it was fresh and newly painted
Jasmin would sing to me in the nude
The guitar pressed against her dark breasts
her long graceful fingers moving
as fast as the eye could see
Her angelic voice
a balm to the tensions and stress
of living in a foreign country
with little money
and an over aggressive police force
The shining guitar in her hands

I had no musical talent
But I could play her slender body as well
as she could play her guitar
I’d strum her vagina till she’d hit high E
On her endpins I reach low E with my tongue
I’d play her nipples as if they were frets
and wrap around her like a bandolier
to fill her body with the finest wax on God’s earth
As her guitar sat quiet in the corner

Familial problems, parent's divorce
caused her to run from the states
We met in a little hilltop town in Italy
Members of a band of outcasts
Coming together in camaraderie
to smoke the pipe
passed round a dark room
The delicate perfume of burning hash
lulled me into a gentle sleep
Jasmin grew groggy
I made love to her on the floor in a corner under a blanket
surprised when the Sophisticate’s
Supple body bled of inexperience

The hash had traveled in Joseph's shoe
across the Moroccan border
walked to Italy
where it had taken on the shape of a foot
before being broken into smaller pieces
and generously shared
of course
there was hemp the Californian received
in weekly brown envelopes at the post office
harder stuff had been carried
by a pharmacist son
charged with theft by his father
who wrote him a check to flee the country

never touched the narcotics
Jasmin liked the weed,
in those days it hardly smelled of skunk
So weak it did nothing for me
But the yellow brown pebble
burning in a foil pierced hash pipe was
was subtle, tranquilizing, peaceful

Jasmin would smoke her weed
and spend the night
filling notebooks with poetic confusion
in the mornings we could not decipher
what she'd written though she was sure
there was greatness somewhere within
If only we could crack the code

We were inseparable, tied to each other
like the strings wound round the guitar pegs
You'd need a pliers to extract them
Then came the tool that separated us
he father’s heart attack
A ticket waited at the Rome airport
I drove her there slowly through ancient citadels
a route rarely traveled by tourists
We had a few days to spare
We filled them with promises of love
and furious bouts of love making
She cried when I filled her with hot sperm
She called my cock Vesuvius
and I called her cunt Mt. Etna

The Rome airport was chaos
people running in all directions
I accompanied her as far as the wire cage
She showed her passport and we separated
She landed in JFK. My father picked her up
She spent a week with my family
then took off for Chicago
She wrote once care of my father
I found the letter years later
Our relationship somehow got lost in translation
Time dulled the knife’s sharp blade

Ten years passed before I returned to the states
A series of lovers and alcohol confounded my memory
Somehow I found myself with a wife and baby
The old guitar spent ten years silent sitting in the corner
Before leaving Italy I gave it to the Janitor's golden son
who strummed it knowingly

Into one's life, people come and leave
like the passing seasons
rusty golden falling leaves
they disappear completely
Their crispness crushed to dust
No way to rediscover lost lives
There was that constant reminder
The old guitar that sat in the corner
still painted with flowers and
a colorful string bandoleer,
Jasmin's guitar