For Ms. R. Jones

Delicate, she plays
all 12 notes, the same twelve
pushed and plucked
for hundreds of years
from Bach to Basie

She counts the beats
with her feet and she
lets her dress drape
and dart daggers into
my chest,

How rash, she
floods the keys dawned
and drives my head
down between her
notes, not waiting

for the silence of
fifty years of filthy
matrimony, from
separate sheets to
separate beds to

separate movements
genres, homes, not
smoke-filled clubs
but houses high in
the Hollywood hills

oh, and like the rash
that she is, she clings
back up again and cold
to the touch, the ebony
and ivory sing -

Rashida, play your
delicate tune for me
on the other side
of the smog,
on the other side of the screen.