Blue Death

Halloween drink special Killer

Cocktails: Ladies night, every night,

Vodka and Plague Water, shooters

of Cholera.

I’m blue, baby blue

As I can be

Since my steady boy said

Ship Ahoy and joined

The Nay A Vee

Blue Death (2)

in the afternoon is what Papa

drank with a sprinkle of arsenic

instead of cocaine. Or was that 

Cole Porter? That man was always

trying to answer the eternal question:

champagne or suicide?

Blue Death 3

is the movie of Maugham’s The Veil 

where Diana Rigg played a missionary

nun on a ward for Chinese peasants

dying of Cholera. Impossible to imagine

Lady Di as a nun after her playing

Emma Peel, easily the sexiest woman

ever on TV with the possible exception

of Eartha Kitt as her separated at birth

soul sister, Cat Woman.

Blue Death 4

Yellow flags at sunset flying for

Garcia-Marquez. Who did he compare

notes with? Maybe Camus or Defoe, 

maybe even Sartre who was a Typhus man.

Oh, the sorrow and the pity. Don’t stream

the movie of Love in a Time of Cholera.

It will spoil the book for you forever.

Blue Death 5

is waking up on one of those old

Long Island railroad train cars that

always smelled of soot and dirt and

cigarettes. Had holes in sliding horsehair

seats that always faced the wrong way

where all the Brooks Brothers suits 

and escaped from Pilgrim State lunatics

were dead on their feet while holding

overhead straps while the PA speakers

are stuck on Bobby Vinton’s Blue on Blue

Blue on blue, heartache on heartache
Blue on blue now that we are through
Blue on blue, heartache on heartache
And I find I can’t get over losing you

The next stop is always Hell’s Kitchen