the jungle line

rousseau walks on trumpet paths, safaris to the heart of all that jazz, through i bars and girders-through wires and pipes, the mathematic circuits of the modern nights, through huts, through harlem, through jails and gospel pews, through the class on park and the trash on vine, through europe and the deep deep heart of dixie blue, through savage progress cuts the jungle line, in a low-cut blouse she brings the beer, rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear, those cannibals-of shuck and jive, they'll eat a working girl like her alive, with his hard-edged eye and his steady hand, he paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines, and he hangs a moon above a five-piece band, he hangs it up above the jungle line, the jungle line, the jungle line, screaming in a ritual of sound and time, floating, drifting on the air-conditioned wind, and drooling for a taste of something smuggled in, pretty women funneled through valves and smoke, coy and bitchy, wild and fine, and charging elephants and chanting slaving boats, charging, chanting down the jungle line, there's a poppy wreath on a soldier's tomb, there's a poppy snake in a dressing room, poppy poison-poppy tourniquet, it slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit, and metal skin and ivory birds, go steaming up to rousseau's vines, they go steaming up to brooklyn bridge, steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line