Vegas Rave Muse

As I watched her being whipped by her mistress
on the lawn glowing rings necklaced the dancers

crowding to a circle and the Vegas sky flashed 
strobes and her notched welts popped pink and ropey

and the hour wasn’t as dark as some I’ve known
with laughter near the empty pool—no one swims

on such a night and sleep’s a small café
no one enters and I recalled the Alexandrian bar

where Cavafy met a boy waiter, how a blond
resembling my ex-wife danced with a pink haired go-go

but when I looked again it was morning, the twenty-four
year old vanished and I was sleeping beneath a ceiling

I’d never seen and along the boulevard on that hotel
balcony where the desert exalts in memory and is forever