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
Copyright © 2025 by David Mura. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I was thinking of [Constantine P.] Cavafy’s series, ‘Days of …’ where he recalls sexual encounters. From early on, I’ve been influenced by gay writers like [Pier Paolo] Pasolini, [Yukio] Mishima, Dennis Cooper, Justin Chin, and Cavafy, [and] the frank ways they depicted their sexuality. One can trace the movement of S&M from the gay world to the mainstream heterosexual world these past few decades. Years ago, a famous Asian American academic decried my writing on sexuality to a couple of Asian American poet friends. We’re still dealing with that cone of silence in our community. The film Leaving Las Vegas is also in this poem.”
—David Mura
David Mura
