Panama Jim

Panama Jim falls in love with Rosaria Morales in the middle of a performance.

Panama Jim has a flaming sword half way down his throat when she flashes past,

Standing on the back of a horse as white as clouds,

As white as cocaine,

As white as sheets in a five-star hotel,

And she has her arm extended and the smile of a transported saint on her (truly lovely) face.



Afterwards,

Panama Jim searches the tents until he finds her,

Then spouts half a Neruda love poem before kissing her as if she were some sort of impossibly hot

South of the border blarney stone.



They do it.

Under the caramel corn wagon, they do it,

Then do it again,

Until the spoked wheels bow out from the sultry conditions,

And Jim and Rosaria relocate out of fear of a caramel avalanche.



Panama Jim has been a fire eater for seventeen years,

But suddenly,

All of that seems like ice cream,

Like laughing gas,

Like popsicles,

Compared to the inferno he falls into in Rosaria's arms.



Love is like canoeing on lava!

Then the canoe is gone,

And Panama Jim flails in the white-hot rapids,

Letting Rosaria polish his bones with her kisses.



Anymore,

(thinks Panama Jim later)

You don't meet a woman like this.

She doesn't just come riding by, on a coke-white horse,

With a rose in her teeth.



But this time she did,

And Panama Jim is glad.

_________

for One Shoot Sunday