Lions & Tigers & Beers

The soiree begins,
characters enter the scene.
Burlesque dancers flap red feathers,
black lace masks seeking eyes,
Explorers from the 1920s,
bobbing beige helmets carry strange weapons,
multi-barrelled guns and leather mechanisms tied to forearms,
sparkling with lights and buttons.
Marie-Antoinette prances in her underwear
breasts rise beneath tight constraints
while black layers of crisp mesh crinoline
make quiet music, brushing against time-warped bodies.
Platinum blonde hair stacked high into the air,
everyone's obscured by layers.
Top hat crews walk together along modern floors,
releasing the smell of beer with each step.
Silver bugs with wings fly around the room's edges,
observing improvised Charlestons
catching phrases, such as Anything Goes,
with long green bumpy tongues.
A different type of Wonderland,
Alice walks lost with a bronze turn-key in her back.
Painted mustaches melt in the heat, waltzing across faces.
A woman in a leopard catsuit
with a patent leather waist belt and candy apple lips,
shuffles sepia photographs of profitable side-show deformities.
American World War II music wafts through velvet halls,
drawing the cast closer inside dark chambers,
where a woman dangles from a hanging hoop
swimming in the air, held by her neck, then foot, then waist
while another girl twirls inside one.
A band plays center stage
punk meets the Tudors.
A white ruffled fan jumps and cheers
with an orthodontic metal device
keeping her mouth open in a voiceless scream.
French maids, time travelers and fluorescent beasts
prowl the building
walking up flights and through tunnels
touching big plastic pink, green and yellow bugs
hanging from the ceiling accompanied by black umbrellas.
The place heaves and contracts
and just as suddenly as it all began
the crowd disperses
like ants on their way back home
from a divine picnic.