Hey you,
what’s on your mind?
Lunch?
Afternoon delight?

Miami is a bubble,
a construct for voyeurs.
After lunch I felt
as if I’d been drugged. Slept for the rest of afternoon. Do you think they put
something in our organic jicama?
All the hotels and spas are empty except for me,
being escorted around by adorable PR girls
named “Destiny,”
I swear,
(tight gray fibers, aquamarine necklace)
as I’m trying on the loofa headgear,
trying out the spinach facials,
dunking in the polar tub then
hurried by a short black gay stutterer
to the volcano pool
where the water bubbles
and then you get the green
slime all over your body.
There were two Latino guys prepping the
herbal soak but they looked more
like they should be pulling out
spark plugs
and they laughed when I dipped
my nkd body into the soupy swill of
chamomile buds and savory twigs.
What? Is this a big joke?
I’m not paying nuthn’ Julio!
This be compt!
Go fck yrselves!
There are three Israeli guys in steam room,
arguing about something and
check me out as if I’m sporting
body-wrap explosives instead of
asparagus textile wrap.
But I have to say the waterfall room is pretty
amazing – a fifty-yard run of water jets
shooting down from a true cathedral  ceiling,
splashing against faux mountain rocks
and dried Mangrove roots that hang from threads of monofilament.
The big gnarly roots turn and jiggle in the downpour
to an overall effect of what? I wonder…
(jungle boogie woogie?)
Who designed this?
But it’s quite a feeling to be drowned beneath torrent
of scented water and deafened by the waterfall roar
while  Israeli dudes come out the other end
yelling at each other,
“Fuck you! Fuck your stupid fucking face!”
My little waterproof guidebook talks about keeping one’s center
and maintaining
a holistic environment of wellness
but these guys are so beyond the Yoga fold that I can’t imagine them
ever calming down. They’re just pissed about everything
What is the intended message here?
The long deafening shower, the Turkish marble chaises
carved to human form, rubbed with cinnamon oil and heated
from within, somehow, the pungent smell of burning sage?
I’m getting the final rub down and natural pine needle treatment,
drifting into trippy dreams of Amazonian orgies,
and that’s when  I start to wonder if the fucking jicama
salad had been laced with Nembutal.
I twist my toes against the ratchets of the stretching apparatus
just to stay awake but by the time I’ve
showered and checked out
I can hardly walk in a straight line through the
purple silk lobby and out to the plaza with the dancing fountains, reeling like a drunken
fuck. The nice valet parking dude smiles at me as he hands me my car keys. Is it the crisp twenty
I give him or does he know that I’ve been slipped a mickey? Is he in on it too?
He’s whispering something into his micro-headphone as I skid
back onto Collins with a sickening crunch of shock absorbers and fenders
hitting pavement since I overlook the six-inch speed bump on the downward curve.
But at least I’m back in the heady sunlight with
with only a few blocks
to my candyland pad at Aqua.
I drive very very slowly.
I’m telling you,
I slept like a baby for the rest of the afternoon.
AG