William Westerfeldt House

Western czarina, she is a gothic embodiment of smoke and brass. Her jungle-cat perfume saunters passed in woven gossamer. She’ll put it plainly, as she only can, how she once swam with snow-white saxophones, lap steels, and baby grands, lamenting how her phonographs have since ceased to sing after so many years of breathing in the brine of bay air. Each night is a crushed red spectacle beside the words carved by Anger into the staircase of her spine. She’d abide the elephant in her parlor-room, his aloof squeeze and the rotgut things they'd got up to. On her lacquered breast, they performed their wanton rites to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Grateful Dead. Ibex and the Bearcat clung to the waist of her vestibule, while Leopard spread with all the flare of Victorian taxidermy across her belly. She’s long been swindled of sleep behind the back-lit fuchsia of Alamo Square, while dervish stars whirl slovenly above and divvy up the cosmic minutia: stardust, sex, and music.