It’s Thursday night,
and under no circumstances
am I surrendering
the pen.
the prose-war is on!
and I have the notebook
at a disadvantage
on the corner of my knee.
cheesecake with plastic silverware
will not be enough
to defer my will to write,
tonight,
and as the cheesecake grows lukewarm,
I am concentrating intently
on the finite point
where ink meets paper,
where prose is wrought.
I am waiting.
I am waiting because I was stood up
on an idle Wednesday
by a boy whose last name
I did not know.
I responded with ‘I am but
a small girl
with broad shoulders
and big tits
on a moving walkway
through the airport
toward oblivion.’
I am waiting to turn around
and find the drug-god boy,
in this, the cafe
forsaken by every Lord but him.
‘I want to fly’
is what I’ll tell him,
if he comes here.
‘I want to ride
the crimson passion
of the purple girl’s hair
with the not-so-straight back.’
I need to feel my hair
on the back of my neck
and not jump
with wind-whispers
carrying ghosts of a past.
I need to feel the olive green of a day
with underwater surety,
and I will tell him that.
He will let
what’s out
of my head.
Or maybe not.
trapped transgressions, terrible coffee
(the urge to plagiarize Ellis’s
unpublished lines right here)
open to a moment of a Friday,
I could be even more crazy tomorrow,
the drugs and my good lines
all dried up.
it will be poppy seeds for me,
then,
and blue bandanas
or white caps,
and the surrealistic quality
of over-feel I feel now
will not be extinguished,
but extended.
bad lighting does nothing for a daze,
for the withering of a poem-flower,
the last stanza-petal
clings stubbornly,
for the pen and I are mars
on its creamy
flesh
ending.
the pen is the powdered words
on its skin,
and I am the black grain
which is the last period
following the last line
of the last prose
the summer will ever see.