I was
the lowcut blond
at the hotel bar stirring ice
with the orange paper umbrella
and a sundown smile
the prom queen runner-up
gambling with platinum promises
the dealer, Maryo's slight of hand
never quick enough to touch me
I was fast in a short skirt
legs carried me skin deep in men
many pleasures, one
night stands, used, damp
towels on the batheroom floor
always someone to clean up the mess
I left behind
I Left Them...
(inspired by Michael McNeilley's "For The Women")
Smooth liquid black
framed that face.
Ah. Yes.
That one was young and in love
with my past.
The painter with the dockside
display of goodies, promised
an A-frame on the sound.
Ex-wife Brandee lives there now.
The perfect smile smashed
against the steering wheel,
should have died. He pulled
me along like a comet's tail. I fell
from the sky like a stone.
The little man in high heeled boots--
I paid his child support, bought him
toys, a ruffled shirt.
It was purple.
"Put some sugar on it, Baby."
The one that didn't like his fruit tart,
didn't want to pucker. I waited
for his blue eyes, always at home
in a hotel room. Everything
gathered dust.
Caught up in calculations, shoebox living
not on the agenda, the one
that picked my pockets married
my best friend.
She had
more money.
The one with after the fact
nostalgia about our illusionary
past, took off his glasses
when I was partial
to intellectuals.
I left them--
men, who had breakfast in bed
with my emotons.
I left them
after they left me.
Poppies
Pale as your prognosis,
you wave your silvered
stigmata in the oblique
autumn light. I can see
your blood course through your veins
under your translucent skin.
You are almost beautiful
in your near demise, hair braided
into a simple helix, twisted
like DNA strands of fragile virus
that emaciates your tomorrow,
fragile like its host, perishable
in the thin air.
You twist the plaits of brown
around your fingers like a child
you never were. When other girls played
with dolls, you played with cocks.
Heels to the street, you never
skipped hopscotch, but knew
what it was, once upon a time.
When you need it you don't care
where its been, you explain.
In the blinking neon light
of this shitty motel room
you disappear and reappear,
like an x-ray apparition,
an empty soul, a sad story
in graffiti scheduled to be painted over.
Desperation opens it blackened wings
and takes your high higher this time
over the cracks in the sidewalk,
the ones you never stepped on
but constantly considered.
Like mother like daughter,
you heard her laugh, same need,
same street, maybe the same unclaimed
bodybag. Dead for sure, but it's o.k.,
having lived it all by now.
Perhaps she is buried beneath blood
red poppies, hands folded across
her breast, finger entwined in a daily prayer
of worms. Perhaps nothing matters
anymore.
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