Karma was a dancer
at the Déjà Vu,
trading fantasies a few days a week
for *****, crumpled bills and
then living the dream on her days off.
That was before I knew her.
Before she faded just a little.

Which is not to say
that she was no longer beautiful
with her mermaid hair,
the color somewhere between
phosphorescent amber and
burning chestnut brown,
down to her *** and falling all around
her painfully sensuous curves.

The faint pucker lines 'round her mouth,
that liver spot,
a slight, barely discernable paunch,
I could see such things, too but
they only endeared me to
the façade of some silly notion
a kin to forever.

We would stay up late,
even on the weeknights,  
wine silly and
**** chatty.
She would dance
and I would tell her
****** poems in exchange.
It seemed like a good trade
to me but the truth is,
she was being shorted in the deal.

We said,
I love you
but I’m not sure we knew
that we didn’t really have that
to offer one another.
Both of us had sold more
than we had ever bargained for
long before we met.

When money ran thin and
times grew hard
she split.

Hope still stops by on occasion.
(She was a dancer, too).
But it seems a bit easier to distinguish
differences between the faux
and the genuine these days.
She doesn’t stay long.

I like to blame it all on Karma
despite knowing that I was just never
quite frugal or savvy enough to afford more than a few perfume-drenched moments at the foot of the stage.