I could fall in love with her.

She promises
everything and anything.

No
She promises nothing
She merely alludes to every
intangible dream,
good or bad,
that I've ever had.

She demands commitment
She rewards dogged repetitive tenacity to
to the point of suffering.
Then again,
sometimes she gifts things for no reason.

It's odd but the harder I look at her,
the more I study her for understanding,
the more vague she becomes.

She threatens me sometimes,
maybe a lot,
and occasionally she springs
nasty surprises.

In spite of her meanness,
I imagine giving her some part of myself
but
she's fickle about gifts
and completely ungracious when she
refuses them.

Still,
you've always got a chance with her.
At least until you don't.

I would.
I would make her mine.

But Yesterday,
that ***** just won't leave me the **** alone.

Could I spin a line of*
Words that keep the
Flow of a thought
That slowly
Dwindles
To
A
S
u
d
d
e
n
.
.
.
.
.
.
­**Stop............

There is this girl
cat lanky long
hair geometric and black
love right angular

There is this girl
moonlight faint
baby talking the plants
and they die

There is this girl
a burning in the throat
the sensation of something coming up
Acid reflux

There is this girl
who came back
and then left

There is this girl
twitching wet and frayed on the sheets
smoldering electric breaker trip
Coughing

There is this girl
licentiously staring at me
over the steering wheel
through the windshield
across the hood
racing the engine
black, black tire smoke
smiling

There is this girl
here on a holliday
a week long, all inclusive
get away

There is this ******* girl
wavy and swirling through the tears, still

There is this dog
two cats
no three
a lot of **** cats
there are these other dogs

There is this house
that felt like home
just once

There was this lady
who forgot her name
and got lost in the bathroom

I’m the man
not enough

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.

Dolly Madison kisses me back sweet-like
outside of Ruby’s
where we sip elixirs and giggle
at the sidewalk staggers
of late night downtown.

“I don’t want someone directing me,”
She says, unexpectedly
(and it comes out like a question),
“but I don’t want to tell someone else
what to do, either.”

“Oh oh,” I say
“Like two mustangs.”

And she says, “what?”

“Two mustangs,” I reiterate.
Not a rider and a horse
or a horse and a rider,
with the digging of spurs and
the crack of crops,
but two steeds, side by side,
running for all they’re worth.

Dolly’s eyes stare
before they
roll up and to her left.
I make my hands move forward
up and down and
side to side,
together.

She lights with a slow smile and says, “yeah”
and kisses me harder.

In my mind the mustangs
sweat.

They recall far too well

They keep count
of the exact amount of
milk and sugar
in her Earl Grey tea.

They take note of
how she won’t allow
bar fruit
to swim in her drink.

They catalog the precise shades of
white, pink and red.

They never forget a body
or face.

They were unobservable last night
at dinner
with so much light mirroring
the windows

Completely unnoticed
while we staggered
between the bums and youth
of downtown.

When we danced,
when she laughed,
with her cool fingers
slick on my skull,

when the downstairs neighbors
banged on the ceiling

when she said that I was…,

I was alone with her.

But this morning,
too many hours after cocktails,
with her skin fuzzy bright
all the sun leaking in,

I could feel the metallic glint
of their stares.

Close but not too close.
not close enough to hold on to but
close.

When they took the air,
I could feel black feathers
beating my ribs.

The crows,
they know and always remember.

We eat breakfast at the diner
two blocks up the street
I shew shewed them away
while she was distracted reading the menu

but I saved the crust of my toast
to feed them later.