He thinks -
Give me the rain dripping from a neon sign.
Give me the wet girl,
dishwater blonde,
sad, lost and stoned.
It’s time to go.
He doesn’t really care,
but hates the moment walking away.
Loneliness, with its sucking fangs
waits behind him in the shadows
as a pale, frail, dim,
withered, but still beating heart
pulls away from him
like the last bus out of town.
He wants to hold this moment,
own it like the wasted lighter in his pocket
that he doesn’t throw away
because
maybe
there’s more,
a little drop.
Maybe a spark might invite flame -
warm for a moment.
She looks like the smudge in the bottom of the pipe
that might still give a little something -
might be more than just a stain or a burnt shadow.
Sometimes, late at night,
girls look like that.
Her careless shrug is brutal.
It shatters the minute in which it dwells.
So he watches the pieces closely as they fall away,
rain,
strange girl,
wet neon lurid colors,
flavor of intoxication,
bullshit promises,
the way they let each other
touch each other,
shared fire and smoke.
Now it washes away like sugar from his fingertips.
He could see her as she is -
ugly,
small,
drenched like an alley rat,
but tonight he is high enough
to lift the whole
weird , wet, raining world -
and the little jaundiced angel that floats in the middle of it, too.
He can’t keep it,
so he sings it romantic in the voice of his mind.
He decides . . .
she is florescent,
a glowing apparition
that he watches ascend to the pouring clouds above the streetlights.
Nevermind the way
her clumsy hand
reaches back
to deeply scratch her ass
as she walks away.