Green lights are all she sees
from the third-story window
of her apartment that overlooks
a threatening park and most of the bad weather
that keeps all the troubled wallflowers indoors.

Very quietly she waits for a car accident
so astonishing that nobody is ever going to want
to write about the losers who should have been
more careful in the first place.

She doesn’t go out unless she’s already
fast asleep. It makes sense to have faith
in the relatively impossible. Science
can’t be trusted, and her parents haven’t kicked in
for the rent in years.

When that gets old she reads through
dozens of old magazines and bitterly complains
to a network devoted entirely to reality shows about cats.

She was some kind of something extraordinary way back when.
It was only ten years ago that it only took a couple dozen
long island ice teas to get her leaning against your shoulder,
laughing at every serious thing you said
and doing her best impression of a movie star who had to leave soon.

What probably happened was that someone probably
went out of their way
to pretend they didn’t think much of those tiny, perfect hands.

That’s the kind of thing that can make a veteran of ballet cruelty
lose their cool and travel halfway around the wide world of sports
trying to prove the other person wrong.

We’ve all been there. Every last idiot in the room
has stammered with the script
right there in front of them.

Nothing to be embarrassed about, but it can become
problematic when there’s too many mirrors in the house
and a really good liquor store at the end
of the poetry section at the local library.

She could have kept laying men to waste
well into her forties.

Instead she cooks elaborate microwave dinners
and waits for the day when she can walk
along the power lines and show people what it really means
to dance the unholy blues away.

That’s bound to happen one of these days.
Lunatics crave constant stimulation. There’s a book
about it and everything.

10/04/2010

Posted on 10/04/2010
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard