She was mad,
and he still insisted on borrowing
someone’s else best coat and tie
in order to take her out on the town one last time
for the two hundredth time.

Carole was mad,
a terrible piano player, too,
but he told her once that he liked
how she was hell,
on the kind of wheels
you can only buy on the Nashville black and white market.

Champagne to celebrate
every time he made it up
the burning front porch stairs alive,
and past the blood-stained brides with poetry for sale.

Politics
and nineteen-minute grudges
to make the sex dangerous,
the drugs understanding and the rock and roll
turned up to the point of becoming
a bunch of ugly noise pollution in outer space.

She made an effort to blind him,
every time they went to the grocery store in the summer,
and he just laughed,
bought new books
to replace the ones she had ripped to pieces.

Over a hospital room above their second-family liquor store
he took her by the hand,
and told her just before the morphine kicked in
that she was dangerous enough
to have been a bride for Vincent Price in the 1970’s.

It might have been morphine,
but it might have been the kind of holy water
that can really finish off those love sick,
one-time writer types.

Some people can retire young,
because they’re so rich in spirit,
but more often than not
they spend so much time
buying new material from lively locals,
they forget how to string together a half-competent sentence.

Carole
and her fella
are probably in their early thirties.

They haven’t retired,
but they aren’t exactly spiritual
about the standard nine-day work week.

Carole sleeps through most mornings.
He likes to slow down the advancing ocean
with the biggest rocks he can fit in the palm of his hand,
and he auditions constantly
for commercials that can’t afford cameras or writers.

Or even coffee.
He tells people that it can be an entire meal
for someone with luck to spare.

She doesn’t touch the stuff.
Stimulation comes to her as naturally
as a stubborn child trying to will clean air
from a Los Angeles oxygen mask.

Love’s a close second,
and that’s at least part of her trouble.

Everything else
isn’t much of a concern at all,
and he tells her this
every time it’s in their best interests to make peace.

09/16/2011

Author's Note: I doubt anyone can tell, but I was kind of trying to play around with my usual style a little bit.

Posted on 09/16/2011
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