Her feet are dangling over the edge.

Six stories down,
and it’s a typical day in Los Angeles
around 1952. She’s fourteen, too young to notice this,
even though the classic cars and classic battle cries
have been in full swing for most of the summer.

She isn’t aware that time is pulling out all the cheap stops
to get her attention.

Her sixteen-year-old lover rode a bus to Troubled Heart, Texas.
Took a nap, and found himself surrounded by hard-rock refugees
of the mid-90’s. He didn’t know what to do when he realized
that every woman

When he calls to tell her about all this
she just laughs, engulfs the wings she wishes she had
in cigarette smoke and tells him
they should probably see other people.

She loves, loves, lusts after broken heroes.
Especially if they haven’t done anything heroic.

Having never read a book in her life
she doesn’t get the irony of certain things,

Music bores her to tears
that later turn into concrete pigeons,
and fly away.

She doesn’t notice that either.
Doesn’t even seem to care that the hallway
of her apartment building is twenty miles long.

If she didn’t wear sunglasses indoors
she might notice doors opening from the roof
and hands reaching down to try and pull her
into the spaces in-between.

Not very many things make her happy,
people are a complete washout,
and she stopped going to school last year.

People noticed,
but people get busy driving along,
and wondering how many fire hydrants
they can murder.

Or everyone just moved out of California at the same time.

She doesn’t know. Doesn’t care
until the moon slips into something cloudy,
uncomfortable-looking and prone to a roar
of everyone trying and failing to reach the sky at once.

What she loves to do is sit on the edge of her building,
and let her feet dangle over the edge.

If two more cars drive by with the windows open,
she’ll have enough fragments for a whole song.

05/04/2012

Posted on 05/05/2012
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