This town is crazy,
senile,
blathering,
foaming at the mouth,
cracks big enough to fall in,
live in.
The bars breathe,
hyperventilate and swallow nice people,
Baptist people,
nice Baptist people,
pretty little Baptist girls
with pretty little embroidered good books
in their pretty little hands.
This town swallows
and regurgitates
alcoholics and street walkers with bruised faces
they don't smile much.
At the river we found the end of
the world
and Lassie sat there
with a bottle of vodka drenched orange soda.
She could have once been one of
the aforementioned Baptist girls,
peel back the dirt and psychosis.
She's the prettiest girl in New Orleans,
she said she was a runway model once
and I believe it.
She has strong features,
obliterated by a snow cap,
dirt, mud, lovelessness
and a bag-lady Armani theory coat.
She also said she was from
Scotland
with her strong Wonder Bread voice.
I don't believe everything
but I will admit I am naive.
Tempe has its share of
gutter-cousins,
but the fog had rolled in here
and these kids looked like an Orwellian wet dream.
Sky and sea were one brown mass
and they hanging on the pier like schizophrenics on Harvard
dumpsters.
I always drop a buck or
smoke.
It wouldn't have helped.
The Generation X version of Grandma's magical chicken soup
would come up short here.
Geniuses would come up lacking
--
these kids don't have what to wish for.
There are four of them
including Lassie who held my hand for five minutes
because she's cold and
I'm a mass of shivering neurons,
and she's telling me disconnected stories of her past
and she never finishes a thought.
Stuart has a tat across his
face,
he's drunk -- probably more than drunk but coherent
probably a Nobel Prize Winner from a broken home
who will never quite claim his prize.
He tells me they squat in 9th Ward.
I've heard it's dangerous there
but I guess par for the course
changes with the course.
And tonight
I met a girl
and we are staying on a boat on the lake.
A big white boat with silver sails and endless ocean beneath
us.
The sky will be green
and the water pink with cotton candy islands
and Puff the Magic Dragon will be our landlord
and we'll smile translucent smiles
and Lassie will be holding someone else's hand for
companionship
and this town will keep digesting pretty little Baptist
girls
and spitting them up on cobble stone
and Orwellian Piers
and I'm feeling
sick.
Copyright, EPB,
1995
Beauty and ugliness abound. A paradox to me.
