Peris perish under the heat of your gaze. You don't mean no harm, you're just lookin' for a place to rest your weary travel legs, knock back a cold one. Should a woman want to sit beside you, do the same - well, who are you to stop her? Though they always wind up tangling you up in some kind of drama: Use you to make a boyfriend jealous, a target for the wild love-lust they've been hiding in poems and the locked parts of their hearts. Pure as prairie grass, trod under your boot.

You try to gorgonize the sanguine stranger with tales of drunken derring-do. You're a seething hotbed of hormones, just itching to rip off his pants and live out that Yardbirds song, yet to just put it all out there in plain English would puncture all the mystery and fun - or maybe it would just give his rejection much sharper teeth, were rejection his reply.

Oh, such paralipses tumble from your pair o' lips! Truly a thing to behold. English majors can keep up the tension and teasing all night. You're afraid of the wordless, of letting go, exhales and oblivion.

You press your leptodactylous grip around the parrhesic Parisian, trying to hold down the moment enough to keep it steady without crushing it. Now is not the time for accismus; yield your heart the floor. You may be almost past your prime, but you couldn't afford trips like these as a fresh faced college kid, having no Daddy money to surf the world on.

You smell his breath; it smells like booze, but so does yours. Maybe what you thought was a connection is just a shared cloud of inebriation. But who cares? Rage against the dying of the now.

Cheer up, my chapfallen chum, though your gadarene grab at love has failed. Your propiscient friends laughed and said "I told you so." They just want to pat themselves on the back, count coins won through cunning, exchange them for ale and battle over whose angry laughter most closely resembles actual mirth. You're the one with true courage; they can't stand to appear lesser next to you. They burn you in effigy verbally, you're the reminder there's good in the world they can no longer have. You're the bitter memory they throw booze at, the monster they slay without thought.

Your eyes flash flint even in happy photos, mistrust now an innate part of you, cataracts of calculated distance to keep opportunists at bay. A quality you'll need on a day like today. Strangers and friends alike will want to know what happened. You'll have to say something; pleading the Fifth would just be handing them a blank sheet to write whatever story they want for you. You've practiced a concise reply; you better keep track of your free drinks to keep it that way. "I once dated the groom." You're tired of being seen as wild oats to sow.

This nasty habit of esprit d'escalier eats away at you; each thought of what you should have said like dragon's teeth in your brain. They leave serrated toothprints and make it hard to keep your cool. What do you have but your ability to make others laugh? A lot, but you've convinced yourself it's all, that you're useless as an empty potato chip bag without it. You dog paddle social situations like a rescue animal while Daddy's Girls do nothing and have everything dropped in their laps. "The bird of paradise alights only on the hand that does not grasp."

Our nival angels still gleam in my mind.

My favorite memory comes dressed in boots, wool coats, thick jeans, knit ski hats. Limbs stretched wide to embrace the sky, smoothing wing arcs on the ground, surrounded on all sides by pure white, and you maybe two feet away. Side by side, not touching, just sunshine and elements and good intentions, feeling the best was yet to come, a present to be unwrapped.

The intervening years mean I must walk over steps incarnadine with failure to get to such a pure place, yet it tastes all the sweeter tinged with relief.

A rumbustious night out with your friends, embarrassing embranglements with bouncers, Tequila sunrise bruises big as golf balls dot your body. God knows how they got there.

You lie on your stomach and whimper, point to the liniment and assume I'll pick up the trail of thought: "You. Pick that up, uncap it, rub it on me." If you had the capacity to speak you'd probably sweeten it up with "oh baby, you're so good to me...I'd be lost without you..." But really - "woman, massage my ego" is the bones of the message. The bruises are all that connect us.

Lasso up that lassitude and walk with me through streets of petrichor. Our shoes squish on the concrete while the bedizened hipsters huddle inside, protecting their hairdos. Your lambent lips light up my life, the star to steer my ship by.

Saltant steps, corybantic cries as we try to outdo each other in the perfectly placed puddle stomp to best drench the other. We dance through empyreal elements like notes in sheet music, a perfect harmony in the space between us. Do you remember the last time life felt so easy? And why must feeling this way always involve escape?

You try to be a smooth motherfucker, but who are you kidding?

You don't get the action other people do 'cuz they can shuffle conquests like a deck o' cards while you fall madly in love with every cockaroach who twirls his antenna your way. Don't believe me? Look at all the holes they've burrowed in you. Fill 'em up with enough alcohol and you can spackle your insides and pass for anyone else. Your guts whistle like a ghost town when the false bravado flushes down the drain and you feel like a forgotten cupcake in the rain. Fun.

You're surprised when people remember your potatory proclamations the next day. Not that you didn't mean them, you just didn't think anyone was listening. Hell, you don't even remember what you said, so they could be quoting a magical lamp post for all you know. You gathered your words and flung them like excelsior and people are still finding them in their hair, apparently.

You hope you said somethin' good, that your sentences weren't just ossuaries for your disappointments like so many embarrassing drunks. You just wanna drink coffee and people are looking at you expectantly, waiting for more quotes.

No one is safe from your Manichaen machete.

You find the purest heart and list reasons to reject it, hear lies where there are none, invent evil intentions, reinforce the iron gate around your crippled coward's hovel of a soul.

All those smudges you see are just fingerprints from your impatient, untrusting clutches, trained to look for lice. You're embarrassed when others notice your heart beat, the motion pointing out its filemot frailty, its near uselessness. You'd prefer to just pretend it's not there, yet it's relentless as a cockroach. Don't you need it to live? Pesticide-soaked, it trudges joylessly.

Because there's a beer promotion going on, the bar is full of callipygian strangers beautiful enough to be someone's lonely bedroom drawing of what love looks like - you know, before you realize that everyone is cracked and broken and learn to find someone whose scars fit yours, and that this is not just a making-do compromise, but what love is.

Companies don't sell love but shallow dreams meant to look like it. There are plenty in the coriaceous crowd eager to suck up the illusion like peppermint beer or whatever ridiculous novelty will make you feel adventurous for five minutes.

I'm stuck in fulsome prison.

Yes men who pretend to be my friends clasp each other's claws in formation, blotting out the sun and keeping the truth from me, like I'm some kind of invalid who can't handle it, like I'm a wound and they're the bandages that will help me heal. Or so they say. Try to convince me I'm crippled when they really just want to keep me in a box like a controlled substance. Too much freedom and my fuse is set, or so my made up dossier does say.

I just "yes, yes" back at them.

Carmine claws carve rivers of need on a back stripped for just such longings. You've spent so long in this place in your thought bubbles as you did more mundane things like work and pay bills. Now life has let you step inside the thought bubble. You wish you weren't so drunk and freaked out, but you're happy you're here.

"I'm just enjoying the moment" is what you say in the moment, but you know you'll cling to this like faith in God and if you're not careful you just might choke on it like a pill that won't dissolve.

Quit your quiddities and do what must be done.

Your heart and your brain may be on the same page, but your spine is hidin' out at the bar telling tall tales, stretching the truth like putty, grabbing little chunks of it to Bondo patch your rhetorical jalopies, bidding intriguing strangers to take rides in them with you, you know not where nor why, just that you want to get away and motion feels better than inertia and the wind feels good on your face, your thoughts like dice shaken in a sweaty palm. Your numbers must come down eventually.

Something inside you is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

Electronic letters on the wall say "THE ONLY WAY TO BE PURE IS TO BE ALONE" and they have the curious effect of tea and sympathy from an old woman you wish was your Mom. You don't want to be hatefully alone or tell the world to fuck off, just alone enough that you can plant your flag where you please without all those grubby hands laying claim and telling you what to do, where to go. You want to read your internal compass yourself, not trust someone else's interpretation.

"She's so mercurial," your friend says of you as kind of an ironic compliment, her tone suggesting you're a first grader who's been acting up and should know better but that we'll discuss that later when there's not company around, as if the company can't see the creepy dynamic going on.

One day your head's an explosion of flowers and love and one day it's purity and aloneness and people call you Nietzschean. Well, balance never was your thing. You're the force who tears down the walls so that others may feel just a little bit more. Your blood's incidental.

Your friable friendships are blown away like empty plastic cups at a picnic, their usefulness run out. You mistakenly think it's their call to make, but you're the one better off. You're a Catholic girl, so you know about ashes to ashes, fun to funky.

You always knew you'd be self-sufficient, pollinated by the wind. Better that than suffer the fools who make sport of cutting you down, just to have someone to sit next to at the movies. Choose your own movies or star in your own. What good has trusting others' definitions gotten you? Shoes that don't fit.

Your fawning followers treat your farts like prophecies. You ask a direct question and they answer only anserine laughter, dare not say anything that won't flatter you.

You don't know what's really in their hearts; they secretly hate you and want your power. Their eyes take note of your every move, their feet eager to climb your calves, fastening onto you as a fulcrum on which to elevate themselves.

Better get your snout outta the mirror and fine-tune your peripheral vision; the axe is about to fall. Or are you just so in love with the drama of it all?

There is naught but a nosegay left of what we had. The petals are crumbling, the ribbon around it stained brown like nicotine fingers. It doesn't mean anything if I don't think it does, and I don't want it to.

I don't want any remembrance of you. I hope I don't have to cut out chunks of my brain to get you out, that science can tell me which tendril in the sea of synapses I need to snap to find where your memory is hiding like cat puke in a hallway. A spotless mind is a mind without you.

His mellifluous murmurings cause a scission under your skin. You feel the world's fallen away and all you can see is this light that's been sparked and all you can think is you want to follow it, that at the end of your journey you'll see the whole picture, that this light is the hearth in a place you can finally call home. That for now you must content yourself to warming your fingertips and trusting your hunch while people look at you like you're crazy but mostly harmless, like using a crayon drawing for a driver's license.

They'll see.

You call your pessimism optimisim. You won't look at the glass to see how much water's in it. You cheerfully acknowledge the bald patches where your nerve endings were cauterized like you're breezily showing off new furniture to guests. There are rooms you just don't go in, synapses tied with yellow police tape.

You pretend this half life is not just adequate but ideal, that you've got one up on everyone else and there's nothing anyone can teach you. If you listened to Leonard Cohen you'd know there is a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in.

You wake muzzy-headed next to the guy from the other night. Seemed like a good idea at the time...so did getting your face painted with a picture of Bambi (it didn't look so stupid when you weren't the only one).

In the haze of the morning light you see the interstices between the grand proclamations that must've been what attracted you. You'd hope so, anyway. If not, whiskey does some horrible things to your judgment. If personified, it would be a bad news friend who lifted your skirt and wrote "come and get me" in lipstick on your thighs.

He made for an ambisinister lover and what was supposed to be fun was just sad. In theory, you're building a life together, pretending that's possible with no light or air.

There's no room for you with someone who's essentially a carcass devoured by fear. You both mean well, but some flowers are just pollinated by the wind, and attempts at messing with stamens and pistils like you see on TV will just make you wanna shout at a body of water about how unfair life is, the gloom covering everything like smoke.

Why do you cling to the drama?

Your thegotic thoughts take their toll. You can't handle hate without burning your own fingers; these things are as swords, two-sided.

A glass is raised to you for being the one who holds her head high as her opponent cowers in shame, and you wave away the gesture. Rap your knuckles on the walls, girl. Don't be so sure of your solid brick construction that you don't notice your evil thoughts replacing them with glass. Throw a stone and you shatter yourself.

Take a deep breath and run your fingers over that stone; keep it safely contained in your pocket.

They huddle together, their shoulders hunching against you like circled wagons, whispers of subdolous subterfuge passed back and forth like a joint. What a buncha babboons.

From time to time they peer up at you. You pretend you're not looking, nonchalantly flipping through a magazine like you're waiting for someone to bring you tea and cut your hair like a celebrity's. You're practiced in the art of the subtle sidelong glance, though. Every time one of their heads pops up, whack-a-mole like, their smile wavers as they gaze at you.

Your horoscope in the magazine says "never suffer fools gladly."

Scintellescent stories spin around your skull as the light fades, the sun giving up the last bit o' juice, the sweetest part.

You feel fingers gently weaving through your hair and feel prized, like someone's pet, but in a good way. You feel arms pull you close and wrap yours tight around broad shoulders, twin exhaled sighs that say "yes."

You'd hoped that this would happen, yet took great pains to not let your hopes get carried away. It was like trusting kids to take exactly two pieces of candy from a Halloween sized bag.

Eat up, kids. Eat up.

He had a tin ear for the tintinabulation of the sounds she put forth, so she figured they were useless 'til a passerby remarked they were swell. She told the original guy to go to hell, got hooked up with a recording contract.

The album was called "Silver Throated Sally" and featured a photo of her with a big, open smile and silver bells for teeth, though they were shaped so much like teeth you really had to squint and hold it up to your face to tell. Silver Throated Sally sang songs to make all the children cry, emboldened shy lovers to give it a try. Silver shines so.

"You got to change your evil ways," he sang along with the radio. On the "baby" part, he pokes your belly like the Poppin Fresh Dough Boy. "When I come home, baby...My house is dark and my thoughts are cold."

You maneuver away from his grabby hands and continue cooking dinner. You're not angry, just pensive. You're thinking of how things will be when you leave, when you finally follow your heart and get out of here. You just can't see this being the rest of your life. Maybe you watch too many soap operas. Maybe you're just scared.