female noir

 
she had colors once, bright & flamboyant & slick.
but I made her black&white.

dim & grainy, gritty like old movies. we walked in it till we choked
on the fog. her tears made her plain, a sketch shaded in variants
of sorrow, & the rain made her pretty again.

she was part femme fatale & part virgin whore. she knew the words
for going down easy, switchblade romance, orchestral maneuvers in
the back of a black sedan. how to treat a man good when she was
under him, then leave him drunk & broken in the gutter. if it wasn’t
in the script, she’d recite crude lines from bad poetry.
the beginning & end of it.

the bar where I picked her up was a hangout for gypsies, small time
racketeers, & dames who knew the lyrics to ‘loose woman blues.’
soldiers who ran outa wars & memorials, like me.

she’d drop quarters into the juke & punch up a song called what has
this man got, & we’d dance real fine like the brooding vampire & his
white-haired witch in ‘Only Lovers left Alive.’

in time, I’d drink alone most nights while she was booked with tricks,
then she’d come in & catch me slow-dancing with some other hooker.
she didn’t like it, but she knew it figured  –  we were thieves & tramps,
& there was no honor among us.

she could’ve thumbed a hitch in a Cadillac to a place where dreams are
shot in Technicolor & Cinemascope, but it’s a long ride to nowhere. so
she stays with me, in this fallen pathos. it’s a strange & dire union,
yet the poets call it love.


maybe we’d have had great sex if she laid on the couch & I sat in a desk
chair, & we worked on our own love stories…


(Art: Michael Thompson)