Smoking with strangers

 
"I loved her so much, how can she be dead?
What kind of world does this?
Who does this?"



Fuck your dad.
Can I borrow your lighter?

She wasn't pretty in the conventional
Bettie Page inspired
modest
highschool princess
with a smile that recaptures
the morning dew
between the creases
of her laugh lines
surface
sense.

Or even in a
scrapped knee
ripped out riot grrl jacket pocket patch
burnt out
but I'm still right here
on a savage revolution
for hard truths
and the wild thing lining your pocket
PJ Harvey rendition
of trying
for something better
type of way.

She was smashing old budweiser bottles
with a chrome bat
she found at the dump.
She was stealing dope
and reciting
William Shakespeare
to the constellations at four a.m.
digging his foreign words into the dirt
like a solo game
of hangman
drawn out with the muzzle
of a loaded gun
and laying on the train tracks
of her home town.

There was too much
to purge for.
Too much unbridled fury
leaving cigarette burns
tattooed against her inner thighs
and she had no time
for her rotting husk
of a reality
soaked in the sweet rivers of
babylon vintage
polaroids
to care
that she was the violence
in a beautiful
car crash.

I wanted to love her
as all diseased children
abandoned in war
and starving for love do.

Life is cruel
yet she was every bit as beautiful
as Frankenstein's monster.
Collecting relics of
profound connection
and spray painting
punk never dies
on the dingy walls
of her bedroom
before she bathed
in bastard flames
long enough to transcend
into an immortal scar
upon the world.