She’s the kind who would finger her nose in the subway;
gallantly plumped in her body cast jeans
with the mellow dramatics of purple eye shadows left
Christian Diored on her late Friday nights.

And she smells like cigarettes hung out to dry
by the Def Leppard shirts and the pink leather skirts,
and the haggard intentions of hand-beaten drama
colliding with all but the lines on her face.

And the lights would toy with the reach of her eyes;
telling tales about dreams that would crowd Avenida
geometries meant to hold breeze from the sea and
gracefully Swan Laked girls in the dark
flinging arms that elope with the modest staccato of
baritones mending the hush of the night.

And the winds, of course, are very unkind;
beating lips that would only be kissed out of lust,
hurling waves that would claim all her marks on the shore
and coldly conniving with corpulent curvatures
meant to decode in her gibbering language
the smirk in one’s eye at the sight of love handles.

But all I could do is pry open her laugh,
come to terms with the clamor of the city-fast cars and
provide her the color of gutter-blood streets
with the hounding of sirens to butcher the baritones
Swan Laked girls have learned how dance to. And

we would write improvised songs, she and I;
with the notes Copperfielding the bruise on her gleam
and the grasped imperfections that rupture her scream.
And of course I would string every word to her cover;
a gown of a chorus to hide every curve,
a sunglass resolve that would drape her eye shadows and
symphonies restless in guarding her spark.

But she would just sputter these songs at the cars
while I keep them in sheets, and they gather in fleets
to encompass an image-based, paraphrased resonance
tied to a writing that stretches the seas, and
forces the winds to a soft-spoken future where

I will grow heavy for harboring words
and she will float by with her wind-beaten lips
and the smell of cigarettes hung out to dry;

an easy sight for an aging eye.