Godly little knees crawling

under sweetened trees--a rubber giving,

bounce-backing-sway of books on rounded tableaus.

A long colloquial leg feigning disinterest with

each slow, shadowy switch of ankle to hip.

A pretty fanged mouth. A heavy lipsticked pout.

(No wine, no roses. No romance, no secrets.)

Call her out on streetcorners and sideways alleys,

hooked with whores and needles--her home territory.

Somehow she's never been scared to see the half

that is arbitrarily assigned the position of "ugly,"

somehow she scaled the city walls to find

herself adrift in humanity, unadorned.

Oh, it makes me remember the dark ages,

honey. It's just like old times--beer and broken bones,

men and women blinded by the endless pursuit of death.

Don't think for one minute you couldn't have been

out selling your body for baby aspirin and cheap thrills,

sweet things. A turn of the dial and your world could

dissipate in everything you call wrong. You maybe

don't see it, but I've seen the tides wipe away genocide--

morality is immaterial. At the end of the day, we are

only a small amount of pride and an even smaller amount

of survival. We've gone from bloodletting to clean killing

and slapped on the title of "Civilized Living."

Cocoa trees (forest green and foreign)

on her tongue and in her nose. A special kind

of vampire: Sunday nights find her

sucking the life out of the Hollywood sign,

halogen to make heaven bloom

in between empty bottles of Everclear

and New Eden.