Roadmaps In Sequin Dresses

Two drinks. Maybe three below the skin. A little girl tries on her dress.

Four drinks. Maybe five later she finds the mirror in the drug. Bits of her mind gang raping the shell. It's only an appetite for hunger. Never meant to be fed. We're supposed to keep wanting.

Life is a porno. Greed unrelenting. No one's exploited and everyone is. Love is a script. Poorly written. For awful actors.

Two sips. Maybe ten later I ask myself what I've said that is unscripted. Nothing really. Other than hello.

I can feel them. In dense blusters of human wind. Shy breezes that come off from the underside of young trees infatuated by the frantic. Capsules in pendulum carefully clock the hours between if and when.

Two drinks after. Perhaps four. I know who I am. Who I tried to be, but never was.

Little butterflies on the tips of branches. Trying not to sneeze.

It is a science. The lost that finds us in this search for nothing. It can be measured if I stay awake long enough. To see her. Question. How many drinks it takes.

To know it's hopeless.

All the sparkle. All the shimmer of fresh ghosts haunting her skin. The bleat of crowded disco techs extruded in a frenzy of faulty morals. The road map of his dick. Again pointing me in the wrong direction.

It's a profoundly ugly destination.

All this going nowhere.