Morning Train

When I awake with my usual bloody lip
salted and curdled in a mutinous fugue of fatigue,
only then is every next day of manic perception ushered in.
Another day ahead
-I pray only for blackness-
for to be defined by the monotony of progression is to be emotionally waterboarded.
It’s an erratic regimen,
erotic in reigning inferences.
There in my own forbidden city –
in a maze of maudlin compassion, the wasteland beyond
-the nether-
I remember us three singing Morning Train in our short shorts –
imagining the significance of such a life, dreamily passing a Blow Pop between us.
Our faintly hairy, tanned legs rubbing, swinging,
chests on the brink of junior bras and Bonne Bell
-girls who today would already look like lovers with slow hands-
the difference is now they go straight to summer,
while we had a spring of temptation, legends, morose charm
-before the sarcasm of our adultness set in.
Our system of pinky swears and pent-up femininity
was egotistically complemented in minted bloom,
and set out to fumigate the world with Love’s Baby Soft, held breath.
We learned the deceit
spontaneously;
deceived sycophants in training,
not us-
but dimly conscious, quaint originals
impassioned by solicitude and faraway astonishment.
You don’t own the words
or the fury
of efficient, slivered, leaden bitterness.
Our kaleidoscope of volition was not merely a reckless flirtation,
elliptically distracted, a luminous challenge of ecstasy
-fluent, fluid-
but a passionate seriatim of reiterations,
a narrative string of cautery in a cadenced hue of disruption
-senseless, serene-
serrated into one of those rare fleeting moments
when you are convinced you are a stranger
unrecognizable, hazily foreign, remembered as if dreamt
-then quickly
as the light turns green
memory returns
-slightly cloying, uneasy and prickling vaguely
into some hapless continued vacuity-
short shorts incautiously disposed,
to find me waiting for him.