and she turns away

And the mods are on the corner shooting the shit and she shifts in her seat -- a bus stop bench pasted with toll free numbers and the fading face of an injury attorney.
"Cold Hard Cash For Bloody Wounds"
She crosses her legs.
She inhales.
Exhales.
And she is beautiful.
A vintage dress (yellow) is wrapped around her thin body, pale skin and her small lips move in shapes of enunciation.
But I can't hear her.
Her chapped lips continue and she's an intellectual and everything she says is interesting and I want to digest and absorb the enzymes of her opinions, the nutrients of her thoughts. The sound of her voice is a brush bathed in paint -- and she's weaving a masterpiece.
She has difficulty making eye contact with her listener, and this is a sign of insecurity. Two timid pupils, dilated in the shadows of dying billboards, dash and dart as she speaks. Hummingbirds rattle in her retinas, erratic. Evading capture.
Her vowels, her consonance and those facial expressions -- shrouds masking something sacred and profound.
And I reach to remove her veil -- just a glimpse -- but I can't. The distance.
With her hands she speaks. Movements and expressions and her fingernails are short and unkempt (she chews them: a habit of anxiety) and chipping flecks of pink and I wonder, What does her fingernail polish taste like?
Dried cuticles and tiny hands and two fingers pinch a Camel.
And she inhales.
Exhales.
Smoke of tobacco and fumes of fragrance: The pesticides of beauty.
But I can't smell her.
The distance is great.
Then, suddenly, her body falls silent. Lips freeze. Wings fold. She has become disenchanted with the mods and their feeble words. A lexicon of swollen parasites and unworthy hosts, she disengages, turns away and somewhere, the temperature is falling.

I close my eyes and a prairie is our bed, constellations the ceiling. I pluck the freshest blade and ink her skin with invisible sentiments. With tip of green I trace the notes of fantastic melodies circulating under her skin and all the intellectuals are silenced, their minds emptied, and the lone agenda embraced is one of ineffable beauty and sex is a foreign concept and all hearts are strained from exhaustion.
She inhales, her chest cage expands.
And exhales, the cage contracts.
And there is no distance here.
I touch the pale petal that is her flesh.
Skin coats bone.
Blades of shoulders.
Elbows pointed.
Knotted vertebrae.
Perfect.
And I'm amazed at the infinite wonders of such perfect architecture. A magnificent structure breathing with neurons firing, a network tingling.
And for this brief moment we are larvae writhing in the milky womb of a dying star, our curdled hearts flush with beating blood and then --
Temperatures drop.
Light falls.
Hearts rupture.
And the prairie wilts. The fleshy blades of green now crusted flakes of brown crumbling and cracking and

I open my eyes to find the street corner empty.
"Cold Hard Cash For Bloody Wounds" and the attorney's frozen face glares into me and in the gutter,
Her dying cigarette sends up hopeless smoke signals.
But I can't read them.
I don't understand.

mc