Drunken Silence: #3 Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

She conversed
Like I’ve known her
For a long time
Like these scars -
Scant reasons,
Scantier light inside the
Breathing walls
As I took slugs
Of my bottle.

She saw my tattoo
And it reads,
The tigers have found me
And I do not care.
She quipped,
And exploded in a mad
Flourish of splendor.
Her pale face now Technicolor
With madness,
Her lips were crimson
But then embellished in
A rummage of blood
To her senses.

”Bukowski! ” She said,
And I nodded,
And she told me stories
And poetries, she recited
The world of prolix
Cities to flummox

Spoke to me about
The curb,
The yellow lights
While my lips are sealed
In a fascination.
A beautiful mind,
I said to myself
How rare.

”I’ve never seen
The yellow lights.”
I told her,
And she squirmed
Not the way a woman
Should exude
Joviality
But I let her
Because she wielded it
Like her own empire.

”I’ll show you! ”
She dragged me outside the bar,
Out to the city streets,
With the stench of the thoroughfare
Asphyxiating me.
”Here are the yellow lights! ”
She pointed them
One by one

But I was distracted.
The lights of her hollow eyes
Were enraptured
She was raveling in effulgence:
A daughter of two seraphs
Deprived of hate.

I knew just then
That the yellow light of the
City was her,
And not the streetlamps.