The Girl

In the darkness of a bedroom that is not ours,
tangled in a stranger’s sheets,
the moon intrudes.
The novelty of our evening soon wears off,
as do your sidelong glances,
and the two of us are no longer lonely.
How easily the dead of night is gentled
by half-truths and candlelight.
I show you what you’ve never had
and you give me what I’ve always wanted.
You kiss me long, sweet and slow,
and I can’t feel that this is hopeless from the start.
I am just a passionate fool,
incurably romantic,
but I could be the girl of your dreams.
I thought that I could belong in that painted lady house,
congested with a hundred years of sin
and pregnant with so many unmade memories.
The deep hum your fingers make while
dancing along the frets of that old black bass
was ready to move in and echo up the spiral staircase.
I saw you, picking at a scale on the front porch swing.
I saw me, writing in the courtyard.
Our dreams would elope –
clever, terrible and nervous ever after.
Because, I am the girl of your dreams.
They were playing your songs on Jackson Highway.
We stood outside the magic; you smoked a Spirit and I did not know what to say.
Time was on a different journey that day;
dragging its feet through our dirty, sunny silence
and later, letting precious minutes escape in the night.
This carousel of time.
That tragedy of joy.
Maybe it was real love, as much as it could be.
We both knew I was the girl of your dreams.

I sat too long on that bed where you left me.
In your absence,
the thorny limitations of day crept in.
I was punctured by the realization that
you will never again look for me,
and I will never stop seeing you.
It was such a long way to my feet.
Too early to leave but with nothing asking me to stay
I took a beautiful drive in the wrong direction,
then a two-hour flight to another world.
“There’s a last time for everything,” I had said,
unaware this would be ours.
You’ve now forgotten about me for the second time.
You went right back to her.
She is your reality.
But I am the girl in your dreams.