You Ran Awaywhen You Were Seventeen Sleepingweeping In Blurry Carsand In Eerie Inns With No Addressno

You ran away when you were seventeen sleeping weeping in blurry cars and in eerie inns with no address no name trapped in time bordering the highway where you wrote to me poems in Latin stamped from the basement of my mind inspired by a denuded flower whimpering in a glass bottle of Coca-Cola beside a clumsy kitchen sink. You’re a vagabond tragedy a vagabond prodigy dipped in the paint of a raw sorrow quoting Virgil sitting in a bumper car sleepily howling Roman odes at a hollow night sky with swollen knuckles swollen eyes from trying to twist a drain of logic a faucet of amnesia only to find a leak of pain. I see you lying on the thirsty sand your eyes closed your lips apart morose saliva trickling out onto your chin a ripple of water comes to stroke your feet telling you to wake up but you don’t. A broken vinyl scratched from loving too hard.

headache | © Margaux Emmanuel

close the door on your way out

At night, her grey eyes faintly glistening in the light of a row of lampposts, she stood in the shadow of a suburban cul-de-sac front porch. She mouthed with a grin, in the language of cigarette smoke, the words he would pronounce, his back resting upon an orange steel locker. She’d usually roll her eyes and answer:

Well, that’s very nice. Now, be a dear and close the door on your way out.

She chuckled thinking about it. He didn’t know that, afterwards, she’d lock herself in the bathroom stall, the no man’s land where the wandering soldiers, enslaved by dreams with no perspective would carve the truth with their bitten bitter tongues. And oh boy the profanity. She’d sympathize with the blistering paint of sin while running her fingers over the walls’ scars and tattoos, let their meaning soak her fingertips. She liked it. But did she understand it? She once saw:

If only we could all love.

This sentence creeped back to her with the small-town breeze, seeping into her skin. She put out her cigarette against the shadowed brick wall and sat back on the patio chair. She noticed how rusty the metal was. Maybe it had always been that way.

She wanted to write a play. Not a famous one that would make the Hollywood actors drool, but one of those eighty-cents coffee stained and dog-eared garage sale plays that you’d buy out of pity and out of a tingling curiosity for the literary pariahs. The sort that receives a scattered applause, the actors timidly bowing in response. But it would be about the caesuras of the heartbeat of this town. It would be about the dark blue teenage dreams.

Her eyes wondered to the cigarette ashes laying on the floor, intently staring at her. She smiled in approval to her thoughts, got up, and went back in.

© Margaux Emmanuel

Ill-chosen metaphors towel my body dry inch towards the word toying with the tip of my tongue you know the word the one eyeing the dark corners of the after party of infatuation the one stinging in the touch of bare-knuckled motorists pretending to be in trouble in the implied sensuality of those haunted eyes I said no peeking you already know the word oh I’m not trying to stop you, love all of these untalented talented teens know exactly what they want now turn off the radio whisper it in your licorice breath I’ll just be here falling asleep in the arms of dawn waiting.

don’t look at me like that, help me find this word | © Margaux Emmanuel

The champagne lingering in the driveway of his eyelids ransacks the minibar of his depressive tendencies. A suffering insufferable dandy with a corduroy smile spills the cough syrup on the window sill and walks through a non-smoking floor with an unlit cigarette giggling in between his teeth. The stained carpet mutters that he’s a homeless homesick and the tears sticking to the glass table know it already. So he sits back on a fatigued settee and pours himself a dubious drink with a parking lot view. So he sits back uncomfortably with his heart a little tight and he tells himself that it’s just another sick day.

sick days | © Margaux Emmanuel

clumsy town boy

Your heart

is stuck

in a long

car ride

edging

an endless

desert

empty

road

in 1973

sitting in

the backseat

reading Kerouac

butter-colored

baseball cap

no watch

timeless

wrist

high school

bomber jacket

covering a

white shirt

a chagrined

blue bra

his

aviator

Ray Bans

sliding down

the bridge

of its nose

listening

to the cassette

of a shattered

existence.

Two years

thousands of miles

away

he’s still

the one

appearing

in the

highway landscapes

ghostlike

you can almost

smell

his cologne

you thought

that you had

written

the last act

of that

tragedy

licked the seal

of that envelope.

But the trunk

is still

full of his

letters

the cursive ink

bruises you

at night

oh

the clumsy

town

boys

they really

mess you up.

© Margaux Emmanuel

a dreamlike love bite

Two songs

away from you

having lunch

by the car

I close my eyes

memories

of kissing pretty neighbors

in their treehouses

paint dripping

down the easel

of the night

all I wanted

was for love

to bite

and now

you’re smiling

by my side

I guess

I’ll rob the sky of tonight’s stars

for you

but once my eyelids open

I’m still a lovesick kid

in an empty parking lot

and the stars always find

a place to hide.

© Margaux Emmanuel