Pretty girls don’t smoke, except when they do.
Confidence can be bought in a flip-top Newport
box and lit on fire, having even more of an
effect on your psyche than a brand new
pair of skintight jeans that you been
saving up for all month. He tells you to
holla at him next time you in the city, and you
give the side-eye to the boys hawking CDs on
the street corner, because the rap game is the
only hope for a way out they ever had, and you take
a long drag off that cigarette that always
been like a hand to hold in the moments of weakness,
and you squint your eyes like you thinking real
hard about what he has to say, and you got a train to
catch even though he asking you if you want to come back to
Brooklyn, and the second you grasp onto him press yourself
into the nape of his neck, all reason goes
out the window, so you miss the train so he can
spin you onto a bed in a brownstone on Flatbush Avenue,
and he’s like the heat of Johnnie Walker’s Blue Label
sliding down the back of your throat,
and two months later you sitting in the dark
corner of a bar in Union Square, waiting for
him, and he’s late, because that’s how he do,
and you trying to be angry, you really are,
but then he appears, without apology, because he
never apologizes, because his presence is the only
apology you ever needed and he tells you that you
not really angry, you just trying to be angry,
because you Scorpio women? You just like men. And
he’s so sure of himself, because he grew up
in the street, and he’s done his obligatory
eighteen months in Attica, and you don’t even
care because he’s so goddamn beautiful that
when you touch him, you feel like there might be a God,
and his hands on your hips are like little apologies
for all the times you been done dirty, except
he's going to do you the same.
He disappears off
the face of the planet, until he asking you to
“make arrangements” and you do, even
when he sends you a text intended for some other
bitch. And then there is blood, so much blood,
and it’s like the all the words you’ve
stuffed back down beneath your vocal cords are pouring
out all over him and he sits with you after,
so you let the remaining words stay deep inside, where
they belong, and you know you will never be in a dark room
with him again, where the only thing you can
see is the fragile transparence of your own skin.
Now it’s been three months and it’s about damn
time for his ass to pop up, because he's like a
motherfucking straggler, talking about getting
busy and losing track of time and girl, you always
knew he was busy, that he don’t have time for watching
the sun rise and set in your eyes, but you held out on
some artificial hope that…you don’t
even know what you were holding out hope for, do you?
And what kind of bitch were you anyway, thinking
you were anything special, thinking that he was
dropping a G on you because you were any
better any other bitch he could have crashed into
outside of Grand Central, but your anger abates
when you remember him covered in tattoos,
his body shining like you imagine the Pearly Gates
may shine. His voice keeps echoing in your ear, and there’s only
there's one thing that you really want to say:
“I need you to understand that I was emotionally
fragile, and I was at a very strange place in my life,
and you was a life raft that deflated under the
weight of my body, and I thought your hands on my
breasts could caulk up my broken heart which
had been sinking like the Titanic for years. Your hand prints
remain on the backs of my thighs, a permanent muscle
ache, and I just want you to know that I
spent seventy five goddamn dollars on that underwear and
I’m still angry that you didn’t notice.”
