Three Fingers Short

One day closer to snow,
and one hour short is the day.

A game of dive bar hop scotch means never skipping a chance to double dutch a double scotch, three fingers short of a Tom Waits ballad.

Whiskey makes me beautiful,
at least that's what I tell myself when I'm touching my face against the bar bathroom mirror, speckled with has-been band decals and inscribed with dime store lipstick poetry.

Last call incense lingers in the air.

One pour further from boredom.

One pour closer to divinity.

I own no watch, so I watch the time pass as my cigarette packet diminishes.

Four cigs left: clearly, it's 3:00 A.M.

Trouble is, 20 more reasons to stay awake are just a deft discarding of plastic and foil away.

I just need to find the pocket they're in.

Where did I leave them?

Who's jacket is this?

A couple new ones

Grey Dog Refrain

Sweating icicle daggers onto the sidewalk below me, with each step another casualty.
My tardiness is deadly for the daydreamers on 16th Street.
For them, time moves as snails over nasturtium petals, a slothful eclipse of orange and grey.
My heart, however, beats three paces ahead of my gait and my body is a shaky steering wheel in a foreign car.
The skin on my lips begins to peel from backpedaling into forward-thinking strategies of how to abscond my vanity.
It really takes a 14-hour work day with a 37-minute break split into two followed by three hours of binge drinking with strangers and a six-hour nap on the train to look this disheveled.
I don't believe in outsourcing.

Nowhere at Night

Leather pants the color of straw and a heart black as tar.

I am prey for a pride of ravenous singles doomed to pretend they're alright with themselves enough to swill PBR cans and update their Facebook status on their iPads in a rollicking gay bar with Prince blasting in the background.

I am so many eyes as fingers working shiatsu down my back and lingering on my ass when the focus should be on my calves, taut and shimmering from 57 hours of work in four days and refusing to rest on my day off.

If this man where man enough, he would have said hello already.

I am sat alone writing under the pathetic light of a sacrificial candle purchased in the ethnic foods aisle of the supermarket.

I'm anything but unapproachable.

If anything, I'm slutty.

I'm dressed for a Halloween party I'm clearly two months late for.

But I"m not wearing a costume.

This is how I see myself.

I am paisley on a Manhattan subway in December.

My laugh invokes transformative properties in otherwise listless souls because they yearn for more of it.

They conjure spells, stir potions, and crack yolkless eggs in an attempt to be funny enough to elicit my giggle.

What they don't realize is that I speak no language.

I feel words.

I know funny when I feel it.