She said.
As I stumbled away, drunken, beneath
the yellow sodium streetlight
that always makes my skin green.
Buying smokes and beer
just before closing
with money scraped together
by all of us.
Dreaming in the rusted bed
of a basket-case El Camino
swimming through the balsam
of city-planted trees.
Someone bitching,
the beer's gone luke
and out of smokes.
To late and far too early.
Nicotine sick and cottoned head spinning,
walking under the yellow waning moon,
alone in the Central Valley piedmont,
tired and my whirl-a-gig heart is pounding
the eventual way home.
And somewhere,
the yellow moon has punched its way
through the smeared window
of the one I truly love.
© 1997 Rainier Mariano, all rights reserved
