girl rotting in plain view

In a dimly lit room I see a face I like. Everything else vanishes. She’s youthful beauty in motion, the perfect balance of awkwardness and grace. Her loveliness, although perhaps still unknown to her, is quite clear to me. Long brown hair graces a thin swan-like neck. Her eyes are expressive. The curves of her body steal attention without being too obvious.
Sensing my attention, she turns her head towards me. The features are lovely beyond description, although strange and imperfect. What would that throat look like if her head were thrown back in pleasure? The eyes are large and full of life. Her weak chin accentuates a large nose. Her upper lip is very full, while the lower one diminishes, the whole mouth unforgettably young and soft, made first and foremost to express pleasure. I want to feel that mouth on my own.
What does she see over here? I’m ugly inside and out. A leper. A nigger. The energy of my life, my love, is trapped in a shell that’s incapable of expressing grace, a crippled horse, a bird with crushed wings. Beautiful insights are imprisoned behind an awkward crooked face and the truth tries hopelessly to escape through a breaking voice that chokes and coughs. The wind’s been knocked out of the lungs. The words can’t be found!
She looks happy; one last spark of something innocent in a world where even the sky itself is bleeding with a million knife-holes. She moves on, probably never to be seen again.
Soon enough she too will be corrupted, the lovely mouth soured with hatred, the eyes turned away with tears and resentment. The body then will no longer be a vehicle of life and pleasure, but an animate corpse playing out the empty functions of the earth, of gravity, of the worms. Beauty is a spark, a glimpse of something at once fleeting and eternal.

City O’ City / Denver
March 25, 2009