LUNA

Luna haunts me like a dead dog’s eyes

Memories of her surround and swarm me like hornets

Stingers that spit poison pummel me senseless

like fat cops armed with billy clubs and bad thoughts

On a five year vacation in a sleazy Boiler City Prison

for conjuring demons at The Cape Horn Furnace Company

Corporate pimps pound cans of warm beer in the streets

back when the Bishops beat Gunnery City in seven games

And corpses fell from rooftops as the city threw a parade

Shellshocked flashback rockets me back to high school

A mortar wound in my tragic history

“Hey dude. Can you lend me that number 2?”

Cattle prod kick to the ribcage

A megaton tornado that rattled my teeth

“The pencil?”

Soaring symphonies from 1960s Piero Piccioni

Bubblegum pop songs on my old clock radio

Luna caressed my frazzled fascination

A funky convertible stalled in the Florida sun

Vagabond surfer’s confidence as she dropped beatnik poetry

A benevolent palm tree that shades the drunks baking on skid row

Hardboiled homeroom like lurid crime fiction in a pulp magazine

Stunner femme fatale packing .38 caliber eyes and dead man’s curves

Luna’s existence was melodious frustration

A forgotten Gerry Rafferty tune with that cool sax solo

Drunk on wine and vainglory, her old man flipped off a cop

At the intersection near a porn shop and a garish cathedral

My mother serviced dock workers and rocket scientists

to help with the rent and her morphine addiction

Me and Luna were golden souls in hand me down clothes

Just two naive tadpoles swimming in sewer water

We smoked weed in the bleachers as we switched radio frequencies

Speaking of trite things that held an unfathomable cosmic importance

Greeted like royalty by the dawn

we kissed on an overpass near the school

A Dodge Dart obliterated a cat on the street below

Leaving the world a red and green smear

Modern art on the pavement

By the time I flunked out of high school

Luna had left this world on a subway that rolled downtown

Her bum ticker stopped just short of her nineteenth birthday

My time has been running out ever since.