A Girl on the Streets 

All at once, the manic forward progress

        simply stopped

 

Looking back, it seems that café life

was the easy part; easy to slip into

the lonely city and make up a name

Easy to be a girl on the streets

 

when manic forward progress was

the God-given aim, and yet the subject

(as it turned out later) of mockery 

by the overlords. The joke is

 

that this body—my only one!—was

a willing participant. They ordered

decay, and so the body took 

a hammer to its own wicked heart

 

Then the hammer became 

its own reward. It called for nurses

and bandages as if it meant

to do repairs. The argument

 

raged on for years: was she worth

the trouble or just what the wind

blew in when it blew through

the playground? After all, the wind

 

is an infidel—it knows no regrets

and yet, there is another theory:

that she is her mother’s child,

the lonely mother who went shopping

 

and never came home. What she left

behind was a ticket to the infinite and

a hint about how the manic progress

forward should be memorialized:

 

not tomorrow, my dears and darlings

but if you can bear it, perhaps today