A View of the Bridge

It came to be that a demise is where I start,

Tear up the planks!

Fogging the glasses of any coroner who dared get too close,

I screamed,

"Here! here!, is the beating of my hideous heart!"

 

Behind blue smoke, so thick,

and a naked light-bulb, so dim,

I see a silhouette kicking off her boots

while falling endlessly backwards

onto stained sheets and torn blankets,

asking the ceiling, or someone else,

to join her struggle with her tights,

her clasps, buttons and straps

 

Her tangles of blonde hair

were draped over the pillow,

the pillow was placed over a gun

O! the show hasn't even started yet but we're having so much fun

and she thought of tree-bark shards,

dogs barking beyond the tree-line as she ran

and shattered china fragments, battered cheeks and virginity:

all of which remains beneath the shade of the weeping willow

 

As the blue smoke exited, stage-left,

one beer between two friends graduated into

a sky blackened by the starling flock

and darling Molly Greene told the wall,

"Those are my books; but it's too dark to read

and piled on the floor are my dirty dresses I'll never wear again"

 

"On the wall are my Polaroids, my paintings;

beneath my mattress, a journal, in which I write my dreams - 

they’re not as frightening as they seem.

It helps that my nightmares exist on paper and not just in my head"

 

A taxi honked its horn on the street below

but the last fare of the night was elbowing his way through the bar

waiting for last call; one more game of pool;

one more cigarette stubbed out on a bar stool

in the pool-hall

as the cab-driver’s wife put some coffee on to percolate,

sugar and cream,

narcotics and wet-dreams

and chocolate, and chocolate

on the mind of the last fare of the night as he elbowed through another crowd,

knowing that things could get tasty

if he elbowed the wrong ribcage

And he elbowed mine…

 

But, I left and managed to catch his cab

at the intersection of Cemetery and Zima Junctions

“Take me to a diner with a view of the bridge”;

the cab-driver said, “I hear there’s a roof on Ridge Street.

It has music, eggs and coffee and strangers who’ll leave you be”

It sounds good to me

 

On the rooftop I was alone -

the cab-driver was a liar

but for one detail:

behind me was the cathedral spire

and in front was the bridge

and below was Ridge Street

 

“Just come in to join the crowd?”

A voice to my left, on the edge of the roof

“I had some time to kill”, I said.

A mutual understanding,

and off the rooftop the stranger stepped.

His fall was the most beautiful thing I ever seen,

an autumn leaf floating under the looming shadow

of the bridge which ran past Ridge Street

 

On the road below a taxi swerved away from the stranger’s body,

a screech and a scream,

as the taxi struck the homeless postcard seller’s dog

 

I took a step back from the edge of the roof,

as the postcard seller whistled and groped for his dog's mangy mane,

and peered down into the skylight of apartment 17C.

That’s when I laid eyes on Molly Greene,

she did not see me

 

She spoke to a photograph on the wall

of the stranger who lay dead on the street,

bedfellows now with the postcard seller’s dog,

and she told the photograph,

"Those are my books; but it's too dark to read

and piled on the floor are my dirty dresses I'll never wear again”.

And, I dare say, she never did.