On the corner between
Dickinson Blvd. and Poe St.,
she stands
with hair blowing
like loose paper in a breeze,
and eyes that
read the streets
like passing people are stories
and the patter of feet on concrete,
words.

The lamp above flicks
light, on and off,
splashing her huge hair from
gold to grey
as the Frost
chills up her leg,
and gooseflesh rises
on her bare arms,
cold.

Free thought formed in free verse
flows through her head
as men knowingly stop to
ask her work
and pay her price,
eyeing her more like
a piece of work
than a piece of
mind.

When asked for petty pretty poems
of life and love and light white lies
the veins on her wrists
shift from
blue to black; blood to ink
until a stream of
words
fall into line with
her stream of
consciousness.

Some days she tells them
what comes after death
if anything at all
based off her mood
and her fluid
attitude.

Some days she tells them
where man stands in
the eyes of God –
if anywhere at all –
based off where she got a clue
and her shifting point of
view.
Some days she tells them
that Nietzsche was wrong,
that God is not dead
because in order to die,
one must first be
born.

(Then again, she’ll explain
on her less than cynical days,
if life were to start at conception,
then the mere thought can be taken
as action, and the
struggle for humanity
long lost
can be taken as a
funeral.)

She writes it all down of course
when she speaks with her hands
and the words are
printed on the minds of
clients.

And she always re-reads and
edits her scripts to the
facts and opinions
as they come in by the
person.

She is selective with them,
her clients, that is,
because she is not a whore,
nor should that ever be mistaken
because she knows that
not everyone wants her
opinion.

Not the ones with the thick heads
and thin hair that sits above
their shiny heads in a ring
because they only come
with frowns, furrowed brows and
over-thought but under-proven
arguments.

Nor the little ones with big ears
and small minds
willing to absorb
anything and everything
at the click of her polished
fingertips.

She takes the ones she can talk
with and who can
talk to her as though she
is not a
freak.

She is tired when the night is
through and through
again and again,
and she washes her face off
with a towel and water from dingy
sink.

When she talks, she knows,
she is an ideal
not herself because
her lashes fall out
and her face isn’t as
clean nor pristine as
she would like to
pretend.

True enough words through
a false mouth
are only as true as
the others are willing to
believe.

She stopped doing that
a long time ago
because the point isn’t there for
her.

But it’s there for the others,
the believers of beliefs,
and the non-nihilistic
ones.

They will buy her poems
night and night again
so they may all
pretend.