Should I emphasize your sunglasses 
low on the bridge, the peering that signs coolness, 
a voice sexy bleak, clouded with adrenaline 
and alcohol, candied hair that flaps and curls 
along the rouged cheek like a car that weaves 
just so across the center line? 

Shiver of glass, shiver of your hand on me: 
accident, shrapnel. I like so much that it means nothing. 
What works for me are those eyes 
like the end of a five minute pop song, 
colliding small and immeasurably with the silence, 
impact measured but not noticed, 
electrons spat at lead breastplates 
half a mile away. 

If the world explodes beautifully as you 
perhaps I cannot give it up, but the newspaper 
ringrings like a telephone solicitor 
grieving with need for a sale, 
a landfill of disaster and emotion, 
silver and radioactive, tick tick, 
half-life, click, bad connection. 

Yes, the baby was placed 
just slightly on the gray freeway, 
and that tongue­pink van pulsed bullets 
across the scattering carwash crowd 
like a quarter's worth of water, 
casual as conversation. 

Your life stays interesting because 
it is always ending, is about to, should. 
Behind us rollicks a simulacrum of musical desire, 
that bland robot of graceful contact and decay 
there comes that glance, elegant and slim, 
filled with the chrome of the moment and no more, 
the panicked jumpy foot, the swerve without intent, 
the startled sparking ovals that moisten and gleam.