Love Affair

In Las Vegas,

the buildings stand huddled together

like young hoodlums,

hands stuck in pockets, waiting

for the first chance to reel you in for a dollar.

Lazy electric light shows and concrete basins of chlorinated water

holding cement schooners.

Brazen buccaneers

crowded around expensive adobe “tenements,”

curtains billowing in the wind

like sails.

City scenes of love unroll on the street

in a cellophane crackle and a wash of askance sidewalk glances,

tossed in with broken memories

of grocery lists and widening piles of laundry,

and suddenly,

we see her:

the pain of growing old piling onto her body in layer upon layer of fat,

and

he steps in:

two white sticks of legs poking down from rotund gut and ass,

venturing into the sunshine, a feeble wax sidewalk strut.

Perhaps it was a glance through a crowd of youthful, bickering couples –

a dead stare love affair in a sea of golden skin

and blond hair whipping around designer frames.

For the needle of desire pricked her, piercing through

the pleasure of comped drinks and nickel poker

after an hour and forty dollars pumped into eye strain and blue screens –

Jacks or better.

He was her one armed bandit –

spinning wheels of possibility coming to rest at three sevens

on Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road

with a wet-eyed Wisconsin grin.