Love Affair
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In Las Vegas,
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the buildings stand huddled together
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like young hoodlums,
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hands stuck in pockets, waiting
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for the first chance to reel you in for a dollar.
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Lazy electric light shows and concrete basins of chlorinated water
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holding cement schooners.
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Brazen buccaneers
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crowded around expensive adobe “tenements,”
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curtains billowing in the wind
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like sails.
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City scenes of love unroll on the street
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in a cellophane crackle and a wash of askance sidewalk glances,
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tossed in with broken memories
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of grocery lists and widening piles of laundry,
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and suddenly,
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we see her:
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the pain of growing old piling onto her body in layer upon layer of fat,
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and
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he steps in:
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two white sticks of legs poking down from rotund gut and ass,
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venturing into the sunshine, a feeble wax sidewalk strut.
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Perhaps it was a glance through a crowd of youthful, bickering couples –
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a dead stare love affair in a sea of golden skin
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and blond hair whipping around designer frames.
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For the needle of desire pricked her, piercing through
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the pleasure of comped drinks and nickel poker
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after an hour and forty dollars pumped into eye strain and blue screens –
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Jacks or better.
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He was her one armed bandit –
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spinning wheels of possibility coming to rest at three sevens
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on Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road
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with a wet-eyed Wisconsin grin.
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