a guitar given to me
by an angel before
I took the stage to sing
for the first time.
a muse is many things
and can be found
in many places,
or traced back
to a song or smell.
my eyes sang to her,
there in the dive bar crowd,
and my cocaine tongue
kicked the back of my teeth
in unforgettable fashion.
young, with an old
poetically industrial spirit,
she had never left this town,
so I was her tiger window
into a new world, breathing.
it was tough to follow her
but easy to love her
for a weekend,
and she needed to get back to her
life that is left rusty and wrought.
later, on the train
out of the snowy mill,
I wrote her a letter on a napkin
and told myself to mail it
from the west but I never did.