MicHELLe

She lived in the little l-shaped building where

At night,

The lost souls are let free to wander during a time that could be Rec period,

Or Some Other Such....

They congregate like zombies in the skinny, smoke-and-garbage stinking halls / Which are coated in white cracked with brown and old pictures stolen from Goodwill boxes

(...and old plants withering in the corner)

and behind doors, roaches streak across carpets where food is ground by stockinged feet or bare feet or drunken feet

of tattered angels stifled

in the air of rickety want.

Richard Speck, disillusioned with his time in Hell, his Letterman jacket red and white and flying true colors of blood below his olden man chin

gone to football seed, and the coif of Eisenhower hair.

But, at the end of the hall is Michelle.

Past a woman in a dishwater gray gown carrying a pot of beans

and tittering to her friend,

and I note that we live, we live exultant in the midnight beyond the gaze of bourgeois sunshine daylight savings time eyes...

So I go to the door and she opens and there standing with black wire shocks of chopped short hair above pale bad skin dotted with lumpy folds is a little woman

in hot darkness.

I enter. A stove next to the bed. She lays down, spreads her legs, and I enter again (aloof bandit that I am, Am I) in hot slick and greased fucking doll of crepitant flesh,

skin unfolds beneath the fat and we finish off and she get up

and her pillow between two hands and I note the stove is on fire. Richard Speck stands on a chair by the door as I go out.

"I'm spending the night with Michelle," I tell.

The gathering of lost souls by the door holds a coloring book picture.

Her internal organs.

Someone has scrawled Crayola across her chest cavity.

Along the side, the Mental Health Squad has typed out the words "VICTIM OF HATE" a dozen times down.

She comes to the second door (perched by her front door, which is the backdoor), and points with one finger and denies it all.

"Wrong, wrong, wrong," she stabs pointily with one finger.

Richard Speck stands on a chair by the door as I go out.

"I'm spending the night with Michelle," I tell.

She burns.

MicHELLe.