I had moved the day I first met him so my muscles ached and my head was stuffed with the indignity of dust,
And even not on drugs he looked skull-cracked, you know? That kind of hollow head gaze.
But he had a glamour that shone past the silver metal buckle on his leather cap
"Yeah," he said, when we were introduced,
Slippery eyes gliding down my body, head cocked back like a trigger
And the ubiquitous cigarette dangling from his bottom lip.
"Tom's crashing a party in the West End," they said, laughing and nudging me,
I felt adolescent and unsure because my friends from before weren't like this;
This rockstar experience these people were bent on having every night
"Yeah," he said, which I took to be an invitation,
His skull-cracked face bland and filled with electricity at the same time
With the ubiquitous cigarette dangling from his bottom lip.
They had a van, a minivan, that they rode in, rattling and careening through narrow downtown streets
And nobody seemed to care where the gas money came from or how many beers he'd had;
Glittering, hollow-head Tom always drove, though I don't think it was his, really.
"Yeah," he said, when I asked if he liked girls,
Because in 2 hours after four beers he'd taken on a silent shine, appealing to me,
That ubiquitous cigarette dangling from his bottom lip.
When the party was cancelled, we drove to the woods, the van shaking and creaking, everyone silent in their seats,
He drove hunched over, his hat nearly in his eyes, concentrating hard on the dim beams of our headlights,
And the ground underneath rolled past rocky and jounced me against the window, screeching against branches.
"Yeah," he said, whatever small talk I made as his co-pilot,
And it was that feeling you that you have when you are small next to someone, one who has
An ubiquitous cigarette dangling from his bottom lip.
Being young and ridiculous I enjoyed my smallness next to him, his monosyllabic answers to my proddings, his
Deep eyes always shaded by his shiny leather cap, his lazy shifting and consistent blindspot checks,
And pulled over at a cliff with a black mirror ocean crashing beneath, we found ouselves alone in the van.
"Yeah," he said, when I leaned in close to his shoulder.
He never kissed me, not until after we'd been doing it for 5 weeks--I shit you not--and all because of
That ubiquitous cigarette dangling from his bottom lip.
