Glazed Gaze

She looks at him with an indelible apathy

Something about the way a woman’s eyes peer through a man

The imprint of visualizing the indifference

Of knowing there was not a god damn thing he could have said

She makes up her mind and the silence

Of retraction supplants every word in his kudzu

To try to speak, write, befriend a ghost

Because that look never rubs out; always grows back

In stares like he was stranger, a nothing passer in a jar

A split dog, guts in the street tires whirling on

Rider listening to bubble-gum Taylor Swift obnoxiousness

As if she doesn’t know either party

There are bars in Nashville, New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans

And not much anywhere else in America; Pop is forcing the outskirts

To where the cosmetic surgery gawkers are outdoing the dirty guitar players

Drinking craft cocktails over whiskey straight in the pit

No chaser, no stray look just dead-eye forward

Aware that when belted-string eyes meet hers

They’re riding into nothing, just nothing but a side glance

To dismiss a body in a crowd

Changing him to where every woman that looks

Feels like her

Like why speak because the pretext is caked on

That after a while the water runs and back to nothing

Possibility exists like a cataract needed a surgery or a drug

Even Pfizer can’t sell

So all the women appear like tall glasses of haze

Sturdy that if tipped would not even anger, just evaporate

Phase off into air bubbles of haughty mindlessness

Aggregating so that he is never alone

The conversation never takes place and the residue

Of what he wanted to say films on his tongue

Painting a motion picture like a tornado through his skull

Why’s and black and white chaos

So that the only words he ever has churn incestuous

Writing a story like a mirror where either no one else exists or he doesn’t

In and outside his vision compensating for the indelible