City Lights for Ghost Stories #Poetry by Gabriel Ricard

​City Lights For Ghost Stories
By Gabriel Ricard

This girl is crazy, man.
 
If you disappoint your parents,
guidance counselor,
and all your unassuming mentors
more than fifteen times this season,
then make sure number sixteen
doesn’t have a damn thing to do
with Melissa. Or Steph. Molly McPolly.
 
So I guess you’d be tempted
to admire the sorts of names
she gets away with using.
 
But trust me. Trust the guys
who are still in love,
but who are just barely enlightened enough
to understand that even though
it’s technically all her fault,
all the live long fucking day,
no should still mean no.
 
The deep bruises you wake up with,
every other time you go to sleep with her,
will have to mean whatever they end up meaning to you
in their own delightfully, needlessly complicated way.
 
Just don’t.
Don’t even imagine that she thinks
an actual phone call is actually charming
in this disgruntled, city-lights-for-ghost-stories era of ours.
 
Don’t hold open the door for her,
and then imagine that good manners
are going to save your parents from the burden
of not getting grandchildren to emotionally blackmail,
or worse.
 
This girl has a lawyer that she doesn’t pay,
but who nonetheless keeps more firearms
on hand than you would ever expect from a man
who isn’t anti-black, or anti-gay,
or anti-immigrant,
so much as he’s just super, super pro-white.
 
She isn’t.
That’s not the kind of crazy we’re talking about.
 
But she keeps him around.
She’s also buried her mother a half-dozen times.
That’s the kind of thing that we’re talking about.
 
It’s the kind of crazy that isn’t really fair,
if you think about it,
since the best of us aren’t really
a hell of a lot better.
 
I’m not,
and I’m holding your arm like this,
talking to you in the most straightforward
approach to mixed tongues I can manage like this,
because I don’t think you are either.
 
And,
brother,
or whatever the case may be,
I can’t recommend your plans
to anyone who isn’t morally superior
to an unrealistic impression of your secret hero.
 
Are you up for that kind of thing?
Are you honestly listening at all?

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