Sylvia Brown was a Mysterious Woman

After Tony, Borders

The backstocks grinned
blood and neon
before succumbing

and turning you
into a unbalanced
guiding light, uniformed.

As you continued to
shelve away the books
you would never recall--

Atheist's Handbook,
the Shack, Nietzsche, the
Necronomicon--

even that narrow-spined
History of God,
with its shiny covers--

you talked softly to
me about punk rock and
crazed philosophers--

all these blank topics
that we would never
fill our red, fleeing

heads, my own flooding
up like a deep rice
paddy with no pickers.

Water becomes a
source of life and death
here, way down, packed-up.

You consider the
ghost-talker for just
a second before you

realize I'm laughing
a cold blue color,
pretending to rip

the covers off her
Biblettes, one at a
time, thinking loudly:

I have worked here for
over a month. Now
feels like the right time.