“I’m going out for a smoke.” He smiled. Crouching, drawing pistol fingers to a flaxen-haired femme, “If I don’t come back, presume me dead, but don’t panic – that’s part of it.”

He had decided long ago that his qualities were best perceived as a playful death wish.  Chain-smoking, all-night drinking, no crap from nobody and a beautiful corpse; these clichés shielded an inner life.

From these, however, the eventualities were that he would be constantly underemployed and that he would be young and reckless.  He had just breached his teen years, a loud burst of delinquency and drug use.  Currently, in a yet unknown band, he was working as kitchen help three times a week to pay for rent.  Check and check.  He followed the handbook of haphazard, kept in his left jacket pocket.

Dragging his feet across boarded floors, he made for the door to get wind of the crisp summer breeze.  The night opened up a breath, but he ignored it and lit his cigarette.  In a languid sigh, he breathed out smoke to watch it bellow in front of his eyes, and imagined a bleaker world than was before him.

The scenery splayed itself out before him, the streets like the parted legs of a vagrant.  Dirty walls of the streets were patched with graffiti and disorderly storefronts, blighted with an abandoned building on the near street corner.  Neglect and squalor punctuated the sidewalks and roads.  He took it all in, even through the tar of the night: every pothole, cigarette butt and blackened piece of gum.  He watched other young guns as they ran from bar to club, ducking into alleyways, in search of the substance they’re lacking.

A crooked lamp encroached the bar’s door, highlighting the bouncer’s general space.  Like a UFO, Taylor notices the unnatural directness that connects the bouncer to the bar, as if the man could never leave.  Taylor doesn’t linger by the door, but stays within the periphery of the bar, illuminated by the glow of the party’s energy that the front windows leaked.  He watches as lazer rays of magenta and green light flick the heads of the smokers outside.  A group of friends, congregated near him, try catching the slower-moving rays like snowflakes on their faces and cigarettes.  They irk their bodies backwards to follow the rays, they pucker their mouths forwards to accept magenta kisses.  To them, it could not be denied that the night was magical.

Taylor’s cell phone rings and it’s from a girl inside.  She can’t hear him, so he hangs up.  He texts: Outside, smoking. Specific, yet laconic.

With the glow of a lighthouse
her bright red cap casts
her light though the dark sooty night,
the brambles and bushes of clawlike construction,
the layers of snow that demand,
airy steps, balance and caution.

She floats toward me,
shifting in tugboat steps,
undaunted by the howl of the wind,
the spindles of ice that clack together on branches.