Bebop

I blame Adam for this. You should too. Over at his blog, he posted a video of this uber-daffy girl talking to her webcam, about her webcam and other topics, including anime, her nose, or lack thereof, and her few friends. I got the impression it was fake. And it turns out I was right. She's a budding filmmaker/internet personality. But, all the same, I found her weirdly adorable/adorably weird. I wanted to fix her a bowl of soup. Or write a poem. This is quick, not great, but kinda fun as an exercise.

FOR THE SAD-EYED ANIME GIRL

Someone will soon say to me you aren’t real.

That I loved you for no good reason.

He’ll be correct, an acolyte of accuracy,

and I’ll begin to forget you, discount

this poem, assign it to the binary netherworld

of the hard drive, never to be

posted or printed or perfect bound

for one thousand people

to whom I’d profess some bogus bit of biography.

Did we meet in Baltimore

beside the scalloped bay

while February made a fist of snow?

I don’t think so. Why would we ever stop

in the midst of so much

slush for the flare of the erotic

to catch fire? Down cobblestone

we’d never go to my bad

hotel, to my room beside the vomitous

ice machine, gurgling all

the night long while we

laughed at nakedness

as though it had been this easy, always. No,

it wasn’t Baltimore

that would make a good lie

of our lives. Nor would New York be

much better. Better to choose

nowhere, better to fold

the map back into the glove compartment,

better to begin thinking

of the last person

to actually store gloves there

and not maps of Iowa

and not proof of registration

and not a gun like the movies have taught me

to expect, which is a kind

of imagination. If we met,

I would lie to the last

and you would never know me

for my name. You could

love me as I loved you,

falsely, for a moment, unassailed by fact.