The chubby girl is struggling speed on roller skates.

She is alone.
She is in that crazed eye.
She imagines the neighborhood friends.

Most the poets I know are fat girls on roller skates.

Few of them are in love,
but many know how to sing 
the notes of the uncaptured orchestra.

I think the composer Randy Newman is like that.
I don’t think he loves L.A. 
I don’t think he loves.
I don’t think I really have a friend in him.

The friends I know 
who are in love 
are doing something.

Love is busy magic.

Love must be magic
‘cause when my friends fall in it
they disappear.

I drove with a woman 
across the mosquito creeks of Arkansas
to figure out why that was.

Looking at each other like surgeons,
daring the other to go first
I finally asked how long 
she thought it would last.

She said she it didn’t matter how long,
it just mattered that it was.

I  changed the subject,
told her about the lone roller skater.
I asked if she thought she had ever been kissed.
She didn’t think so.

We held still, then

a sky flush with moon 
opened up like a ballroom
and her kiss broke the spine of the night
paralyzing the moment
into our skulls, 
forever.