Stories from L.A.

Table of Contents

• Building
• Why
• Learning Hope
• Avocado
• Somewhere
• Luckier
• Journey
• Making God
• St. Valentine's Wake
• Sand Castles

• One Side of the Story
• An Other Woman
• Theft
• First Street
• Singing Goodbye

• Autumn
• Blue Note
• Chameleon
• Clouds
• Deux Montagnes
• Endings

Theft

Someday I will look back on you
with glassy-eyed sadness.

Perhaps by then I will live a life
where love isn’t a game
played in quick moments
of life’s intermissions.

Or perhaps by then I will live a life
in which I am smart enough
to not use words like love
to describe my binding
to men like you.

I feel as if I have stolen you
slipped you quickly into my pocket
while her attention was momentarily drawn
to something else:
a crying child, a pot on the stove bubbling over.

But later,
when I reach my fingers into that pocket
to offer some sweet caress
and find only loose change and pocket lint,
I understand.