Perfumed Wild


You smell like toasted tonka beans and bergamot, folded in with a suggestion of raw amber. Lips dark as cherries, holding back so many secrets it plumps them out fully. Hair carelessly falling like strands of honey, golden, dripping, and flowing.

A halo of afternoon just rained light is framing your body. The spirit that compels you beats like a drum set to the pace of wild horses tearing across grasses. A stampede, holding nothing back as they race to their death fearlessly over the edge.

Everyone’s eyes follow you from the top of your head to the black patent leather heels boosting you up in the puddle, they reflect. No one seated in the café is doing anything, frozen in time while you subtly touch your neck.

Intoxicating as you may be, I’m wary of your wiles. The houndstooth jacket you’re wearing keeps your crazy buttoned-up, while I allow myself to get caught up thinking, just for a moment, this should be love. 

But it isn’t, you left the vase of flowers strewn across the floor after hurling them at me. It wasn’t love after you pressed that clove cigarette into your lips years ago and told me at the stroke of midnight everything would be over.

It was love when I saw you dressed as a clown in cowboy boots wandering through the party where we first met. The nervous laugh of yours silenced as it bit into the lime and licked the salt from my hand after mutual friends introduced us over shots of tequila. 

Now you’re the girl in the café that everyone dreams about. I knew that girl, she’s a gorgeous, mind-blowing, burn the world down, take no prisoners disaster. Finish my croissant and cappuccino, breaking the undissolved crystals of residue sugar between my teeth at the same time we break our stare. 

Turning my eyes downward, away from your Hollywood glamour, I lay my tip on the table, careful to tuck it below the bill, you’ve been a delicious distraction. But I’ve grown too smart now to be caught up in your beauty and rotten to the core no one can see aura.

We smile that first-night flirting smile, happy to cross paths, and wince in the same moment, ripping the band-aid off our past. I wonder who’s horse you are now, and reflect on my fortune, I made it out as a heart bruised survivor. Stopping before being hurled over the edge by your unbridled perfumed wild.