poem of the day 03.22.09

shopping for books

i was alone in the poetry aisle
looking for some villon
but they almost never have villon here
so i shouldn’t have come
i thought to ask this female sales clerk
standing next to me
but i rarely do things like that
not here
not anywhere
i just wander around a store
looking for what i need
and if i don’t find it i leave
no worse for the wear
rich man or poor man
it never changes a thing
but i really wanted a volume of villon
the one time they had some here
i was broke
so i hid the book in with
those on americana
but the next time i came back
it was gone
nothing left but robert frost.
so i went to ask her
and the girl and i made eye contact
she gave me a glare
then turned around to ignore me
and sort through a stack of books
she had resting on the floor
bishop, steve dunn, john ashbery
and a bunch of other shit i wasn’t
interested in.
the sales clerk turned around
to ignore me just like every other
sales clerk before her
but when she bent over
the top of her tight black jeans scooped down
revealing her pale, thin white ass
the top of the ass crack black and blue
pulpy in the cheap bookstore lights
i couldn’t help but stare as she bent there
looking through books
waiting for me to leave
it was beautiful and grotesque all at once.
finally i couldn’t look anymore
i moved down one row of books
until the sales clerk was again in front of me
then she rose and brushed by
no glare, no eye contact at all
as strands of her dyed red hair
smacked me in the neck.
then i left the poetry aisle
and went to find my wife
who was somewhere
lost in a stack of children’s fantasy books.