Beyond A Reasonable Doubt

He was the newly polished diamond like the one soon-to-be lost ring dropped between sideboard and mattress

His teeth were straighter and polished whiter than his Grady White and sleeker than his smooth Armani suit and lawyer-ease 

Wouldn’t she find a six-figure

attorney a quiet listener and a pleaser of womankind by nature

So she thought a man with means would welcome someone more substantial than a summer fling a bartender hip to rap and  conversation who was yet an articulate university graduate like himself and a soon-to-be pharmacist worthy of his status 

A trustworthy attorney might be the catch of the day one evening

on Federal Hill so she thought

Though she found him engaging on various subjects unavailable to twenty-year old boys she was used to dating 

His knowledge of wine lists 401k’s and luxurious getaways

in the Caribbean and hidden hideaways was more superior than her own father’s experience 

Though he proved to be lost in his own pleasures riding into her body’s erogenous zones and no less uncaring than the fumbling boys of her university dorm

When the ring was lost after

less than a half hour of grunting blindness and hip grinding she surely was perplexed that he may have been no champion of foreplay and ethical manners and was only a rich swindler and pretender

Authorities took down the  information two days later and a nurse unwrapped the rape kit that sent his world spiraling into debt and infamy

Would there be another political  campaign?

His corporate lawyer job was lost

to gossip and media shaming along with the Grady White sold to pay for the hot shot female Boston defender

Tennis would we played not at the private men’s club if even that now as his friends kept finding other engagements 

In the end he found his freedom more precious than the open sea

crying like a kindergartener on their first day when he was acquitted

And she found her slimmed down frame left the found diamond looser  than before when inexplicably it had somehow slipped off her finger on that Tinder rather than tender night

And the jury who had only hearsay of the prosecution lawyer’s dramatics to go by and no DNA no security camera footage to convict her Tinder date of her intoxication and lack of consent 

The jury would wonder was she wiser in the ways of modern hooking up now or frightened into depression never to overcome anorexia and trauma 

to find love.

    Widow At The Council On Aging

Her father’s ghost is always circling like a butterfly ready to alight on a round table with miss seventy-eight year old widow showing up uninvited to the noon time meal which is usually a meat product splashed with gravy that a vegan like herself cannot eat 

She has a newly self-published book out that again has her child of innocence praising her fathers musicianship and kindness

This may all be true like a President being more sainted than Mother Teresa in the vanity of illusions that memory reshapes into a variety of wildflowers that will await her in heaven as the face of her butterfly father hovers above our unholy heads 

What I found most surprising though was her unthinkable story of her eleven year old self babysitting a chimpanzee in the infield of a race track

The chimp was the pet of one of the hairdressers for the famous Rockettes who kicked up a lot of gossip and pheromones behind the scenes around the saxophone player her father who was evidently as spotless as she remembers

      After A Bourgeois Marriage 

     I was no Kerouac not one of those beaten journeying authors of miraculous encounters in the night neither of risk nor meager means except with their wits traveling west like thrift shop hobos of stream of consciousness devices.

My own divine madness would sit reading and never cross the high plains on a locomotive nor settle into a commune of ocean bathers in the jagged movie theater that is the dreamland of underachievers and panhandlers and religious fanatics. 

Ironically I have found the egg over easy comfort of a single bed without a companion to wish a goodnight to in the dark and it’s more tedious than an unpublished diary manuscript of fantasies from a lionhearted drunk.