Broken Saints Blog-a-Plenty

i found her in the bathroom.

i wasn’t the original
finder,
but the wrong people claim it all the time,
so –
i found her in the bathroom.

sitting on a cold ring myself
with nowhere else to go
and no one
to be with at that particular moment i

hear the loud jibber jabber of girls
and picture them staring in the mirror,
pulling shirts down skirts up and picking up
breasts and readjusting them,
as if it makes all the difference in the world.

i imagine this because i know it is happening.
i’ve seen it enough times.
venues change but bathrooms don’t and
neither do the
women in them.

but this time was different.

she caught my eye when i first walked in,
the stall door cracked open just enough to see
legs spread apart
and i thought, well…

but after a shuffle of footsteps and a final comment,
“come on, as if we all haven’t been there…”
i met the hypocrisy of my silent answer as
no one was in there,
and she was deathly quiet.

and that’s when i found her,
revealing the unsightly
vulnerability of a no-longer
stranger.
she
pathetically trying to conceal herself with a
why-did-you-even-bother? patchy shave job.

toxic fumes of human vomit occupied
my nostrils and i
didn’t know what else to do except
shake and shout
because that’s the kind of thing they teach in
first aid class, and her consciousness
was like an Alaskan winter.

they also teach to assess the danger
and i’m no “good samaritan” because almost all of me
didn’t want to get too close
for fear
of being puked on.

because this skirt, i paid three
dollars for it, and apparently that means more to me than
showing this woman genuine love
because maybe,
she needed someone to hug her,
and caress her hair,
fix it –
because it needed fixing.
and you’re probably thinking, what does that matter but
maybe it does – conscious or not.

i wonder at the lightness of this girl’s soul
because she’s alone in a scummy bathroom
covered with the stench
of human weakness and she looks
dead.

it took a while but she got-it-together
with the busser urging “get dressed!” and
“we’ll drag you out with a bare ass if we have to”
understandably,
because she didn’t “have time for this,”
we never have time
for the people who need
it the most.

her get up doesn’t really need a description
since i’ve and you’ve seen enough of the
little-girl-gone-bad runners, knee socks, pleated skirt that
doesn’t cover an ass if you have one combination,
and these skirts
make me sick

the twisting of men’s desires.

her’s was covered in puke
front to back,

and it seemed fitting to me.

before being escorted into the police car
she stopped,
to do the pull-down-up-adjust combo, but
spent the longest on her hair.

the busser said, “you don’t look so hot anyways”
in other words, it’s a fucking waste of time,
because you look
and smell like
shit
and it was true.

i don’t know if she saw me…
but i was standing there with wet towels
to clean the vomit off her body
and she didn’t seem to want anyone touching her.

so i tried to put a water bottle in her
hand
as if it was champagne for the limo,
as if it makes a difference.

she left
and i stood
for a few moments with those
brown soggy towels in my hands smelling
sickness, feeling sick inside
outside

because she was beautiful to me
and pathetic

unconscious and alone
lying in her own
feces and vomit
like we all are, every day, it’s only a matter of
admitting it,
since we rarely get to see it.