Denizens: Maggie

Mad Maggie walked with a crooked cane
of gnarled and twisted oak,
a knobby shillelagh, as Irish as her eyes,
and hard as the face she showed strangers.
She gripped it like folk wisdom,
and shook it like a fist,
at damned kids and damned hippies
and colored people - why must they always shout?

She wore her gray hair down to her waist
and it whipped in the wind like Halloween,
and the tattoo of the palm tree on her breast
had faded to the blue of Winston smoke,
and drooped like a dusty houseplant,
thirsty for water and kind words,
and her nipples were brown as tobacco spit
and dry with the ache of childlessness.

The nose on her face was as plain
as a rusty Esso sign,
hanging loose over dry pumps
in a barren and weedy lot.
"Running water never freezes,"
Mad Maggie would shout,
as she'd pat pat thok from dive to dive,
trading kisses for tales of failed love.

Mad Maggie called everyone Lover,
and kissed them with waxy pink lips,
smearing them with cheap affection
and the stink of truck stop perfume.
And everybody called her lover,
though none would admit it sober,
but most had spent their drunken lust
between her bony legs a time or two.

And she clutched her cane like a root on a cliffside,
afraid she would fall off the world,
and what had been an affectation
became an identity - Mad Maggie,
with the crooked cane and the twisted smile,
who called me Lover on desperate nights,
when whiskey kisses tasted like movie stars,
and mad love cured my soul like country ham.