Purple Butterfly

A protagonist couple walking down the street, seen from a vantage
as if in a window above and in front and fifty yards away. She's in a school
uniform, or it looks like a uniform anyway,
benthic skirt and white shirt and a satchell bag.
He's got a suit on, open collared and off-white on off-white.

It's an asian metropolis they're walking through, yes
indeed, maybe somewhere we could
even put on a map.
They smoke an unfiltered cigarette without speaking and
don't look at each other.

It's gray that afternoon but the whores are dressed like butterflies
in robes or like kimono'd geishas without grace and covered
with glittering silken scales
their lizardy eyes and flickering tongues and crocodile tears--
adornments we never see coming.

When she turns her back to his alley
later, there is a hitch in the smooth brow and eyecorners
mouth parting slightly she inhales silently.
We all want her to turn back to her lover. But
this is years after and now he must be used.

Grief and partings are silent, howling faces thrust at us without
the shrieks we hear inside. She kills
another's beloved, who kills her, her beloved
bleeding out in a nightclub, in turn.
A pretty picture, and then to tie it up

the leader of the pack makes love to her abandonment
in a tenement before the assassination
where the telephone operater waited for her own
to return (his coat was hastily mistaken for another).
No one is allowed to get away with it, again.