Olfactory

Summer’s End

Not yet the end of August and
the thick death-stink
of affection putrefied
reached across the café noise
to spastify my stomach entirely.

No matter we were all
in sunny San Diego,
(more precisely, La Jolla)
America’s Finest City
(queue puke sounds),
amongst marble topped tables
(strong and stable),
the too-loud chamber music’s
clavichord competing with the
crunching of a blender fashioning
fashionable iced offerings.

The place reeked with
bilingual bitch/bickering
American English strung
with guttural gobs from
some Middle Eastern tongue.

The overheard dialogue
bogged down in the
quagmirey lingo of
contract negotiation,
love’s death knell-
once blood-brightened,
limber sinews gone rigorous,
wormwood in a plain pine box,
disintegrated, done.