Baking Cocaine for Carly

Isn't this hell: the asphalt we strike in falling?
Dust on an old photograph
on a decaying port city,
on cars and egos, pressing their desires for haste into a single lane.
Tar and tobacco and thiamine hydrochloride, the human exhaust
and the sulfurous yellow that calls to the eye.

It sounds like my sister: a smother-smack of lip polish
the munificent spray of Versace Pink and Paris Hilton's latest,
of intoxicated daydreams,
of penitentiary doors, closing—an oven's glass.
Cake and catharsis and kindergarten coloration: the human vice.
A vice-grip icing hold, drying like wax from a one-year candle.

Because she's baking cocaine for Carly,
I'll relapse just a bit this time.
(Just for today.)