any spectrum of women in today's society

My point is this.

That I had something to say,

but not much.

I was relying too much on my thesaurus.

Reading too many Cliff notes.

The women in my life were telling me things like:

"I dated this intellectual writer guy who would gaze into my eyes. Eventually, I realized that he wasn’t looking into my soul, he was trying to remember who I was."

The men in my life weren’t saying anything at all.

Even though I was a born progressive human secularist,

I converted to alcoholism in my late thirties.

In the mid-eighties, I hitchhiked to Cali

in a pea-green Volkswagen bus with a divorcee.

She was forty-three. A waitress. Likable enough.

Had a navel ring and corn rows.

In Chandler, Oklahoma, she confessed to me

that she whiled away the hours by watching

Sesame Street and taking a yellow highlighter

to the King James Bible.

I don’t think we were in love, or even in lust,

but we sure as hell knew how to be dishonest

with each other.

While lying in bed at a Motel 6 in Gallop, New Mexico,

she sighed heavily and said,

"I’ve always felt I was original, shy and reserved,

but not reclusive."

We did f**k that night.

And it was memorable.

There should have been a shrine built to her a*s.

She had a presence and toughness about her,

a real vampy-New York-hip-art-rock kind of thing

going on.

She was a Jim Carrol poem

without the emotion and

she brought forward the fact

that a woman always

needs a hook

in this life.