A Girl at the Mall One Afternoon

She stands before the pretzel place,
Perched on an ephemeral pedestal
Pretended in the peripheral of every male passerby,
One hand affixed to where her hips should be.

Her lips,
Two carmine collagen blimps
Pursed in pained selection,
A calorie-counting cacophony
Of muddled brain chemistry.

Onyx dusted eyelashes
Bat idly at the boy behind the counter
And somewhere a rabbit is tied down,
Eyelids clamped open,
A chemical administered,
Inconsolable squeaking
And a wretched pop
As its spinal cord is torn asunder
In the want of an escape.

She blinks triethanolamine stearate.
She blinks hydrophobically modified cellulose.
The pretzel boy wants her number.

He thinks of kissing her cheek,
His lips lifting traces
Of the phenyl trimethicone
That gives her face pigment,
Of holding her bronzed hand,
Running his fingers over
The Erythrulose and dihydroxyacetone
That brown the cell-thin deadness
Encapsulating her.

In a building full of cages
A dog in a gas mask,
Un-anaesthetized,
Coercively huffing
A contained cloud of experimentation
Until the poison takes it
Or its stomach ruptures,
Muffled yelping
Crumpling in a dead heap on the floor,
And she’s so sexy.