To the Girl Who Stole My Guitar

My paranoid neighbour’s video recording is grainy, but I can see your short white coat, blonde hair, shoulder-checking-nervousness. You are holding my sunburst Larrivee guitar.

Even from this distance, across the furry grey street, the pixilated lawn that is mostly dandelion, you are standing there, keeping lookout for your boyfriend or pimp, as he loads my pillow cases with bottles of scotch.

My neighbour’s lawn is perfect—he strangles each new weed or plucks them by the root, and tosses them on the blacktop to expire like a fish out of water.

He’s disgusted by my indifference to dandelions and my carelessness that leaves doors unlocked, or the guitar by the window. I see the yellow fiery bursts against the lawn as truth.

When they seed, I admire the floating paratroopers that so bravely commit themselves to the wind.

The neighbour doesn’t see the beauty in you either, he only sees thief, prostitute, junkie.

He laughs that you appear to have a black half-moon smiling and swelling on your cheek, from where you’ve been punched.

I can see a lot in these fifteen seconds of distant footage, before you meet your accomplice and walk down my driveway. You don’t play guitar, for example, the way you awkwardly hold it. My neighbour doesn’t see, yours is a history of bruises; nor does he see that you are a soft spoken poem, a floating parasol in search of a whisper landing to fertile soil.