Art is by Julie Nicolle.
An Ode to The Japanese Marilyn Monroe
When I first met you in that darkened bar,
I thought you were
a Japanese Marilyn Monroe.
Your lips mouthed sex,
your eyes whispered laugher and
your hair spoke dyed
ash blonde electricity.
Sex and beauty were always
your currencies and
you almost bankrupted me.
Towards the end
we were just two people
slow dancing in the dark and
stabbing each other
to death
in a damp attic.
You killed me
many times
but you always
knew how to do that best.
A friend got to showing me
your wedding photo the other night.
And perhaps I caught your eyes
for the final time in that darkened bar.
But this time
you were wearing the long ivory dress
of a proud bride,
not the short skirt and
easy smile
of an easy party girl.
I saw the guy stood crookedly
next to you in a cheap suit,
who seemed a poor imitation of me.
I wondered
if that was deliberate
on your part
but I doubted it.
I looked at the woman
in the photograph and
I still saw the Japanese Marilyn Monroe.
I saw the woman
who tossed the diamond necklace
I’d bought her off
a downtown Hanoi hotel balcony
into the deep blue
of a swimming pool below.
Who kissed me softly
on the face in a back alley clap clinic
after a Friday lunch and
after six shades of roses.
I saw the woman
who had sent me images of her
shallow self harms, and
who made all those suicide late night calls.
I saw the woman
who had made me breathless
with any number of injuries that I’ve come to
avoid acknowledging like a war torn vet.
You were my Okinawa,
my Viet Nam, my Iraq and my Somme.
I saw the woman
who had laughed at the most
unsociable of times, and
the girl who’d gone to her knees
in the most unlikely of locales.
Who loved to fuck
everywhere but between sheets.
Who’d worn my shirts around the apartment
and my sunglasses swaying in the park and
who had lied about being on birth control.
I always imagined
seeing your wedding photograph
would bring back
a lot of the undead and unhealed,
but I just gulped at my warm beer and
wondered if the guy stood haphazardly
next to you knew exactly
what he was getting himself into.
Marilyn Monroe had been
a very sad and a very sick woman after all.
Stephen J. Golds was born in the U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his adult life. He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling, boxing and listening to old Soul LPs. Glamour Girl Gone, his debut novel, will be released by Close to The Bone Press on January 29th, 2021.
