The Happy Couple: A Photograph

She had the look of a 1976 Buick, driven hard and left too long in the tall grass behind the barn---the nesting place for wayward mice.  The lines on her face told sordid tales of drug-induced stupors and drunken one night stands.  Barbed wire tattoos coiled around each arm and a poorly inked vine spiraled around her mid-section. A gaudy dragon clutched a cubic zirconia and dangled to and from her stretched navel.  She wore a stripy, knit half shirt in horrific autumn hues that revealed years of tanning bed abuse.  An overwhelming array of rings, chains, bangles and bobbles littered her heroinesce frame.  Her arms were curled around his neck in a desperate fashion and capped off with shiny, blood-red talons.  They were locked in a gag worthy kiss.  All eyes closed---her face relaxed, his pinched like a 5 year old forced to kiss his Old Aunt Mabel, whom he barely knows and certainly doesn't like.  His drooping seventies rocker hair hung like stringy linguini and fell over a filthy looking leather motorcycle jacket.  His look is disheveled and dirty, clad in tight blue jeans with a hole below his left buttocks.  A chain connected his presumably empty wallet to his belt loop and clung with uncertainty over his thigh.  Boy, woman, man, child?  Too old to attain his rock n' roll dream, too stubborn to let it die.  A dream not so much deferred, more tarnished and yellowed with age and laziness---soaked in sex, drugs and alcohol, light on the rock n' roll.  The happy couple living out a hazy fantasy---the hot, sexy groupie and the sensational rock god.