Lady MacGuffin

You kept your bottles of nail polish
jumbled inside a turquoise chest of drawers

on top of which perched a cast of the Maltese Falcon

you'd purchased from a thrift store years before.

Scars criss-crossed its black veneer,

exposing the chalky plaster underneath.

The film was on TV last Saturday evening.

I sat alone and watched it from my couch,

slathered in the achromatic glow, downing

tumbler after tumbler of bottom-shelf scotch 

to make myself forget that you were gone
and still would be tomorrow and tomorrow

lacquering my talons with filched obsidian.

The liquor made it difficulty to stay within the lines, 
the shaky brush kept slipping from the nail. 

The vapors caused my skull to start to spin

just as the dark heart of the story is exposed;

when, cradling that chunk of feathered lead,

Bogie mutters those wrenching final words.
You know what they are. Stripped of fury, 
signifying nothing. Sockets hollow and dead.

His gravelly voice so bitter, so resigned.

I hate admitting it, my love. I cried.