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Silver Lake

This life isn’t all hookers-and-blow, you know
but even so one day a month you’d ease the car off
the boulevard, your u-turn describing a long slow arc
forgetting the pretence of work, the litter of scripts
on your passenger seat. Driving south
against the rush hour, the commute, as a salmon
might make its way, by force of will, upstream.
And so you headed out towards Tijuana.
I remember you saying you could order from a menu.
How the oiled girls lined up to meet-n-greet you.
But I could not tell you which part of yourself
you handed over as your Buick crawled across the border.
Or which part of yourself you left forever
with Tanya, Tracy-Mae, Encarnacion or Estella.