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jeans with the grease spots

by Jared Fladeland

picking up the pieces
to someone else's dream
has never been the most exciting expenditure
of my time.

but its what i do to stay ahead,
because crawling over the backs of the fallen
is sometimes the only way to know
you are less of a screw up then you imagined.

and i can't think of a perfectly good reason
to listen to endless complaining about
the way we have to live our lives
but you can't imagine a better way
to make the insides of your dreams
come true.

we listen to the bickering
of a few dollars and change at the market place,
and the funny thing is to laugh aloud
and mumble so everyone can hear
"you can't take it with you"
and walk away in bliss because everyone's already too busy
arguing about what's left to do in a dried out town
to hear good advice when it's spoken.

the shot glass is empty,
upside down on the table, leaving
a shallow pool of wasted alcohol
on the faded, scratched table of a bar
people spend their nights inside
to get closer to strangers,
run into people they may have known at some point in their shallow lives,
or if nothing else,
capture that feeling between living and crashing
when you feel like you're dancing
but both feet are planted on the ground and
the music is so loud you can't really hear the beat to dance anyway.


and we smirk together
because we've found each other among the static
and it's not at all as perfect as we thought it could be
when we were five years old
thinking about how the rest of our lives should go.

but at least when we crash,
we crash together.

03/26/2009

Posted on 03/27/2009
Copyright © 2024 Jared Fladeland

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Gabriel Ricard on 03/27/09 at 11:52 AM

Wonderful stuff. Just the right mix of hard-won optimism and insight.

Posted by Nanette Bellman on 03/27/09 at 05:00 PM

Jared, this is really lovely. It's like "Be happy with who/what you have".

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