I’m either going to find twenty years
worth of work, or I’ll just spend an hour
waiting for you at the entrance to the junkyard
that’s had its eyes locked onto Main Street for quite some time.

Every year,
they say
that junkyard gets a little bigger. The surrounding fence
can damn near talk of ambition like a lazy dictator.

This place is going to be a scary sight in a decade,
and I’d rather have moved on with you
long before then.

An hour, no more than two,
and then I’ll go home if I don’t see your name in lights
or some young kids walking past me. They’ll have to be going on
about how
they just saw the most beautiful woman
in at least forty counties pass them by.

If I do stick around for twenty years I hope
to never run into you. I’ve seen how small the supermarket is,
and I’m aware that the town mystics really know
how to get around and spread the latest gossip.

The town fair can almost fit
in your back pocket, and the trailer park is a skyscraper
with broken ladders and complimentary grappling hooks.

You don’t stick around to live recklessly
and push your luck in the youthful endurance
of your lungs or knees, so I’m not sure what you’re doing here.

Maybe we grew up here. I can’t remember that far back.
Maybe you finished school like you said you would.
Maybe you lost it all and wandered through the dust
like a character from an Amnesic country song.

Maybe I’m asleep in Chicago,
and you’re still living it up and down Richmond, Virginia,
remembering every bitter complaint I made
about that city always shutting down around midnight.

Maybe you’re a vampire,
and I’m Nick Nolte in that one movie
where he was so old, so worn-down looking
and so cool as he smoked a cigarette
while they played that one Leonard Cohen song.

I’m just saying. It could be something completely stupid like that.

You liked stupid, and I think I’ll be okay
if I can be just dumb enough to make you laugh
and then hit me in the arm for getting it out of you.

I think,
hope,
pray,
cough
and probably cough a few more times.

I’m going to rely on old charm. Old tricks. Old dance moves
that look like I’m just walking into a room where half
the crowd is happy to see me and the other half wants me hanging
from a telephone poll at the top of Vincent Price Hill.

I’m going to assume everything at once
and hope that makes sense
when I see you during two hours of swearing at fast cars
or somewhere in twenty years
of infuriating paycheques.

I can almost lean either way,
although I should once again emphasize
that my passions are not on looking for a career
in this part of the world.

01/06/2010

Posted on 01/06/2010
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