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mercy me

by Gabriel Ricard

I’ve taken all kinds of rides
in ambulances, but not one of them I can honestly say
ever actually made it to a hospital.

It was one accident after another. You don’t have to
walk very far
to find someone
who would trade their new lifetime pass
to the county fair hall of mirrors
for your bad knees or unfaithful wife.

I didn’t look for these idiots, unfortunates, physical comedians
who only got one chance to be rich. You can be sympathetic
on Harris Boulevard, then turn the corner onto Teapot Street
and be caustic to the point where the angels
in Cactus Tower
cross you off the list.

Getting to the library
and back in less than an hour
would be wonderful and along the lines
of the old childhood dementia
that would let me get away being
one of those blind accessories to economic decline.

One of these days I’m going to work on being a real bastard.
My bank account will be empty, and I’ll have so much glass
in my feet that I’ll lose it trying over and over again to walk on air.
Old friends will falsely congratulate on me on my hard-won
sobriety. They’ll tell me to find them the proper channels
and then walk away very, very quickly.

My capacity for patience
is making me lonely,
but I just can’t stop thinking
that even the worst of us
should have some company to hear that horrible music.

Someone ought to tell a joke, bitch about witch doctor weathermen.
Good enough pretenses, I guess.
My heart remains close enough to the right place,
so I guess I’m just unlucky. The emergency routine is always the same.

Every single one of those ambulances
drives for about two hours,
breaks all kinds of unspoken traffic laws
and then hits the tunnel so fast that almost no one
has time to run from their cars and get out of the way.

We go so fast that I black out
with the victim screaming in my ear as though he’s afraid
to complain any other way. I guess I tumble out the back,
no telling who the drivers are or what kind of books they read,
and I always wake up just outside wherever I was originally planning to go.

I have nothing funny to say about this,
but I guess as far as taxis,
the abyss
and other assorted mysteries of the universe go,
I could do a lot worse for myself.

Gratitude gets easier when there’s no one around to hear you complain.

01/27/2010

Posted on 01/27/2010
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Therese Elaine on 01/27/10 at 06:52 PM

"My capacity for patience is making me lonely, but I just can’t stop thinking that even the worst of us should have some company to hear that horrible music." That kills me -the subject (albeit far more poetic) than many a discussion between friends and myself...and a feeling I relate to all too well. Wonderful as always.

Posted by Therese Elaine on 01/27/10 at 06:53 PM

Er...that should be "of many" not "than many"...coffee hasn't kicked in!

Posted by Kristina Woodhill on 01/27/10 at 08:56 PM

Oh, yes, I do like this very, very much. My favs are S3 and S5.

Posted by Charlie Morgan on 01/28/10 at 04:42 PM

...whose coffee hasn't kicked-in...yours certainly has. only you can write like you write, only you...keep as many 'than manys' as you want/need. more than a sixpence, a shilling!

Posted by Glenn Currier on 02/06/10 at 06:10 PM

What a ride and what a metaphor! You had me leaning to the left then to the right, then putting my foot on the break. Blown away being plugged into your mind. I wish I could let loose my imagination like you have here. Thanks for the trip.

Posted by Beth K Hannah on 02/08/10 at 10:26 PM

i love the movement and the friction

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