The videos were so old,
they came in those huge plastic cases
that could fit a brief history of the world on the back
and often did.

When that old Korean couple owned the store,
he used to bring girls around to rent something
from the fifty or sixty videos in the back.

The store was always a bit of hazard.
Some of the candy had been out
of major circulation for years. There were robberies
every other week. Lottery ticket bloodbaths
between people who were willing to go a little mad
to keep the dream rolling towards their lifeless apartment
buildings to tear the bricks in two while they watched
from the other side of town drinking champagne.

The floor was a living history of slapstick.
Light bulbs would drop from the ceiling
to take out a leg and leave some kind of faint
laughter ringing in the ear for days afterwards.

The whole neighborhood was like that,
and that store was just a good place
to keep a firm grip on reality.

It was his home away from the fireplace.
He used to bring the girls there
to rent videos and steal snacks to impress them.

It was always two Cokes,
two small bags of No-Name barbeque chips.
It was always easily done,
and able to fit in the huge back pockets of his jeans.

The store never closed,
so he usually didn’t come back until he had taken
the girl home and gotten a kiss for all that useless listening.

The wife usually worked the counter.
She always saw him stealing that food, and she never said
a word when he came back later to pay for it.

She spoke five complete sentences of English,
but their understanding was pretty sound
and held up until she passed away and the husband
moved out to the park to shoot pigeons and drink gasoline.

The store closed down.
Dejected grown-ups wrote poems
that weren’t really about the store at all.

The boy went to college
but came back when he was twenty-five,
bought that little condemned universe and opened a new store.

It wasn’t the same. Business was bad.
He gave up after a year and a half
and turned the place into a nightclub.

It’s not the worst way to die,
although the husband sometimes wanders in
with absolutely no concept of time under his eyes.

01/30/2010

Posted on 01/30/2010
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