The idea
was to meet up at the Jones Family Funeral Home
on East Broad street. There’s a little parking lot
behind the building where you can dust off your virginity
or drink until the cement looks like the tide at Virginia Beach
during one of those get-rich-quick hurricanes.

It’s quiet.
There’s broken glass from discontinued sodas
and humble one-time kings who argue
about hockey games five miles deep in the archives downtown.

It’s not a home for anyone
who needs the traffic or fifty TV sets running forty-eight channels
to keep them from thinking about the last ten years
and everything they almost got around to doing.

He’s got his car parked by the payphone
because his cell has been unreliable as of late. He’s teaching
himself to smoke while he waits and thinks about
which characters he would want to play in his favorite movies.

There was the time her hair completely covered his eyes.
He had no choice but to imagine
what was going on between her lips
and in the whites of her undivided attention.

There was that time and a couple thousand others,
but all he can think about are his favorite movies
and why anyone would ever want to be a smoker.

His cell phone sits in his lap, and his window
is rolled down on the off-chance
that payphone suddenly breaks out of its coma two-step.

She’s the one with the sixty grand in considerate bills
and the fingernails that leave burn marks on the bone.

He trusts her,
but he’s never been a legend at waiting patiently
and walking the freak show telephone wire
between common sense and pure hope.

An hour,
two hours, maybe,
but there’s really no telling
when she might show up.

Whenever the sun is going to break in half
as her car pulls down a slow music phenomenon.

It’s at the point in their ambitious dreams
where absolutely anything can go wrong,
and that’s certainly not lost on him.

His imagination is too vivid
for dishonesty and recklessness,
and he went ahead and picked love anyway.

He changes the radio station
to something else he doesn’t want to listen to.

01/30/2010

Posted on 01/30/2010
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