We’re going to sit at this dinner table
and settle a few old scores. Hopefully
it’ll be long before those candles decide
to send us out the front door and into what’s left
of the driveway jammed with anxious cars and broken lawnmowers.

I’m pretty familiar
with what you can do
when you get a book of matches
and eight dollars worth of intimacy.

I have startling insight
into what you can do with an unkind word.

These late nights are going to kill us.
The local gas stations have been wise
to the way we stagger for years.

We can’t even get in
with those casinos
where jacked-up therapists learned how to make
their hearts stop at will while handing out
Chinese buffet coupons and Mexican death certificates.

The money is always thin. It’s never capable of standing
a chance. We live on watching the night pick up traveling speed
like a couple thousand war dreams and two speed freaks.
We live on a ninety-degree summer night in any number
of strange towns and a strict adherence to the basic principle
of the One and Only Miracle.

Although lately,
I’ve been spending a lot of time on my own.

I’m meeting a lot of people who laugh freely,
pick their teeth with solitaire cards and live off
the bones of dumb strangers. The kind of carnival veterans
who never got tired of using us in the late 90’s.

They love the hell out of me.
They could care less that I write for a living
and act whenever I happen to be passing on.

Not a tense thought
in all their great inventions.
Not a violent impulse
across the board.

You ought to see them.

You should keep in mind that we might even
be finished with that dinner table by then.

10:05,
and the two of us
could be cruising down Cross Boulevard
at high speeds and reckless altitudes.

They might not get out of our way,
but that doesn’t mean we would necessarily
have to stop driving.

06/16/2010

Posted on 06/16/2010
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