She climbed onto the hood of the car
and started swinging that baseball bat
about as hard as she could.

I was helpless to do much of anything.
Voyeurs who don’t know how to laugh
or spin their wheels after arriving
fashionably late usually are kind of useless.

Hundreds of wings had burned up
in an atmosphere of manic weather
and comic strip panels of Little Nemo’s
sarcastic prayers to God.

All that and more had to happen
for me to even get back on the streets
of runaway fires, orphans driving jeeps with machine guns
and thousands of people who are going to turn bloodthirsty
when they learn to fly but can’t think of anywhere to go.

I might have even been dead at some point.
It was that kind of year, guys. I was twenty-three
when my old friends from that one band
started doing some of their best work in sixty years.

The next day we were through celebrating,
and all I could do was lay in somebody’s bed. For some reason
my memories of being nineteen and relatively calm about adversity
were so strong that I may as well have been actually going
through it all over again.

I loved once again being just twenty minutes away
from finding out if ambition would be enough
to get my writing partner and I into Memphis on time.

It didn’t,
but it was a hell of lot of fun stealing cars
in order to get back to Virginia Beach by Christmas.

The point is,
I can’t account for much of the last twelve months,
and I certainly won’t lie my way through everything
I should regret about the years that go back even further.

What’s important was that I was back in the day-to-day.

A bad limp is taking serious money out of my left knee,
and I’m about thirty pounds heavier than the last time you saw me,
but it’s still nice to be needed again.

It doesn’t really matter where I wind up.
It’s not a big deal if I can only be so weird at my age.

This girl and the car is just Tuesday,
or whatever day it’s supposed to be.

I’m just glad I’m once again able to believe
that everything happens for a reason. The trick is to shut up
and stand in the way at the same time.

07/21/2010

Posted on 07/21/2010
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