I want to meet the next young man
she falls in love with
and invite him in for a drink.

I want to set up three hundred shots
of the good stuff from one end of the counter
to the other, light them on fire and drag him
through every single salutation and every last bad idea.

Not malice. I just want to make one elaborate,
expensive and ridiculous point at least once in my life.

Then I’d kind of like to steal a car
and teach myself to drive on water. Something tells me
my nerves are going to be shot by the time
they let me back on an airplane going somewhere
worth the risk of getting mugged. Afterwards converted
to whatever faith has you traveling the world
from the comfort of the bathtub in a bad motel room.

Because you can’t go very far around here. My best efforts
have only gotten me as far as those mountains. Most of the homeless
people moved there to build these weird cities beneath the rocks
and pick up on the kind of peaceful simplicity that makes a lot of us nervous.

They didn’t like me very much. Sarcasm is a big turn-off
to people who have implicated the impossible. It’s a miracle
I got out of there alive, and I can’t say I’ve done a lot
of real traveling since. Dreams
that prove the end of the universe looks an awful lot
like my backyard don’t count.

So the prevailing logic is that something
dramatic needs to be done. Soon. I can only take so many trips
to Disneyland, so many vegetarian chicken burgers and but so many
offers to star in a reality show where I sleep until six p.m.
and then spend the rest of the day insulting 411 operators in my underwear.

I guess I could always take the money and walk, not run.
There’s no music in it, but it’s not like
anyone’s cheering me on in the first place. That’s so 2003.

11/03/2010

Posted on 11/03/2010
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