If I wake up in the middle of the night it’s usually
for a damn good reason. Twenty-two years of being
able to look back and laugh, and I can’t say the movie
marathon has ever been able to mature and move forward.

It’s still subject to the court
of popular opinion. And apparently popular opinion
consists of an old man who wears black, remembers
back when carnivals took a few unsuspecting children
along for the ride and mumbles so low that you have to fall
in love just to get close enough to hear him.

That’s the image I’m working with anyway. Don’t ask me why,
but it doesn’t make a lot of sense
to think of youth or summer holding strong at seventy-five
with just the right amount of breeze.

I’d rather think of the terrible public spectacle
as something that’s a lot older than I’ll ever be. I just don’t think
I’m smart enough or creative enough to imagine a boulevard
with decades to spare and cities to burn. People I only could have met
in a past life loaning me money or trying to get their car to start
because for some reason I frantically need to get a ride before sundown.

Even the pennies
stuck in the eyes of the neglected staggering dead
have knock-knock jokes and old barroom drink recipes to share.

When I was eighteen, reasonably strong
and definitively in love I could live with all that. My fingerprints
weren’t unintelligible from putting out too many cigarettes,
and I could live for years on my optimism alone.

Nowadays I’m asking the wishing well
to return my teeth in full because I didn’t find out until it was too late
that almost everybody is on to my act. That shouldn’t be altogether
my fault. I was too busy writing it all down to realize that eventually
everything about me was going to be pretty average in the long run.

That’s a whole other subject though. Twelve epic novels in a making
that will take years for my great-grandchildren to find
and finish on their own.

The worst part of it all is that I don’t even get to sleep in.

No matter what
I’m up by seven-thirty,
and my emotional state is subject to savage change
until at least seven-thirty-five.

Some movies take longer to respectfully fade out
than others.

11/24/2010

Posted on 11/24/2010
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