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told you so, big guy
by Gabriel RicardOver the years
I’ve had occasion to dance
with the occasional young actress.
I can’t say any of them ever went on to win anything.
I’m sure they were very sincere and very beautiful
right up until they found some kind of holy light
at the end of a long hall on the sixth floor of The Hotel Broadway.
In the interest of fairness
I can’t say I’ve since gone on to do anything
that would forgive the psychic and psychological debts
incurred in the days when I bet everything on that horse
with a serious rockabilly death wish.
A couple of broken hearts are always on the table.
But I suspect a good brass knuckle veteran from downtown
would take the disappointed hearts for a pound of flesh
over two or three emotionally devastated lovers any day.
Then again I could just be completely kidding myself.
I tend to be at my most arrogant when I’ve worked out
a new pen name and a new unbelievable cover story.
One of these days
I’m gonna come up with a personality that sticks.
One of these days
I won’t have to run into someone five years later.
It never goes well.
They can’t believe I’m still trying to write for a living,
and I can’t believe
they can walk and sleep like that at the same time.
Everything’s a low-budget
freak show around here,
and I’m just a geek because I have ten small obsessions
with very little patience for anything else.
In other words
get me out of here as soon as possible.
I’ll wait until later to worry about money,
war movie heartbeat or whether or not
I can speak the language.
The great thing about consequences
is that the right combination of them
will always be kinda funny
whenever they finally catch up to you.
I’m one of the worst-dressed people
to ever figure that out.
I’d still like to think something’s been learned
from waking up to a bleeding nose,
and the sound of a bus trying to get ahead
in some impossible experiment of time and space.
I’d like to think there’s still a thousand and one
small countries where I’m just a little handsome
and always on time.
12/02/2010 Posted on 12/02/2010
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Johnny Crimson on 12/02/10 at 03:14 PM 1,002 small countries to be exact! Nice write. |
| Posted by Paul Lastovica on 12/03/10 at 03:43 AM "The great thing about consequences
is that the right combination of them
will always be kinda funny
whenever they finally catch up to you." this needs to be written on a dollar bill and set into circulation... I got a really nice kick out of it |
| Posted by Joe Cramer on 12/04/10 at 02:33 AM ... nice..... |
| Posted by Meghan Helmich on 12/09/10 at 02:30 PM I don't know about your punctuality, but I've always found you handsome :) This is a great piece, I know this feeling. What am I doing here? What can I do there? |
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