My father may or may not
have been a great man,
so we’ll just leave it at that.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to crash into him
one day,
when I’m stuck at one of those parks
that go on forever and have some beautiful homes
and three-story buildings scheduled to be finished by summer.

I want to meet him and then wait thirty years
to figure out what everyone saw in thirty seconds.

Sometimes I miss the obvious.
Occasionally it breaks my legs and leaves me
crawling towards a minefield full of shopping carts.
It’s difficult work when you’ve got a ringing in your ears
that sounds like a remix of a cover of something that finally sounds
like nothing you’ve ever heard before in your life.

There’s a bad accident, a terrible scene
and a lot of calm voodoo logic all over the place.

I’m always caught off-guard.
I almost never have enough twenties on-hand
to get myself out of real bad trouble. And I sure as hell
don’t know what to tell a beautiful girl when I’ve tricked her
into looking my way.

A lot of problems are on the board. There’s a team
of invisible pedestrians dealing with them as we speak.

Is it okay to blame my surroundings? I have no way of proving this
beyond the usual old photographs and recorded conversations,
but I’m almost positive I was a better person at some point
not too long ago. Pure speculation
but I’m hoping there’s enough to make a case
the next time my hands fall off, and the only cars for miles
are ghosts that pick up living hitchhikers.

I think I may have even met some of them before.

12/05/2010

Posted on 12/05/2010
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard