I used to be able to drink five cups of coffee a day.

When some of the stranger images
from my mid-afternoon dreams showed up on the 6:31 news
I laughed like a real veteran bastard and went out for the night.

Everything happened for a reason back then.
I believed that you never had be to be afraid
of the great unknown if you counted amongst your friends
great liars, exotic dancers who didn’t make a sound
and comedians who found smiling distasteful.

All I had to do was change the subject when someone pointed out
that I wasn’t going to make it up the stairs alive in the condition
I had paid good money to put myself in.

I could have been a lawyer. I could have been a lawyer
who stole the show a thousand times a year by pretending
to be a contender so effortlessly that it just had to be legitimate.

I hit the road running at seventeen with four cigarettes a day
and a little notebook full of addresses of people
who wanted to find out once and for all
if I was as stupid as I looked in that one weird jacket.

I hit the road
and told everyone back home
to call me when the traveling show tossed aside
my emotional debts and were finally leaving my backyard for good.

So they didn’t call me at all. I had to come back to find
that the old junkyard had wrapped itself around the outskirts
of town and went straight up into hell
for hundreds of ridiculous miles.

My twenty-first birthday
was a lot of distant communication
and grudges that died in a flurry of fictional gunfire
at the center of a one-way street.

My twenty-fourth birthday
was spent asking strangers to marry me
and waiting for the heart of the room
to need my undivided attention.

By twenty-five
I was hoping to learn how to sleep
through every car crash owed to me through karma.

And when I get to twenty-six
I’ll wake you up at five in the morning
to give away my last stall tactic and tell you
why I don’t trust people the way I used to.

02/07/2011

Posted on 02/07/2011
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