My temper got the best of me
when the car was six miles above heaven and earth
and just about to try for one more ballerina twist.

I held her beautiful face in my hands
and tried to see the big picture
out of half of a cooperative eye.

I smiled and filled in the gaps for any teeth
that might have been waiting for my return
twenty miles behind.

It was a good night for getting back to the performers of my childhood.
They were gods who failed like monsters. I usually find them playing
in tents before a packed house of possibility in the middle of the desert.

Then again it would later be a good morning
for a hotel breakfast surrounded by retired cops on painkillers,
some strippers trying to start a rock and roll band
and several children who ate quietly and wrote things in a shared notebook
while glancing around constantly.

My time was spent eating alone.
It was unspectacular fun to ignore the no-smoking sign
like a tired rebel from a tired stationary dance move
last seen on an infomercial in the sixth and seventh worlds.

For the most and even some of the lesser parts
I just tried to recover from my nineteenth birthday back in 2004.

I can nurse a September hangover
and an February concussion simultaneously.

I can be awake by seven-thirty, alive by noon
and impossible to ever love again by nine.

Weeks went by before I found a ride back
to my second-to-last hometown. It would be even longer
before I remembered how I got to the hotel, what happened
to my June bride and why taking Tylenol PM with gallons of coffee
had become as natural to me as breathing
by way of someone else’s compassion.

Even in her mid-thirties,
she was a mean kid who found a gun in the glove box
simply by believing one would be there.

Her bridesmaid dress never once moved.
Not even after the wind picked up and sent most of the drunks
scurrying for a quiet place to pin themselves down
like crazed moths and wait out the preachers
who stalked the streets with shovels and big ideas.

We were fine
until the time came when we weren’t fine anymore.

When my temper got the best of me
I took out a chunk of her hair with my teeth,
remarked that a wig would suit her better
and let myself out before our car came back to reality.

You had to be there.
To know how much that bugged her
you would have had to have been there.

04/11/2011

Posted on 04/11/2011
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