Twenty overweight chorus girls
were trying to get me onto the bus that night,
and I turned them down cold.

I smiled. I counted several of them,
on looks alone,
as being strong candidates for the next
twenty years of my life.

I didn’t wake up. I smiled, bowed
and told them some bullshit
about being all booked up
until 2018 with appointments telling strangers
how close we used to be.

Back when I was worth trusting,
could walk to my hotel room without breaking a sweat
and being left at the kind of alter
where only one of us was going to show up in the first place.

I tipped my missing hat. I told them
to remember me
when I finally learned to live with guilt
and photographs from the impossible romance days.

You don’t have to tell me. I was a fool.
For a while now I’ve been telling anyone,
who can listen while sleeping soundly,
that I’m just spinning my square wheels,
and waiting for the rest of the pieces to arrive by Canadian post.

Let’s blame it on the kind of bad mood
that you get
from sleeping for three straight days
and waking up with all the answers.

It doesn’t matter what it says on my file.
I really was happier before

I didn’t need to know for sure
that everyone is deeply disappointed in me.

I was happy just being suspicious,
of the idea that I could have been a Mexican soap star
before my twenty-first birthday.

Or just anything that would pay better
than what I’m pretending to do now.

The girls just laughed.
They were under the influence in unison,
and found me to be theoretically handsome and funny
at least half of the time.

The bus drove away,
and I finally checked my phone,
to see two thousand unopened voicemails
from two thousand different people,
two thousand different cities
and two thousand different concepts of still being alive.

The bastards, concerned parties and sister sob stories
had finally tracked my sorry ass down.

I hailed a cab,
and told the driver to drive,
until neither one of us could figure out
just where in the hell we were.

He may well be a brother of mine.
The idea grabbed him immediately.

08/22/2011

Posted on 08/23/2011
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