Take me back to the top of the world,
and try to have the common
goddamn courtesy
to make sure it’s the night before last Tuesday.

Those were the unrealistic,
six-hundred-dollar days,
and it didn’t matter that I had been drinking
for days, or that it was finally known to the public
that I don’t know how to write a technically sound poem.

I was handsome in a white shirt,
and I still didn’t know how to play
the guitar, but I knew how to tell someone else
to just smash theirs against the wall,
and claim it was part of the scheme all along.

Way-past my spiritual bedtime,
but the cops still didn’t care,
if I lived or died.

You don’t climb the library steps,
back up into Hell over that kind thing,
but you do stop complaining
and fretting over psychic breakdowns for a little while.

It wasn’t going to send me
to the kind of church
where people who fit my description,
trade in their loaded kids gloves
for directions to a firehouse pancake breakfast.

I’m not falling for their snake charm ever again.
The sweetest people in the world will lock the doors,
and keep you on the third floor for twenty years.

It wasn’t a night
as grand as any of that,
but it might be have been good enough
to teach me how to ride under a bus
without complaint for as long as it takes to get well.

It could have been a great night
It could have been memorable for all the right reasons.

No one can say
I didn’t blow the deal in spectacular fashion.

Do we really have to dig up the details?

Is so important that we figure out
how many people told me to know
when it’s time to leave like a gentleman?

Even I can’t remember why my pants and wallet
had their own first-class ticket to London,
or what I wrote on that ten-dollar bill,
that made that poor girl so angry at me.

Someone else does.
Let’s just go with that,
head back home deeply ashamed
and meet up for breakfast in late November.

Someone else knows the whole rotten account.

They’re not going to put me back on top,
but at least they seem to have grace enough
to not say a word.

Count your blessings,
and keep the pennies that carry them,
as they drop from the sky.

09/11/2011

Posted on 09/11/2011
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard