I’m honored to say
that some of the best Shakespeare plays
I’ve ever seen
have been in junkyards,
and loser-takes-all boxing rings.

The girls are ridiculous at those.
A dozen strange head cases just like me
are lined up to kick the old cigarette machine,
and then act like they picked up the limp
chasing them across town in elementary school.

I don’t stand out in these places.
My clothes are not brand-new,
the plain, ordinary coffee has been half-gone for hours
and my footsteps are muffled against all this noise.

For the record
they still carry the stupid hopes
and charming loser ambitions of everyone,
who used to come here,
and secretly wished to one day grow old.

Someone else already broke their neck. They tied a bed sheet
around their neck and tried to fly
out the first-floor window
amidst glorious, heavy metal fanfare.

I was actually there for that.
Would you believe it was also
the one and only night
where I almost got hitched?

Everything was glorious and unreasonable that night.
The band was ready to leave Kansas City behind.
I traveled hundreds of miles,
and almost forgot how much the sun can feel like a Vegas hack
when you go long enough without staring it down.

Yeah,
I deserve to be blind,
or telling people how hard it is love again
on one good leg.

I’m sure the hole in my stomach
could contribute a lot
to a game of basketball.

Sometimes,
I wake up in the night,
remember I’ll never be innocent,
remember no one else is there,
and I suddenly start coughing for no reason.

A spiritual woman told me that’s enough.
Another spiritual woman told me to try harder.

I loved them both,
and you can probably diagnose me
with a phone book worth of a paper
on that alone

A gang of bright-eyed atheists took me out to lunch.

I swear,
their Cadillac never went slower than one-fifty.

I might have laughed harder in the past,
and I know I’ll laugh harder in the future,
but there was something,
I hate to say it,
but there was something magical
about that night.

I didn’t breathe a word of that to them though.

Can you imagine how that would have gone over?

10/14/2011

Posted on 10/14/2011
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