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sawdust on the floor
by Gabriel RicardI can smoke indoors here.
The bartender is a fat man
who sleeps through the night and morning
with absolute trust that his customers will pay their tabs.
All of us do. All of us smoke.
The fat man’s place is not in the public eye.
Not a lot of people ever stop in.
The standstill light show in town draws and breaks the young.
It torments the Gamblers Anonymous clients
with hundreds of the wrong kind of chip in their pockets.
Women I want to love are not exempt,
and my family stopped covering the prescriptions
I buy for other people, so I stopped asking them
to think of excuses for why they couldn’t come here.
Sawdust all over the floor.
The slot machines are Depression-era temples.
Sawdust coming down from the ceiling.
This place doesn’t have an upstairs.
Young as I might really be,
I get to play shock therapy Go Fish
with the old-timers here.
They trust me.
We cheat at the card games good-naturedly.
I drive some of them home,
and we don’t talk about the radio
or how I don’t have a driver’s license.
I came in here a year ago
on the business of hiding from my future close-call-ex-wife,
and I decided it was better to be closer
to home than to Heaven.
Something tells me I won’t live forever.
I never prayed for that.
I never wrote it in the margins of history books.
Deep anger about it aside
I’ve learned to accept that I can’t even see
the five minutes in front of me.
The fat man hates these questions.
He sullenly leaves the bottle on the bar,
and he sleeps standing up, arms crossed
and head looking down.
I drink until I know better than to leave.
I can smoke inside,
but I’ll sometimes stand outside.
Between this cheap joint, and it’s cheap brother,
the cheap motel.
No need for a mirror,
to know my eyes are talking backwards
a mile a minute.
I swallow the smoke,
that’s a bad idea,
and I listen to the rooms in the motel.
Always a fight
during Saturday Night Live.
Always a marathon of lovemaking
before the money runs out.
And more.
But what I love is when those things
are going on at the exact same time.
I like not knowing where one begins,
and the other ends.
01/20/2012 Posted on 01/20/2012
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Laura Doom on 01/22/12 at 06:18 PM Tight and mean, with a touch of mitigation; this month's stand-out [so far]... |
| Posted by Shannon McEwen on 01/22/12 at 08:47 PM the imagery kicks me in the butt and I love it, really awesome. |
| Posted by Philip F De Pinto on 01/23/12 at 05:52 PM splendid work as usual and I love the line about the old timers not questioning or minding if you do or don't have a driver's license, and if that does not illustrate trust, I don't know what does? and when was the last time some reader asked a writer if he had a writer's license and given I equate writing and driving as similar mediums of expression, given that writers such as yourself drive their readership around to places in the mind, places which would never have occurred to them, otherwise. And so in essence, the writer's quill is the vehicle upon which he or she drives their readership to unimaginable places and thank God we still are at liberty to write and drive our readership without a license. |
| Posted by Quentin S Clingerman on 02/02/12 at 02:43 AM Cheap joint for a cheap drink?(are any of them cheap?) and oh, yes, smoking permitted - no longer in MD anywhere in a public place. This is a picture of utter futility. Sad. |
| Posted by Meghan Helmich on 02/10/12 at 05:02 PM I like it, too. |
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