That weatherman is just another local asshole.
He’s small-time,
three marriages down
and has become an internet legend
for drinking on the air
and calling the co-anchor, his first ex-wife,
a “rancid bitch with three legs.”

No one knows what to do.
He’s the only reason
why anyone,
clean-living or brave,
living or pretending,
watches the local news anymore anyway.

He calls for rain,
and then hopes our minor league baseball team
discovers old land mines
in the arena of indie-film heroics.

Rain,
snow,
wind,
hail.
August
through
March.

Charred pennies courtesy of the humbled missing persons up above.
Really,
they’re not missing. They just know something
we don’t,
and they’re not coming down or telling us what happened.

Splinters pour down
from the sight unseen portion our local ladder to the moon,
but no one has had the courage to go up that thing in years.

Dark stuff to match the luggage in our eyes,
and we watch it most every night
over steaks, a crowded room
and warm beer, two cans at a time.

Out there it’s a town
on the eve
of a World Series victory tonight.

Tomorrow,
we’ll try to pick up the heaviest pieces,
eat breakfast without talking to each other.

We aren’t going to know what happened,
who got hurt,
who saw it coming and did nothing,
who buried themselves alive in revelry and fear,
until some stranger visits to make sense of it all.
and leaves with our memories in a black suitcase.

I don’t care about that.
I don’t watch the weather because I like that guy,
and I don’t care about the news.

I just hate the bastard
when he calls for anything,
just about anything,
that keeps us from going out.

She sits on the couch alone,
our friends sit all over the floor,
and I listen to her heart sink,
as though the muscle has too much electricity
and is hanging by a thread over a bathtub
as wide
as an establishing shot
of the ocean.

We don’t play the lottery.
Everyone else here does.
This is enough for the both of us.

She hasn’t left the house in months,
and that hasn’t been by choice in a while.

02/04/2012

Posted on 02/05/2012
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