Better the stories I think I know,
than the ones people are preparing,
for the conversation at least one of us is going to have
about why I’m in love with the wrong kind of wreckage.

Better to be sleep-deprived and heroic for a day,
than to be responsible for the Valentine that poisons
your coffee, borrows your thunder and uses it against your protests
for some kind of social experiment with your heart.

Better to be here than where I’m going
when I finally run out of working vacation towns.

I’ve been around. That’s what I’ve learned,
from people who study psychology during the day,
twentieth-century failures at night.

I’ve gone to bat. That’s what I’m sick of doing,
after a long time of realizing that nothing
I’ve collected is actually precious.

You can see why my grandmother robbed
The First National Bank, faked her death
and married a juggler twice her age.

Or did she actually die?

I know as much about it,
as I know about what I was really trying to say,
when I finished the letter of apology I started ten years ago.

You can’t give up on something like that,
come back to it ages and ages later
and expect to have the wisdom,
you almost killed yourself trying to get in the first place.

I’ve tried to go back.
I’ve worked at taking stock in the breeze,
and wondering if it feels the same as it did,
that summer when I almost found steady work.
Completely free of fifth-hand smoke
and worrying the night away
about only being good at being someone,
who can make jokes about using lipstick to clean holes in arms.

Don’t be so naïve.
It’s a different breeze.
The nineteen-year-old girls are fresh-faced.
The statue of Moby Dick is no closer
to Ahab’s skeleton.

Wherever the hell it is in that steady, chatty ocean.

And believe me when I tell you
that the only new thing the ocean is talking about
is how it weighs about as much as a bucket of tears,
and how it was a much more interesting place
when horses were trying to walk across it.

I get that.
I was a much more interesting man
when I was losing games of Hide-and-Go-Seek
in a firehouse that became a whorehouse
that became a warehouse for smutty letters to fine books.

That became a house for really lousy vacations.

I loved those buildings though.
I loved dressing up to eat at Denny’s.

I loved knowing what could never, ever possibly happen.

04/11/2012

Posted on 04/11/2012
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