Absolve the holy ground for breaking your foot.
Pardon the church bells for ringing after you stop breathing.
Forgive the strangers that don’t know what you’re talking about.

It’s not even easier said than done these days. But it can be done.
A Pittsburgh construction worker gets lonely, hands over his life-savings
to a French poetry major from Toronto,
and then tells everyone at the last post office for miles
that she tricked him somehow.

Idiots, creeps and twenty-year-olds ruin everything.
That’s how it can seem sometimes.

Even if someone tries to be a little better than all that,
they’re still likely to burn the antique photo albums,
and then use their fingers to draw new memories with the ashes.

Some of them are hopeless,
clueless,
and, yes, even talentless,
but they’re doing the best they can.

Not everyone makes it though.

One little kid won’t sleep
until she’s fed every pigeon in the park by hand.

An old butcher brought his tools of the trade
to a card game with his buddies, and he told them
that they were going to play for keeps this time.

Hopeless amateur social workers,
also known as people who wear their seven hearts
on seven regrettably peerless sleeves,
take some Xanax, borrow a houseboat
and wait until they’re a thousand ice rinks
under the sea before writing home.

Don’t blame them for not being happy,
and not knowing what to do with the insight
that everyone can see it in the way they sit down.

Ask the right outsider,
and they’ll be pleased as punch
to show you that they get along just fine
with bits of glass under every knuckle.

A fight is a brawl is an uphill breast stroke against the storm.

These people exist,
and they’re just as troubled
as a man who wants to impress
the first woman he’s loved in ten years,
by flying in through the twentieth story window
of the office where they work.

It’s just that they either believe
in the love of a good war story that much. Or they’re lucky
enough to have someone to put fresh coffee in their IV
on an hourly basis.

They pay in cash,
and they can still be surprised by someone
turning them around for a long kiss.

They even vote once in a while.

04/28/2012

Posted on 04/28/2012
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