What these poor, soulful sons-of-bitches
don’t seem to understand
is that this is one of those seasons
that’s going to outlive at least half of them.

Ask them if they care.
See if they try for a make it-or-break-it run
when the cotton candy factory is being swallowed up
by some sort of tornado coming up from the basement.

Watch every last face of those deadly serious class clowns
when the sirens are humming a happy tune. When the blood
leaves the heart to rinse out the eyes,
and make every shadow already in motion an agent of chaos.

You’re going to be amazed.
You’ll never trust a tenth-rate magician ever again.

To hell with those shoddy men of wonder.
They can’t even afford to put gas in their mother’s car,
and all they ever do is argue about sports.
And ask passers-by if they feel like the ground
is getting warmer and warmer every day.

As though the great concert hall downstairs
is running out of places to seat the hucksters
who came before them.

The class clowns,
the peculiar young men of this radioactive town,
they don’t pay those cats any mind.

This night started when they were even younger,
and the dawn is just a daydream with a shrill voice
that gently fades when the bakeries and museums
break the last of their windows. They’re making way for possibilities
that will hopefully be filled
when the great-grandson of the current mayor
sits on a tower of old computers twenty miles high.

This night opened with a bang in the brash middle,
when they realized that they didn’t have to try very hard
to get the girls from the neighborhood
to treat them like weary heroes just back from the front line.

They have time for everything.
No questions, no regrets, no retreat, no apologies,
no excuses, no hurt feelings, no plans, no sob stories,
no faith and no answers.

They have time for romance. They have time for coffee
and very small rooms. They have time
to be dimly aware that their fathers
know what they’re going to say before they do.

They have bodies made for shrugging that off.

06/08/2012

Posted on 06/09/2012
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