Jack the Bear didn’t get his name
from a movie hardly anybody remembers.

And he would kill any smug son of a bitch
who asked how much of his weekend was spent
looking for a prom date at the Country Bookstore.

He was just a big guy in a clown car.
He was just another early-riser.
He just wanted to gun it down Baltimore Avenue.
Windows down, a paintball gun in his hand,
and enough laughter to scare a murder of crows
circling ominously over Kansas City.

He just didn’t want to carry around that oxygen tank
for even one more day.

So he didn’t.
Took the cops a whole couple of hours
to bring down #7 on the hard-luck case top ten.

#6 was the girl who loved him back in elementary school,
and never actually auditioned the script she wrote
and re-wrote in the part of the kitchen
where the water came up to her knees.

Four of her five kids didn’t have a father,
so it was a hell of a surprise when she told them
after he was gone that their father had been a good man
who might have tried a little hard to be glad he was alive.

Consolation prizes filled her dreams for weeks afterwards.
She stopped taking her grandfather’s priceless revolver,
the one he always said should have killed John F. Kenney,
into work with her at the bank downtown. The one
that nobody trusted anymore.

Sometimes she danced on the lawn,
and sometimes the lawn wasn’t made
of the same old sharp plastic.

There were even times when her kids
weren’t embarrassed to go outside,
and make her come back into the house.

Some kids eat apples drenched in vodka three meals a day,
and eventually turn their wrists over to resignation.
Even sooner than the grown-ups who play Russian roulette,
and carry two pennies with them at all times.

Since you can still find love in a scene like that,
everything was actually pretty good for a little while.

10/12/2012

Posted on 10/13/2012
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