Mary spent her eighteenth birthday in a Kansas City jail.
I wasn’t around when it went down. I wasn’t even alive!
All this tells me is that there are worse celebrations
than the last few times I’ve feared the moment
when everyone starts telling me to slow down.

When I head for the woods,
hoping to find that one wasteland with just a hotel
and a couple of stores,
because I’m pretty sure everyone being safe
on the streets that night are going to drive so fast.,
that the tire in the trunk is gonna fly right out,
and go straight for the back of my teeth.

Every single time,
and this thought fails to hit me
about as often as a medical miracle
smokes another cigarette and smiles,
I just felt like I had to get away.

It never has anything to do with almost slipping
on my guts. It isn’t because some art-school goddess
played at being a class clown, lifted up her skirt,
pressed her other hand against the country home’s revolving door,
turned to me,
and just laughed.

And by the way,
I’m pretty sure dropping to my knees
to pay dedicated lip service
would have been the worst decision I’ve ever made in my life.

And that’s saying something. Especially for 2012.
Especially for 2011. Especially for 1998.
Especially for 2007.

You get the idea.

I never flee the scene
because I’ll have to apologize tomorrow,
or because it’s time to find some new friends
who will be warmly receptive to being ignorant of my bad moods.

If you haven’t figured out why yet,
then I’m not going to tell you.

Let’s just say I don’t want an audience
for all the songs I’m going to sing,
from a notebook I stole from that weird museum,
from that one town I was stuck in
because the bus crashed into a national monument posing as a brothel.

Let’s just leave it at a need to mutter
all those verses of The Bible a man with charred hands
had just made up.

Let’s just leave it.

12/16/2012

Posted on 12/17/2012
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard