Wait for when I’m sweating it out on mean summer streets
with someone else’s debit card taped to the right sleeve
of this tacky tuxedo I grabbed in an awful big burry.

When the garbage cans in the driveway across the street
hit the front door,
and you know people meaner than the Central Park cops
are about to come into the living room,
you suddenly become a west coast house of charity
with your possessions.

She can keep the jacket.
I’ll probably meet back up with it
in some horrible town in Mississippi.

It’ll be 20 degrees,
and I’ll probably be so dazzled by bad dreams
and heartbreak that I’ll be seeing palm trees everywhere.

And little things will rescue my sorry ass once again.
They always stick up for me when I’m so busy laughing at the stories
I remember people telling when I was happy half of the time
that I can’t hear her bedroom light coming on two streets over.

Hold still for August humidity
in a town that welcomes all the lost, scared,
stoned hurricanes.

That will always be the kind of scene that makes me want
to screw up so badly that I have to make at that moment
the kind of plans I was waiting to make until I was thirty-five.

It will make me look for comrades who haven’t come down
from the ceiling a mansion slowly being pulled into outer space
in a very long time.

I’ll want to suddenly start listening again
to women who couldn’t be paid to talk to me anymore.

Do you dig on guys who talk because it’s easier
than thinking about hypochondria?

Have you ever wanted to love somebody who walks
like they’re escaping from a weekend pass
to the Coca-Cola factory?

Then keep me up for the rest of the year,
because we both know you can,
put a few strangers’ names into my heart,
because we both know you will,
and promise me you’re not obsessed
with growing old together.

You’ll love the mess I become
on the fifth anniversary of when you got really tired
of all the things that used to vaguely charm you.

03/07/2013

Posted on 03/08/2013
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