You’re grateful to make it from the car
to the burger place alive.

August dipped railroad spikes into February,
and the wind has been brainwashed
by the kind of heat that somebody closed
the door on a long time ago.

19 is the kind of age when it’s time
to see how Nowhere Valley measures up
against the silver lights and black stone
of all three hundred members
of the Nothing City Community.

But you see trucks full of kids your age
in the parking lot of the town’s
one time world-famous flea market.

They look cold.
The sun doesn’t bother them at all,
and they’re telling ghost stories in the first person.

You see old men bleeding and sweating
on the high school football field,
and you feel a little sorry for them.

You see the day your dad woke up,
and forgot he had retired two years ago.

Make sure the car is still there.
Remember you and the rest of the idiots stopped for gas
two counties back.

Count the money amongst all of you again.
Repeat that there is still so much more to see.

At the door you’re looking back at the football field,
and you don’t like the way the ages of the boys
in the marching band seem to run between 14 and 90.

Those uniforms need to rest in an incinerator,
or they could just be left on a clothesline in the backyard
that dances like a drunk who doesn’t know
he’s standing on water.

Inside the restaurant everything is bright orange.
The uniforms are bright orange.
The tables are bright orange.
The counter at the front of the line is bright orange.

You can’t find your friends for a moment,
and in your panic you imagine
what passes for a wedding around here.

Fear suddenly makes you imagine
how long she’ll wait for you in or around
those three hundred cities.

But you find you find your friends,
and you walk without limping.

You’re laughing at what they’re laugh at,
and you assume you would have done that anyway.

04/18/2013

Posted on 04/18/2013
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