So far as the average partying bar-hopping American is concerned, I probably have no life. The bar-hopping flies and turds are of course welcome to this view. Now that my schedule has been changed so that I have Friday and Saturday nights off, I find myself sitting in Denny’s during the night with my laptop watching the bar-flood sog, slurk, slump, stumble, slurp, and slink into Denny’s as the bars close up around two in the morning. In some ways they’re interesting to me. These living ghosts represent a feeble attempt to make the harsh lonely realities of existence more bearable by using alcohol and probably drugs to alter their perspectives manually. And the shackles of healthy inhibition removed, these emotional deadweights swarm each other’s sexual urges like piranhas in a bloodbath.

I watch them fondle one another, compete for attention, get pitted against each other by attention-seeking females, rise up in dimwitted defiance, and fight. Sometimes the tables fly up to avoid the charging bulls, enraged by the double tragedy of their life’s inevitability and the loneliness they face in the cattle-chute.

Once in awhile one of the cows—even pretty ones—looks over and notices me with my books, and smiles suggestively. I smile back, courteous, and quickly avert my gaze before one of the drunken bulls notices, and return to my own process, satisfied completely by my own path—a far cry from the cattle-chutes. In my peripheral vision I’ll sometimes see one of the cows staring at me as I type, read, or think. And I think of that last long look at the pastures as a bull or cow begins to find itself corralled into the slaughterhouse pens, and driven through the chutes toward the mill.

Theirs is not my world. And so this poem manifested as I listened to the gaze of one of them; one who has yet to hit bottom.