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.

Reflexion

yes…
      i am far beyond your reach
     we merely share stale air
    drowned in broken hormones
   slurred jests and wild urges
  surged through pickled brains

    i will stumble only
      from exhaustion fueled by work
        a natural need for rest

your eyes…
      track me to my corner
     then turn with sad forlorn
    to tease a drooping cock
   with spittled absinthe lips
  home to soiled sheets

    my lips are only flecked
      by sober songs flung
        with passion to the stars

tonight…
      your bed will creak with pain
     a quiet hopeless rage
    stilled only for a moment
   in the half lit aftermath
  of sullied expectation

    my sheets will cover only
      stillness found within
        a coffer filled with peace

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