Barroom Bruises

We are flying alive hideous here,
sitting grooms in bowling shoes
hiding behind a scotch
on the borrowed smirk that being gone owes leaving’s loss.
Saturn rings me up at 4 am,
and the infatuation’s lipped from the tongue
again
driving in madness like a wedge of nobody’s lemon
but mine.
Stung to a restless hover,
you can’t sell rattlesnake piss to a shoelace maker,
at least not without the proper amount of gin
included in the purchase price —
no sales tax to speak of,
no shipping & handling to stay up late with.
Let’s put that money back in your wallet
where it belongs.
Of course,
bulldozers and gardenias can be stationary things too.
Rip off the suckers who are only getting busy bearing more suckers.
The wind worms through rusted frames of decaying El Caminos
all lined up across the spilled mounds of junkyard dust
like dead antelope carcasses or something.
Nobody breezes through pedestrian training manuals
anyway,
and besides,
the cost of dying is figured into the labor charges:
some pre-calculated strife in the sudden punch of being done for.
What we’re never after proceeds
in all the rosy stations of table settings,
of beaming hands-off roars,
of dimmed heart monitors and muted thumb wars,
of bishops taking the cream from the coffee’s rook,
of too-close handlebars and farther-away shaves,
of mistakes in the raspberry’d skin of The Old 88,
of milder and more subtle panic attacks,
of the likes of…