It was a crapshoot, that year. Blown apart

by its glorious squalors: open marriages

you’d wanted as badly as your dominatrix

wanted to study performance art; primal

scream therapy down by the I-5 rest area;

boombox safety-belted into the shotgun

side of your muscle car, tripping along

Pacific Boulevard en route to your day

job. It chills your prodigal dreams: takeout

fajitas, still fizzling in their styrofoam box

on the minibar in a dim efficiency where

you no longer live, brewing hepatitis A

or worse. What don’t you understand? We

are also dying, in a sense. And in the other.

(Even our words doth flag.) I dig, my brother.

 

 

Originally published in Meridian