half a something ain't nothin

i said baby let go of those New York wimps and the English blond in the German clothes, there ain't nothin wrong with all their education if you don't mind dyin early and there's nothin wrong with fashion 'cept there ain't no better way to dress this legend

i was born in someone else's clothes and still don't think it matters

ain't no easier way to blaspheme than a poor man somehow proud, though i ain't nothin cept a wish, and the first sign you understood the world as temporary

some women disappeared from me before the first dawn, like i had the power of gravity and they could never escape if they didn't run right there and then, they had the most obvious respect, just sigh to watch a man burn

while i'm a phoenix from the trash and the backhanded slaps where you see your blood as a red beacon on dad's knuckle as it flies away, hesitates, returns

grade school couldn't break me any better, high school found me arrested for striking a teacher, actually just a push on his head toward the blackboard, angry to be forced to live like this, strong enough to fight and crazy enough to like the punishment

arrested once again, then gone, highway 40, headin sideways, blown like prairie dust, with friends among the tumbleweed, in the back of trucks with cattle or cowboy drunks, a coming-back-from-Sunday station wagon filled with watchdog kids, The Shadowman and his black rig and the rest, all took this bullet west

then i went junkyard mean, worked too many days for honest pay, too much fun in the land the cops wanna take, too few untroubled women, too much a nothin or half a something, too many times with no chance to walk away, too little room for a man who once jumped three floors from a machinist's wife only to find another woman down below who seemed to come alive at the touch of a broken leg, you know what i mean if you ever ordered coffee just to get out of the rain, or you been afraid to think that you got no home no where and you just don't wanna go to another bar to make a friend, get laid or inna fight, angry over my own unimportance, refusing it

they were reckless women who'd be seen with me, no woman would stay—or at least not from love, some didn't hardly talk, but they looked at me like the out-of-town bridge, while all i wanted was a moment when the world don't add up right, just flesh and intrigue, somethin loose, like when freedom don't take a day job

like this woman i knew, she walks in to where i'm delivering furniture, selling steaks door-to-door, an opera in her sales pitch, in front of the secretary's desk trying to stand still except for her hips, sayin as true as television that her cows were developed for astronauts in science's final mastery over beef, and this wasted morning in an ugly office stays in memory up front, every day, sort of the way a man might remember resurrection if he could, a drop drop drop of dream, the first woman to make a buck off interstellar steers, no one could know, so i told this secretary that i had purchased these steaks and how you could taste the Nebraska corn, the big sun rolling cross the plains, the angel rain

this woman, Rebecca, makes this sale and invites me to lunch, and i end up quitting my job that night from a pay phone, collapsed in her driveway three days later after getting married just for fun in a nevada motel with honeymoon rates, trading my car for a motorcycle, dice hanging from her ears, a dried out wind, the heat in the air streamin off my sunglasses into her hair, only our road, only our time, only our kind, two lanes seemed too crowded, the light hanging from the desert sun like flypaper, no way to explain it, freedom does return

it's her way of pounding the motel wall cheering on the bounce of bedsprings, the little roads she finds on maps, a woman who can't remember what she did last year, her way of talkin to strangers like they were cousins at the family picnic, and she always thought it was her name being called in the last casino page

a woman you could not convince of tragedy, she said there was other ways around the worst times, like she couldn't be a home to sadness, she wouldn't volunteer, the first in some sort of emigration, my friend for eight days

to have antelope grace, to move without time, to make the way you turn your head a movie, to live as if nothing lasts

because nothing does, less than a week later there was no good-bye, just "i don't think so," a lateral of a smile, i was too tired to argue

and i kinda knew what she meant, something left in silence to remind me in the lonely quiet of what might be out there, or who

only way to face it: i was changed

now i may be just a machinist's son who never learned a proper trade, but i gotta blue nova out there so fast it shatters old roads and i know a nightspot to shake you loose and a hill anchored to the moon where we can roll around like wolves with only the crickets bothered

the crowd you run with gets older as they talk, leave ideas to the dead, leave these fashion ghosts, wasted on their pride, take the hand of something that moves without time, a man who don't take pride in anything but something close to seizure, in pleasure, it's what they call a thrill, it's my way of life

your friends are scared, witless with the thought they might not know what the other has discarded, dazed from magazines stacked up in the brain, in deadpan panic that there is no meaning, stopping one step short cause they don't wanna know

yeah, they sparkle and jangle but cannot roar

walk straight past your fear of disappointment

step out with me

© CyberClem