Lord Bull's

roadhouse guitars spit and splatter
hot as bacon grease in Lord Bull's.
dark and smoky hell on a good night.
something turns in me, some wheel
of old wood and rusted black bolts, creaky
and worn from the river driving it.
in times of drought i wake up here,
the bedouin's way with underground springs,
standing with a poolstick outside the sharp light
or back in the corner booth, shiny, red and empty.
still facing the door after all these years,
my arms atop the cushions to catch
something big that might float from the floor.
myself a ghost of a 15-year-old
busing tables, looking down blouses
sneaking drinks and cigarettes all night.
man, i don't want to end up like these guys.
no other place to go than this
stinking dark cloud above the earth,
where floyd neatly fixes the beer signs
in alphabetical order, neon stations of the cross.
when you're poor, you sometimes blow out
of your life fast and scattered as a shotgun shell.
the same day i'd hold college textbooks
--the new paper, and the complications
made me nervous as a woman's skin--
i'd be in Lord Bull's drunk and shouting,
maybe getting hurt, maybe rolling down
some timber road with the devil's fortune
in long hair & blue jeans faded, mapped.
and the morning would find me holding
tight to a school desk fixed to a spinning planet,
aching, happy, alone, determined yet.
lara knows not to call the cops
or the hospital, but she'll phone her mom
and ask once more what she should do.
but i know the rules up in kingston heights,
and her mother didn't get there baking cookies.
"Does he have money? Does he beat you?
Does he satisfy you in the bedroom?"
what else do you want?
and lara stands there, in the kitchen,
struck dumb again on that rumbling ridge
of all we want that we can't see,
the hurtling ground, the last remaining dreams.
till you go back to where you came from,
looking for the portal you maybe missed,
the river's route past the waterfall,
the gurgle of a trout creek below the molten sand.
these guitars have yet to melt the walls
and a stranger can never take you home,
but this whole earth has no where else to go.
i swear they could burn this place down
and people would see a guy still here, sitting,
pacing, waiting, in a vacant lot.

© CyberClem


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