One Every 24 #27

Lost Weekend with the Boys (Reprise)



This starts with you in a car going somewhere
you probably shouldn't be 
going, driving toward
the loaded possibilities of a lost weekend, still believing
no real plan is the only real plan necessary

but, really, you know where you're headed, it’s not like you
haven’t over and out done yourself with the boys
too many times before, so why not pop the cap on
a cold one from the cooler riding shotgun and drive off

through the bloodshot sunset into your memory's slurred
loop of Judas Priest and Black Sabbath nights riddled
with the gaps in your knowing whatever it is you keep feeling
for each time you return to reach down into those blurry holes.

Two days later, this ends with you in a car returning from somewhere
you probably shouldn’t have been, taking another wrong turn
into the gap-riddled Saturday night past where you once looked
deeper to find the blackest part of Detroit.

That night you played the blue balled wheelman after regretting
the Windsor strip club where you chose not to go with the French
stripper who invited you and you alone to come over to her place
later and take her clothes off for her this time, only

this time it's only you and you alone in the car on on a Sunday
afternoon, hung over, middle aged, sick from a lost weekend
you think was spent trying to prove you’re still the wildest
one of the wild ones who are now sensible and no longer so wild

and worried about you. No Black Sabbath, no Judas Priest
rattling the windows down now as you search the ghetto
above the grit of wheels slow rolling against gravel and broken
glass to the silence of no one there to egg you on or beg you off

as you take the turn past the burned out shell of the bar
and the ghost of the bartender who considered you
no more than air, leaving it to someone else
to tell your white punk asses to get the fuck out

before you got stuck, the bar where drunk and stupid
and eighteen one of the boys (maybe you?) said
“Stuck where? We’re not stuck anywhere. We got a car”
only to be told, "Then drive your cracker asses the fuck out."

So of course when the whore approached the clot of you
standing outside trying to decide what next, somebody (you?)
said sure and went down the alley with her looking for some
head and this just before a brother out spare changing came up

said, “She ain’t no bitch, man. She funny. She trans.”
When someone (you?) asked what he meant he explained
look at her fingernails, look at her hands. “Bitch got man hands
all veiny and shit.” Just the kind of revelation that might make

anybody, let alone some blasted high school kid (you?) stumbling
out of the rank darkness, followed by the sight of a whore
spitting a load onto the cracked asphalt, drawing a corded
muscled forearm across his or her lips

puke their guts out all over the mouth of a Detroit alley
to the sound of everyone else's laughter twenty-some
years ago during that very moment the blank vacuum of a broken
street light mapped out the question of how it's possible

for anyone to still be so turned around.