Last call—drink up & see who will stretch to embrace you like crime scene tape. 

Once more you hold forth & wish you could look the way you did when you were ten plus ten  plus ten. This is where you fact-check the words  

rage chair rain 

Rain—clean as a jar: It’s the rain you said—twice—on the phone, while you made yourself  some breakfast. 

Rage—the swell of a cloud’s gray foot—leaves your house in a box of rain. 

Chairs don’t make a thing, but they got singed in the house fire, & now make it hard for you to  sit & think, & I know how you can leach the think out of all your rooms. 

* * * 

Every day, you stop by the bar to wash up when you are ready for breakfast. 

Where will we be when no one knows how to do things? What will be when no one knows how  things work? 

I lose sleep: I’ve felt the need to write that down for days, now; my teeth are moss: I write it all  down on a napkin, right here at the end of the bar. 

Shit-faced, & fried all the way to the hat, there can only be so many sheets to the wind. 

Stars scar the sweet dark sky but look at you—all nerves & in fear for the world: you wake with  it at night’s crossroads. 

* * * 

We’ll rent the lake house, we two—we have both been bodies of water on fire—& at night, we  will put the boat in & row to the far shore—no light, no choir, no Place to speak of—& each 

night, you will let out a sigh when we set the line to wait for fish, & you will lean across the  bow, as if on cue, & say to the lake 

I try to do my best each day I’ve let that be my vow 

At daybreak, you’ll scrub your face, & it will kick your suntan up a notch. You’ve waded  through your life, botching up the food chain, & you’ve taken on heartbreak with a kind of joy. 

You think the love you keep will have a shelf life, but then comes the next & the next, formed in  the jar of the first. You speed off like a bee to a bud or a plane to a cloud, & if the love you leave  or run to is true, it will go that way as well. 

* * * 

Our bodies were made so beautifully for sleep, & we have no idea why, but consider the day we  all at once fell asleep: we all at once fell asleep at our desks, & at the bar with our lunch mates  we fell asleep; all at once & at the wheel, we fell asleep, & with a slight nudge, the curb showed  up, so we stopped & slept.