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On The Way Home from the Metro Center
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector. -Ernest Hemingway
The winter snow melts
maples into midnight
The slippered muse stirs…
Aw—who am I kidding?
Maybe I should just
Leave the Brown Dirt Diary
with old blind Charlie,
and move
to Ocala where I could get a job
teaching high school English
to the heirs of the Confederacy.
I could expose the glory
of the comma,
and of Tim O’Brien, and maybe
that there English sonnet feller.
On weekends I could tend
bar at the Seaside Lounge
located in the new Days Inn
on the edge of route 75,
only 6 miles from the airport
(free shuttle service)
and nowhere
near the sea.
I would wear a red vest
and serve piña coladas
in fake coconuts to Judy Jean
in the really short green dress,
who told her husband
she was going to the movies
with Millie Farquhar, but is seated
next to his brother who drove
down from Tallahassee. All the while
slipping rum and cokes to the redheaded
girl that sits in the front row
of my senior honors class with the smile
that makes me understand Nabokov
a whole lot better.
I would spend Christmas break
on a drive to Key West.
Walk down Whitehead
Street pausing to pet
the cats before settling
at Joe’s to drink rum
and talk fishing
with the rest
of the high school
English teachers including the gray
haired lady in the floppy
black hat from Ketchum
sticking to the claim that she heard
the shot but thought it was a book
dropping, or a bottle rocket.
I would spend New Year’s Eve
on the ‘walk’ with the one-man
band in the pork-pie hat
across from the Naval Park
blowing Bob Dylan
out of the harnessed harmonica,
picking Lennon’s chords out
of his guitar, while beating
the snare with a new pair
of redwing wing tips
on blackened plywood.
On the way home I would stop:
Fort Lauderdale Reunion
at the Seaside Lounge,
under the bridge that carries
Andrews Avenue over Cypress Creek
and nowhere near the sea.
I would reminisce with little Art Ashton
Who taught me
the first rule of the working world
is that the boss is
a son of a bitch. T.J. Spline
who taught me redneck.
And ol’ Bob Hoffrogge
Who taught me that craftsmanship
is
patience.
I would spend the evening with my brother
at the Southport Raw Bar
on the edge of the Intercoastal,
stone’s throw from the sea.
Surrounded by nautical wheelers,
and forty-year-old pirates
drowning plates of raw
littlenecks in German beer.
Cold green bottles sweating
rings into the scarred table.
And as the morning sun rose
From the Atlantic waves
I would guide my white Buick
with the broken
air-conditioner up the Sunrise
Boulevard ramp onto I-95 pointing it north.
Setting the cruise not stopping until
I reached the New Smyrna Beach rest stop
where I would bake in the late-morning sun
attempting to Starbuck the plaintive cries
of my hung-over mind. Sitting,
back to the sea, on the concrete and plastic,
I would remember
that night, on my way home from class,
when the snow combined with the lights
of the street and the tops of the trees dissolved
into the night sky, and I sat waiting
for the light to change wondering
if another poem would ever come.
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Taken From the collection Brown Dirt Dairy