Poem: Sixty Too on HI

A fifth of the hour has
passed with grey skies peeling
apart cloud-by-cloud.

Hardly pleasant when rush
hour forces attention
deficit on dutiful drivers.

More coffee may help leather
lungs lift. Steam and lisps continue this cycle until
my mouth shuts. The tires s
tutter tooth brakes and tongue-twisters
slip simultaneously and swell
in a sudden sizzling centigrade 60.

Definitely a day for downers, says the barkeep
down the street. His pub runs them into a
number depression before drinking becomes a chore.

A dash and smug, ugly smiles
make smut seem fashionable and sober
to the tunes in lane left. They hit like stillborn pathogens.

Clogged arterial vehicles divide yellow slashes. Street
time split in half with mathematical precision,
the decision to exit my auto was made well
over six minutes ago.

Where was I? Ah.

I'm down in the bar with tipped brim;
slippery singles sipping alongside me.
Specks of spackle sputtle,submerging
spirit-full into my glass shotflask.

Today-
Keg-throat barrel horns blare under a blazing
nearby overpass and continue to fellate ethanol
tracts. Siphoned oil finds swill fits
swell in a tub labled HOT.

Taxi picked me up less than five ago and there's this
guy, this fucking guy seated to my left here. He was
in the bar all night. I saw him go into the bathroom around seven or eight.
Maybe it was ten and I don't know analog clocks.

He smells of whine and vinegar. I think he
was cell phoned during his bathroom tenure.
When I saw him finally return, this guy.
this guy sitting next to me v
o
m
i
t
s
all over the god-damn floor!

So now I'm beside myself and he's beside a drunk
who can't clear thoughts on what's what with this
foggy situation.

But it makes me wonder.

If he compares hand-size to cocks
or feet and like-wise. Or if he likes
sleazy cologne on day-old flesh, rotting
cell-by-cell to the floor, or onto shoulders
of his brown leather jacket. Perhaps that
was dandruff. Rugged it was, I didn't chance
on another look.

The ride home is a sodden
hitchhike with dead soul,
rhythm and blues singers whining
out of a sealed tin trunk.

Foreign diplomacy excludes me from asking where we're [be]headed.
Isreal drives us another inch towards public terrorism. It's scary,
how my life isn't in his hands but the wheel. The steering
deal of our life is operated by a trustworthless man in drab
clothes eating swad from a thin plastic bag.

We found a stop that resembled a street
corner, he exited while I hailed another
canned phrase to him [he must've kissed the curb].
No romance for another slimy night, and the
clutch gave up around seventy-third.

I handed the cabbie a tenspot while glancing
bow-legged to eighty-first avenue. A right-turn or
two found my rear end awkwardly backwards,
facing the garbage cans outside my window.

Morning was already against my facial
features and furiously, I fumbled my feet
against the doorframe. At once, bedded
disease became intended deprivation.

The leaves outside aren't getting greener and neither is my pillow.

I know some day soon
I'll hear about my car.

Or at least the drunkard I ran over last night.