Trend Setters

The breeze turned cool
sometime this week,
cool enough to notice.
That’s the signal.
I’m about through here.
I owe the landlord, I owe the bar,
I owe a woman named Darlene
an apology she’ll never get.
Every bridge in town
burned down to the waterline.

The guys at the meetings call it
a geographic cure.
Pack the bag, catch the Greyhound,
start over.
But you never start over.
You just haul the same old crap
to a different zip code,
different days, different locals,
new people,
new victims.

I’ve done this enough
to do it right.
One bag. No goodbyes.
The motivation takes a while,
but it always shows up,
usually about the time
the money runs out.

Every town’s got a skid row,
or one step above it,
but just barely.
That’s where I step off the bus.
There’s always a flophouse,
rooms by the week,
a sink with a rust stain
shaped like Ohio,
a radiator that knocks all night
like somebody wants in.
And there’s always a bar
two blocks down
where the bartender learns my drink
by the second night
and never asks where I’m from.
Nobody there asks.
That’s the whole charm.

We get a few laughs.
We hook up with a few tired women
who want what we want,
a warm body and no questions,
and by Sunday
nobody’s fooling anybody.

Day labor when the rent comes due:
unloading trucks at 5 a.m.,
scrubbing pans in a kitchen
where the cook hates everybody.
Enough money, then I quit.
Then I’m free again,
free as a dog
nobody’s looking for.

We keep it up as long as we can.
The gutter takes us at fifty
if we’re lucky,
in bodies that clock in
at seventy-five.
Then a corner in potter’s field,
a number instead of a name,
the county paying for the hole.

Trend setters, every one of us.
Sooner or later everybody follows.