poem of the day 06.16.14

bridge and tunnel to nowhere

she’s the loudest one in here

she keeps shouting to seth

seth! oh seth, do you know me?

do you remember?

seth serves booze to a hundred people a night

five or six days a week

twelve hour shifts on the weekend

he shrugs, okay i guess i know you

she says, i want my regular

seth pours her the first bottle he grabs

something sweet and full of alcohol

which she, her girlfriend

and their two dullard husbands chug

after toasting to life

then they shout away and order a round of beers

before going off to infest the rest of the bar

jersey, seth says to me, bridge and tunnel people

as if that should explain it all away

it only gets worse with them

she attacks the jukebox with her husband

they find the worst stuff on it

1980s top-40 pop

the music of their glory years

then they sing over music

that should already be dead and gone

seth! she shouts

seth, pour us another round!

and shots! the other dullard husband says

which causes them all to whoop and scream again

they gather around my wife and i

to consume to second round

to talk such inanities as kids

and mortgages, jobs, and time square trinket shops

her husband is proud of his bubba gump hooded sweatshirt

he’s showing it to all of them

and they decide to toast shitty movies from the 90s too

i tell seth, this is horrible

if i wanted to be tortured today

i would’ve gone to work

i’ve seen worse, he says.  much worse

and i’m sure he has

when the bad 1980s pop music stops

i get up to go and play a few tunes

before they get any brilliant ideas

i think to play whatever will get these people

back on their bridge and tunnel to nowhere

some buzzcocks, some kinks, or maybe beethoven

but while i’m standing at the jukebox

this fat apparition appears behind me in the warped glass

it’s the husband

in his red shirt wearing his red hat

from a red college in a red state

you playing anything good? he asks

which is so fucking ironic that i want to spit

tell me what you hate in here, and i’ll play it, i tell him

there’s a pregnant pause

but then he laughs out loud

and slaps me on the back

like i went to rockefeller center with him that day

before going back to give them all a story

that really isn’t a story

but maybe something that they can toast to

should they still be standing

by the next round.