Auld Lang Syne
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There used to be too many things anyway—
Plans and people and places to go.
If you weren’t careful, you could waste
A whole day with someone else.
The movies stretched fifty feet high,
Went on forever, and smelled like popcorn
And kissing. My favorite bar
Didn’t even get to drink itself to death.
It died of thirst
And loneliness, and didn’t even wait
For me to go first.
Before it was zilch
The pay was a pittance.
Good riddance
To baseball, which was even more boring in person
Because everyone was smaller in real life, whatever
That was, and you had to walk so far and wait so long for a beer.
Let’s be clear:
Someone could call you out of nowhere
And say, “I miss you”
And then you’d have to cook them pasta,
Listen to Duke Ellington, and dance
Until one of you said basta.
Worst was that it felt like it was going somewhere,
All of it, proceeding to a point,
Arranging like a spider with its web,
But when it went,
The long nights and handshakes and work,
It proved itself figment
And fragment,
A thin hypothesis
In the process of disproof, then
Poof.
Now you can’t even vanish
In plain sight. You disappear
Into the year.
Whoever loves you can’t even volunteer
To be there.
Shopping lives on
Like lichen,
And won’t die. I’d kill for a high-five,
Or a fair fight.
You can’t even get your ass kicked anymore.
I wish I could say, “What survives of us is love,”
But love was first to go.
Bread stayed,
And booze, thank god,
And you.
It still rains.
And I can still complain
That the sky is sometimes somehow blue,
Like some smug proof.
You can still shut the lights off,
And even turn them on if you want to.
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Excerpted from Barfly by Michael Lista. Copyright © Michael Lista, 2024. Excerpted with permission by Biblioasis. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
