Friday, January 4, 2008

Scraps From Microsoft Document, "Going Home Rituals," Written December 22, After Work, 2007

Tonight I prepare to go back home
Like so many times before
A six pack and I
Will unearth a royal blue suitcase
and fill it up with my nicer shirts.
The ones I only wash
when I’m at my parent’s home.

These same shirts, collectively,
don’t get clean for weeks,
sometimes months
because I’m too old to tell
my mother I don’t know how
to get them clean myself
But I think she's finally caught on.

Sometime in the next week
I’ll be in my old bed
with the shades turned down
but open enough for the moonlight
to come in.
And I’ll see the same view
I’ve grown up with;
a frozen lake,
a couple pine trees,
and light pollution
from downtown Minneapolis
and
I’ll think about things
like where I’ve been
and where I’ll be.

At that moment, I won’t be
at my home
any longer
for I know nothing
of the city I grew up in.
Now that I’m older and
living four hundred miles away,
I feel all Chicagoan and grins
in vintage tees with jeans
but my heart will always be stuck in
Minnesota winters,
even if I don’t feel like a native
In my bed room,
In my heart, I always will be.

Now I’ve drank half the sixer
and packed my weathered bags
and I'm ignoring the other brews for
my scavenger roommates
like I usually do
twelve hours before I leave.

And in my wake a woman,
no, the thought of what could
And never will kill me
Sometime in the
next week I imagine it loves me.
I imagine it lulling me to dreams.

I told you that you would never believe me

There at the embankment of a highway overpass
runs a fearful friend of mine,
away from a car crash
and what he has recently decided is a "drinking problem,"
but what is most likely the same pressures we have all considered,
now embodied by what he does at this very moment:
running from that potential threat,
be it unaided social interaction
or clear-headed consideration regarding the state of our lives.

But I love him, like I love all of you
and if I wish you anything
it is the ability to stop running across freezing Minnesota highways
at three in the morning,
or maybe the strength to drink all day,
everyday,
and never think that you have a problem.