Zero Hour

all that dancing and all those drinks left you spinning center at my wake. it's your wedding but i'm counting life at two kids and three moves til zero hour. then kablam poof! whatever follows that forever and ever amen but i was never a praying man anyway.

it's those eyes, you know.

glowing as if all the shit-shoveling sunshine in you is just busting through the gym-tightened seams. it really can eat the soul out of a man and just leave a walking talking urn that brings home paychecks, six-packs and the occasional groceries. maybe something nice for you, but you just nagbitchwhineplead and i don't like rewarding such bad behavior.

but i don't tell you that.

that's probably for the best. you'd take it the wrong way and probably somehow get the police involved. you did that first month, after we started dating and you slapped me. i was checking to see if i'd lost something up your skirt and you call the cops, callous bitch. sure enough just a couple months later i lost something up your skirt but i didn't go looking for it and you didn't involve the police.

but goddamn, goddamn, goddamn - i loved you.

i signed on because what the hell do you do but support the things you love? you march. you pump your fist. you scream your bloody screams. you throw yourself on whatever it is that would attempt to destroy that one thing. the one thing. Damn do you ever do it with a smile on your face though, because that's love, baby, plain and simple.

you find something out when you're pounding your chest, brandishing those bayonets and spraying spit and saliva with those hoarse cries.

behind all that screaming and hysteria and gland-detonating lust of being "in it" there's real danger. fuck is there ever fighting. fighting that no amount of screaming, chest-pounding or waving weapons can scare away that first hit. the hit that rends, rakes and rolls you face-down in that muck and when it hits all you're thinking is shitrunshitrunshitrun and toolatetoolatetoolate. they may never tell you outright but there's the just-beneath-the-surface implication that they shoot the deserters.

all that dancing and all those drinks are talking me into my grave. i'll march quickly, swear solemn and shove it into whatever part of the body houses repression.

call it women's intuition, but you will sense it's ripe and those eyes'll start scoopscoopscooping me out. Sloppy, you'll spill me on your dress but hell it's a rental and your parents paid for the damn thing anyway.

you'll have me at least in the same sense a man who owns a bearskin rug owns a bear. you'll have that much to show off to your friends and say, hey look. isn't it beautiful? aren't you jealous?

i'll just lay there content to be ground beneath your feet until too many cigarette burns, spilled whiskeys and lonely crumbs accumulate at which point you simply just roll it up and leave it on the curb next to the new volvo. which you convinced me to buy.

the volvo's perfect for our plot of hell pastured in white picket fences. the boy has to go to soccer practice, everyday. there's the little one on the way. something practical, something finally fucking sane was in order. so we got the safest, securest one we could. hell there's not a lot of flash or substance or even real meaning behind the whole thing but fuck isn't it safe? at some point we'll realize we stopped talking about the car.

fuck if it isn't safe.