Bullet Hole, California

We used to ride down to this club in the bottom of town. 
Everyone wore a frayed uniform of expression. One girl batted 
her eyes and offered a series of controlled smirks. You could lose 
yourself in the irony of her eye shadow.

Sundays they put on an early show, had hot dogs for the asking. 
I saw no better future. Coursing through the cold summer nights 
hunting down a payload of sleep and a ration of caresses. More 
beer. More long-distance phone calls. More ringer tees.

I’d buy burritos from a place with clay bowls filled with
water-floated radishes. I sat next to you, and you, and you when 
you cheered for the world cup soccer game on the peripherally 
blinking television. Even I smiled at that.

We were cobwebs, eavesdropping in record stores that insisted 
on resumes. This was not our land so we pelted it with the tarry 
remains of selfish desperation. I collected transfer passes
and poured over them as if they were printed ghosts.

One time, I grabbed a seat on the bus when everything filtered 
into slow motion as bullets pierced the windows, plastic and glass 
slamming into everything around us riders. One kid pulled the
shirt from his body, checking for damage, but they had missed him.

A month later I caught a Greyhound east. Left my sleeping bag by a 
body sprawled in front of a public building. Time descended like
each moment could be garnished with hurrahs, instead, emptied 
of sound. Dirt under fingernails. No soccer cheers left.

Slept through Nevada and Utah. Wyoming stretched into the calm air. 
We all collapse in the open distance. Nebraska and Iowa went green.
Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and then Baltimore. An undercover 
cop offered me weed as the humidity skipped around like a child.
 
The people all were strangers I knew well enough. A car pulled to the 
sidewalk, honked and my brother got out. We drove over the asphalt 
sprinkled with glass and I told him about the cold Pacific Ocean.
You went swimming? Nope. I’d have gone swimming.