Cindy

I am just fucking drunk. No kidding.

I sit in one of those blurs that can only come through a bottle of Jim Beam and a boycott of water.

Cindy slides over, touches my hand and slowly starts running her finger down the side of my face. Its kind of a come on I guess!

-So what the fuck?

She laughs.

Touching forehead to table, angry, drinks, more drinks.

Hard for me to believe, cause I knew her once. Lovers once.


Cindy was a dream I had, when sober, a few years back.

Yet here we are, parkside, patio lights too dim, old men looking down on the pits with bottles of Fifty and shots of Jack, or so it would seem.

Trees now impressionist by hour sixty-one of a sixty-two hour bender.

I see Cindy as through a carnival glass. Pushing over, detached, rings touching..."I love you".

What was it then, 1994?

Cindy dancing down Walnut Ave, driven in a van by her Dad, residence bound.

I met her because I said I would help carry that chair up the stairs. I met her because I came a day too early. So it goes.

Cindy has a screwdriver. Leaning with that beautiful face over this empty battlefield of failed emotion.

-Jonathon, really what can you...

Cigarettes out, smoke streams across the table.

The bar patio blessed with the left-overs of a generation I would love to forget.

She puts her index finger under my chin, pulling forward gently, drawing me a moth to the flame.

Steve Earle... I think...comes on. Some duet. Sad.

-Why don't we take off...you know like in the movies. No looking back.

She shakes her head no.

-Here, darling, there is only looking back.

And there I am again, these mornings before it all, snug against her, oblivion another brilliant sunrise away.