getting lucky
they were a
tag team
mother &
daughter lounge
act cruising
out of town
low life’s
conventioneers
sad sack losers
& their friends
hoping to hook
up for the night
wedding rings
safely tucked
inside electric
shaving kits
they thought
Once inside
the motel
room getting
lucky would
mean fortunate
to leave town
alive though
explaining
what all those
private parts
area bruises
meant and
what happened
to the ring
once he got
home would take
care of being
alive part
Age of Anxiety
She said my life was
just like another long,
boring on The Waste Land
Seminar.
She said I was gauche,
an overworked cliche,
a revisionist throwback,
an anachronism from
The Age of Anxiety.
I had a right to my life,
of course, but she felt
I was better off dead.
She said she’d send me a
post card from Tijuana,
tour the red-light district
on her back, mouth wide open
for the cerveza and the vino,
legs wide open to all
the hombres.
It would all be in a poem
she would write about how
our love was like a used car
left to rust on the side of
the road and how she was
always getting ready to move on
some place more exciting
than the last and I was
always moving into a new
wasteland vaster and more
specific than the last where men
were mean and nasty and wild
women never got to sing
the blues.
The Life of the Party
We were sitting in the living room
smoking dope and drinking red wine
laughing more than we should have for
adults over thirty and I said when I
died I wanted them to play Cherubini’s
Requiem in d for male chorus and orchestra
for me before they pushed me out to sea
on a burning raft and they all looked
at me as if I should be planning to live forever
and said :”What nonsense, you’re not going
to die.”
“But I mean like eventually,
I’m into this Dies Irae bullshit, I need
this for the comfort of my soul, I like
believe the soul needs cleansing by fire.”
Which was a boring, major bummed out idea
and they all said that no one was better
at messing up a good time than I was what
with my obsessive eternal judgment crap and they
would all have just packed up and gone home
like right then except they were afraid
of Susan’s Terminal Man drawing in the hallway
which spoke to their souls with a music
that suggested maybe the end was near and
there was no redemption, and no one laughed
when I suggested a Grateful Dead Party,
I heard someone retching in the bathroom
which made me wonder whether it was the meal
or the wine or the dope or this suggestion
of mine that we should all sort of dress up
as we thought we’d be like after we’d been dead
nine years which was supposed to be a joke
like the hanging Alice Cooper poster on the door
in the dining room that leads to the cellar
where the kids sneakers are revolving
in the spinning dryer like rocks in a metal
oil drum rolling down hill and someone says;
“Since we’re going to be here for awhile, we’d
better smoke another joint and get to know
each other real well” and someone tunes in
this all-night Alban Berg Festival on the radio
and hands me a joint and waits for me to choke
on the smoke as they all sit there smiling,
watching and waiting because they all know how
much I hate Alban Berg and after Berg its Tammy
Wynette and after her it’s slim jims eating
and the Rolling Stones with the needle stuck
in a “Let It Bleed” groove and after that, if
I’m lucky, it will be someone else’s chance
to be the life of the party.
Alan Catlin worked for the better part of 34 years in his unchosen profession as a barman in and around the greater Albany, NY area. He has published dozens of chapbooks and full-length books focusing on his work and the people he met while laboring in the trenches of bar warfare.
