Saturday Night is a myth,
in the bad, not-true way.
But I persist.
The night promises something
beyond a fuck and a drunken chuckle,
but those are what I go looking for.
Tonight’s bartendrix pours to pay the bills
of the convent to which she aspires.
She looks like her ancestors
from a nation of failures, a nation of ghosts.
A thousand subtle dramas
keep me in the jailbreak light of the bar,
contacting the last shred
of intelligent life in the universe
with a cigarette lighter.
I opt for this rude fun,
until it isn’t even a decision.
So I persist, like a mentally defective giant,
close to understanding something,
but doomed from the start
by the love I taunt,
and which crushes me
at every turn.
–Colin Dodds