Every night I watch people disappear and it comforts me.
I find myself religious about abandoned cars,
forsaken wallets stitched into quilts of dead leaves,
bloodhounds, unassuming witnesses, suspect lakes,
runaways crouching outside rest stops, crow-like.
I wasn’t this way as a child— death-obsessed,
mystery-crazed — or even three or four years ago.
Three or four years ago, I only had eyes for thick-headed pitchers
and karaoke mics.
Highlands was where Ryan and I would go every Thursday, Saturday,
and most Tuesdays to pay tribute to Elvis and The Darkness,
Bowie and The Ramones. The songbook
with the grimy plastic pages was our
ten commandments. Marching orders.
A manual for glory and oblivion.
After spreading the gospel I’d be buried alive
in inebriated accolades and nicotine handshakes
sidestepping backwards caps
and puddles of sawdust, a brotherhood of pickled brains.
In the bathroom
above the urinals
were ads for DUI lawyers and dick pills,
pentagrams and devil horns.
It was middle school all over again,
a gymnasium of chokeholds and body odor.
After midnight, we’d go our ways, communing with
unmarked roads and our waxy psyches.
One night I stumbled in the basement and encountered
my father. Where have you been? he asked.
I melted horizontal and laughed.
You could have killed somebody.
I laughed harder, itching to be somewhere
where no one could hear me.
Sipping valerian in front of the TV at the boozy witching hour,
I wonder if anyone from that world thinks about where I’ve gone,
if the muscled bartenders bothered to post fliers, or
if Alyssa, my favorite nose-studded server, ever dipped
into a trance during the hollow lunchtime hours,
muttering to herself, Somebody knows something.
We just want to know he’s okay.
