Destination

Hello, stranger

You remind me of someone

A jangling lust pouncing on a sliver of a dusty pool of light

Your fire’s hue is a maraschino cherry

A room-temperature eye backlit by the bar

Your tongue, a chewed straw

You’re all period blood and soundcheck blues

Both armpits ripped and a lucky horseshoe pinball bruise

You’re not quite in proportion

So you’ve stayed in motion

Ever since your longing outgrew you

Stepping and re-stepping until it is a run

Over and over on the same platform from where you begun

Like someday this one-horse town will pull itself out of the station

Just to follow you around

You’re the real destination

On a boomerang counter, you crash the keys

“Coffee, please”

A word of advice from here in the daylight:

Stay off the high road, it’s a sneering code

It’s lazy border boundary to “I don’t wanna know”

And we never will

Trash like us, we can’t even spell

But we’re impossible to kill

We just self-destruct

Closing time never comes

Closing time never comes

You love boys and guitars and girls and trucks

The way you move fills me with envy and wonder

You somehow live free of men’s eyes

Even with a bell on your collar, they don’t find or define you

You slip that noose in an arc so whip-sleek and steady

You fill me with envy and wonder already

Somewhere between saying and screaming, you chime

“Oh I, I’m gonna live a real life

With blood and dirt and the subway for dessert

'Cause there’s a feeling I’ve never met

And if it’s gonna eat me alive or use me for its fuse

I might as well walk it home in time for tomorrow

I might as well walk it home in time for tomorrow”

Most of all I love you because you don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt

Waiting for the world to catch up and see you for your worth

As more than just a neutral tarp to compliment the gleam

Of some glossy martyr’s meat

As a contrast high, a graphic feast

Your compact in the gutter mingling with the slurry

Of cigarettes and needles

As more than a housewife, a has-been, or just somebody’s lover

A housewife, a has-been, or just somebody’s lover

A housewife, a has-been, or just somebody’s lover

Closing time never comes

Closing time never comes

Oh I, I wanna live a real life

With blood and dirt and the subway for dessert and more

So let’s tattoo the morning paper to their driveways in our gore

There’s a feeling that I have never met

And if it eats us alive, we can still be on time for tomorrow