Open All Night

Some cigarette girl let on about it, and she took out all her hairpins too. The headstands and hurdles of your tamest nightmares. A name that gives out vibrations. Real good times never missed like expensive champagne spilled on a cheap dress. The first clean thing you’ve done in a couple hundred days. Good and bad and available, just like the rest. Bribed out of touch with a rascally contempt for respect. Take a breather, Lumpy. Put on your hat and turn down that collar and don’t stick around for a while. Stay afloat. Mug a priest.Why don’t you go on ahead and come into camp already? Put those arms to some use. Another ripe tomato with a crisp attitude. Democracy’s second cousin on the mend. Repealed to all this kid-sister protecting. Serious as a nun. And to bow down to some chump who changes the carnation in his lapel three times a day. Me? I think you’ve sometimes got to get really dirty just so you can get yourself clean again. I don’t trust those who are afraid to get a little…well, sullied. “Dears” that sound like daggers keep making their way into my conversations. Brief and tilled, the lousy syrup you pour over your common sense to make all the wrongs you keep dolling out to tattered jerks in silver buttons and brand-new jeans seem like God-given rights. Wiping your feet on choice, substituting facts for a lovely necklace that turns into a lovelier noose. One-hundred percent of nothing’s all you get for your dalliances. And, God, I’m in love with so many people I can’t even keep track anymore. Like I’m some seersucker from Moonbeam, Ontario going around looking for a match to light a snubbed-out cigarette. You’re here on a rain check, Cellar Sniffer. Put that riffraff jelly in the roll already, Petunia. Sugar-coated talk and all. And then the horses get on their sneaky inside-track way to losing, and all my bets are on a real limper called Crotchety Lil. And of course I’m just another hack scribbler who goes around falling in and then swiftly out of unrequited love. Drinks with strangers permitted, perhaps, and swell enough for the time being, maybe. Call off all the dances in town. We’re all hardly up for another side of paradise’s fling with a jittery take on being what so many clingy brats call alive. Snap your toes to the bassoon playing solos in your prancing-to-yourself head. Don’t you go on worrying your all-dolled-up soul about the social purposes of this here interaction, so-called sticking around and pool-table patents aside. This one’s on the house.