The Happy Hour

Cocktails
FOR SALE
is what it says.
Underneath the
‘FOR SALE’
are fragmented black letters,
dissimilar in size,
chipped and discolored
to almost grey (not gray).
-Buy 8 get 1 free-
We’ll buy them and drink them.
Carefully placed, you believe,
are those letters on the sign,
crooked and hanging,
the first ‘l’ dangling into the ‘S’ below.

Can’t be what it says, though.
-But does it say that?-
(It does.
Say that.)
For an instant, it’s considered
an outlandish, absurd exaggeration,
before realized – frantically admitted –
you want those 9 cocktails.
Who wouldn’t?
Confident you can drink the 8
and get the ninth,
or all of them,
free!
You raise your hand,
your (invisible) glass, too,
not recognizing no one asked.
Still standing up –
maybe even leaning on that sign –
without doubt next
falling over in a heap
next to some dirty brown Impala.
-Hey, that looks like a cop car-
is what you hear.

Either way, we can fake it,
as we turn around
and look again to see those letters suspended
in our faces.
It is almost certainly too early,
but that burning is already there,
felt in the back of the neck.
So we shiver to think
soon it will all be erased
and all be gone, all be better.
So much better,
when put in that perspective –
a jaded angle curved like a bottle
almost,
but clear, radiant –
biting the inside of the tongue,
cutting deep and blistery
in your cheek,
sweet and stinging within,
and blank.
Always bare, we cleanse the palette,
rinsed and ready for the opus.

That’s not what it says, though.
The building is for sale.
‘Cocktails’
is left over from the bawdy El Norte.
Oh, that’s why.
Our plummeting hearts
thought it was a day for the clinking
of cheap and shameful glass.
Thus humiliated by our desperate cravings,
the ‘l’ falls into the dirt and rocks,
not looking any different than before –
just gray (not grey),
and barely crowning the asphalt oasis.

It was a pleasant prospect.
Nonetheless.