What a Sad Christmas

Christopher’s Bar is all full up and Liquor World is closed already.
So I wander down the avenue looking for someplace to take me in,
clutching a Brautigan in my coat in case I need some conversation.

I used to keep a plastic cooler in the back of my beat-up old Volvo.
Sometimes I’d put a case of beer on ice in there, sometimes a sixer
and a nice bottle of bourbon. I like my bourbon with one lone rock.

But I don’t have the Volvo anymore. Traded it for a book of poems
and watched it ride off down the highway to the city of lost angels.
I know it’s just “the city of angels”, but that’s not how I think of it.

What does it matter? It doesn’t. I do get down like this sometimes.
Only to remind myself how good I have it. I have my failing health.
I have a little bit of money. I have the love of a woman on occasion.

One night in Kalamazoo, I was just cruising and I stopped to knock
on the door of a girl I knew through a writing class at the university.
She used to write these fun stories about doing drugs at dance clubs.

When she opened her door, I said, “Let’s go drinking and driving!”
She laughed and said alright. We wound up at this Valentine diner
up on M-140, just outside of South Haven, called Ma’s Coffee Pot.

We didn’t even end up doing any drinking. Just had coffee and pie
and talked a while. She was a good talker and she had a nice laugh.
She made me feel less lonely. Even on the dark and quiet ride home.

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Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit and now lives in Pittsburgh. His poems and prose have appeared in a number of fine periodicals including Kitchen Sink, Third Coast, The Chariton Review, Nerve Cowboy, Words Dance, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Six Gallery Press published his first full-length collection of poems Unattended Fire in 2012, and Low Ghost Press published The River Underneath the City in 2013.