kilroy was here

indian summer came to my city like a flip-phone
like the soft fuzz hair that you see in some light on a particular woman’s shoulders
it left me wanting to talk to a ficticious hero, but I couldn’t figure out which one
let’s go with bucky I thought, any bucky will do
let’s put him in a dehydrated kiss of a spot where everyone has heard the stains
that you just now noticed on the street

I say “bucky, look at that”
bucky says “you’re so catholic again lately john-joe”
“no bucky, I’m just lucky”. (oh, that’s bad and my tooth aches so I lose the thread)

“but listen bucky, what if I’ve never really been sure that I’ve got the girl”
“I thought you had a girl”
“oh I do, but what if she doesn’t act exactly as I imagined”
“bucky is a stupid name”
“I know, I couldn’t think of anything else. how about if you be dennis deyoung from styx”
“only if you rub my neck”
“shut up”
“oh get over it”

later, under softer lights, you could feel the heat of the day in my third floor apartment
you could feel the ghost of columbus discovering the night about to be as cold as an
ice cream social
we didn’t care, dennis has his eighties perm haircut and we put on thin lizzy and we
smoked out a bit to an over and under bet on how long
“dennis, listen”
“I’m listening john-joe”
“the mr. roboto thing, even if it did stick in the head, that was some fucked up shit”
“I am not having this conversation”
“okay, okay, listen dennis, listen to this”
“what”
“I’m sailing…”
“fuck that, I’m out of here”
“okay, no, really, I want to ask you something. when you close your eyes dennis, when you finally allow a silence at the end of the day and you’re lying there. do you ever see faces of people like you’re surrounded, good and bad. is it people dennis, or is it yourself”
“you mean like ghosts”
“no, I’m not talking about tommy shaw you stupid fucker. I’m talking about how it is, how it really is, the way it chips away at you until the hammer slips and then it can’t be fixed and you can’t find a song for a month that sounds good to you and you don’t know just who to think of in the dark or why certain faces keep coming and when you take a step back it’s all a business, a repetition as a way to figure out how to be dead”
“you really think mr. roboto sucked”
“it wasn’t ‘boat on the river’ that’s for sure”
“oh man, you suck”

indian summer arrives in my city in every october as another detail you can ignore, just like bucky being on meds, or dennis having a secret lair underground
either way the passersby are looking
dying at a rate we have never begun to fathom
and yet, in our heads we walk little seedlings with time to come out, another little trick of vinyl on pages