high voiced Irishmen and spun sugar turned to
teenaged dreams and a teenaged circus

cold beaches in October like candlewax and promises
to call
bacon on the stove and cemetery gates and no one
to answer

if-this-was-the-cold-war to
this-is-the-*******-cold-war to
how'd-you-ever-get-so-blind

to the summer of warm warm warm and
the nights you'd have wanted at
sixteen and twenty
if you'd thought about it

and the big empty road in front of you that
under Orion's patent-leather belt looks so
not empty

how you're tall
and freewheeling

but not without