It was a perfectly good all-purpose metal trash can. Shouldn't of been haphazardly discarded for the want of a new one. Evidently this was my reasoning at the time as I saved it from oblivion and tossed it in the back of my pick-up truck never knowing the dire ramifications this action would entail.

   Tossed in the back of the truck, rattling around, while Jr. Boy and me mosied down some back road. When our world changed.
That night.
As Jr boy, hiding in the trash can, as the sky fell in firey chunks of read hot magma burning and incinerating everything.  Flames leaping as any thing flamatory flamed, anything burnable burned.  Soon digging holes for water, eating bugs for food But surviving.  
For want of a trash can.
You carry on Jr boy. Your daddy loves you.  The world needs you.

I attempted to translate our love in every possible language my mind could handle.
How we laid on the carpet, hands intertwined, eyes locked on each other’s souls.

My stomach churned, my heart beat escaped into your palms.
I had drank the night before,
You could tell, because my eyes wanted to portray innocence, but you knew.
Yet, I wanted to drink your love instead,
It was just as bitter.
Just as unhealthy, with the complements of the same regret the next morning.

I suppose those stamps on my neck never helped either.
The way you managed to **** the life out of me was inexplicably wonderful.
But it hurt later.

Or how my lips tasted like you, I never loved the taste,
But I told you I did.
I lied, you knew.

That night, when you went home, questioning me.
I mosied on over to the glow of my stove light,
Allowed my hand to marry the egg white bottle,
They looked like little sugars,
But I got nothing sweet from it.

Down the hatch.

I called you, against my wall dizzy, giggling.

You love me when you’re lost, you told me,
You love me, you want me when you’re not you, you told me, you yelled.

I passed out that night,
You called me to check up,
And I could not recall what happened,
Or why I loved you.

So I walked over to that stove light,
Hoping the bottle would help me remember,
Just so I could taste you once more, and not feel guilty for never loving you sober.

i.

There isn't much light when you're inside,
Or at least in terms of natural light,
And if you're looking for a star to guide you
Through your thirty days, you're even more out of luck
Than you were getting here in the first place,
(In my case appropriating--almost-- a turkey breast
The Saturday after Thanksgiving,
Figuring no tired, overworked checkout girl
Would ever miss it; **** poor luck, nothing more)
The windows too narrow to climb out,
Too high to smash in anger or frustration.
Still, you can catch a bit of the outside world
The sky (this once, at least) more blue
Than mid-December has any right being
In this grubby, hardscrabble corner of northwest P-A,
***** old lake to the west,
Endless logged-out hills to the east,
Never-quite-boomed mill towns due south,
Up north Indian land where bootleggers and number-runners
Holed up once upon a time, the Senecas
Now having gone legit, Beach Boys and Barbara Mandrell
Fronting shell games which bear the Feds' seal of approval.
This is the Galilee to which I shortly return.

ii.

Time gets syrupy in the hole, moving slowly, lazily,
Fighting the laws of Newton and Einstein at every turn,
And when the ******* about lawyers,
The oft-repeated and off-key done-me-wrong songs
And respectful if somewhat impatient
Supplications to Jesus for speedy deliverance
Are no longer sufficient distraction,
A man begins to think and remember.
I met Easy Terry E. (so he called himself)
In the city lockup in Troy, or maybe it was Schenectady
(I have, after all, mosied up and down the Eastern Seaboard,
On both sides of the bars)
And let me tell you, for the only time in my born days
I wished these small-city holding cells had solitary,
As Terry E. not only had a chalkboard-scrape falsetto
Which constituted aggravated assault on the eardrums,
But also a predilection for non-stop yammering
About nothing and everything, punctuating his blather
With frequent high-pitched insistence
That he was a hermaphrodite,
And he would frequently taunt the guards by yowling
Baby, I got a lady's equipment down here.
Maybe you want to strip search me, honey.
(Such high spirits led to an inevitable outcome;
I heard a jailer up in Utica decided to quiet him down
By sticking Terry's head in a toilet, the swirlie
Ending up a minute or two longer than was advisable)
But I had been able to more or less ignore him,
As to that point he'd concentrated on ******* off
Everyone in the cells with the exception of me,
But my turn came soon enough
Oh, don't worry Peter, darling, I know your type.
Different, smarter than the rest of us
He all but sang in  my direction.
Mebbe so, I grumbled, just a few fluky bad breaks
Here and there, that's all.
Terry laughed and clapped his hands,
Poor sweet thing, a victim of that old lousy karma.
There was a philosopher…
And he stopped for a moment,
Seemingly trying to pick a name from the air
(Not that he could see anything floating in front of him,
As he wore horn-rims with lenses as thick and opaque
As the headlights of a '72 Skylark.)
So you're just taking a break here until your luck turns, mmm?
I laid back against the wall,
Hands behind my head and grinned.
Yep, I replied, things are due and then some
To start going my way.
Terry giggled once more, Well, you've got things
All figured out then!
Good, evil, right, wrong--just snapshots of the roulette wheel
In some infinitesimal sliver of time, and all we can do
Is put our chips down and hope the croupier is playing it straight.
Well, now that you've finally figured all that out,
I suspect you won't see the wrong side of the bars again.
And with that he turned his back on me,
Paying me no mind whatsoever
Until they turned me loose the next morning
With the stern admonishment
To trouble the good citizens of the Capitol District no more,
And as I think back to that moment,
I suspect he may not have been telling the whole truth
As he saw it.

iii.

And so I will be released from this small cell
In this small red-brick building
In the midst of this equally small red-bricked town,
And I will bypass the bars
With their potential for a cheap hustle
And various types and flavors of low-hanging fruit,
And I will dispense with a seat on some sad Trailways bus,
Seeking a ride (thumb hopefully, defiantly
Pointing upward to the sky)
On the old Grand Army Highway,
Then north on the Buffalo Road
And I will clamber down the embankment
To the Kinzua Dam and, shedding socks, shoes, and clothing,
And hang the cold,
I shall wade into the water, acclimating ankles and washing feet,
The dive headlong under the water's surface
To arise cold, cleansed, ready to move onward.