Fight me in the Waffle House Parking Lot
At Dawn

Take out your onion rings
And hand them to your bestie

Except
no onion rings here

You can’t handle
The Roof
Wrapped in paper napkins

Shadow box
Four rounds
Or line dance your way
Back to town

Go inside,
Pick a spot
At the counter
And perform
Americana

Norman Rockwell
Will see you now

Psst…I kinda like this little freak.

(author’s note, filed under “uncertain transmissions from 3:12 a.m.”)

That, that poem(?), my friends, is what happens when you’ve taken cold medicine and are up at 3 am thinking you want to do anything but be inside your own mind. You take a line and twist it like desire and shove it into a poem. You think “Waffle House, but make it Hopper.”

If I had to name an influence on it, it’d be somewhere between Father John Misty’s Mr. Tillman and a half-remembered poem about the DQ that I read years ago.

This is what passes for clarity when you’re alone, buzzing, and full of unnamed things too G-D early.