Waypoints

In those autumn evenings when the sun dripped dry
we slept in the harbor, swam in our clothes.
We picked up the drunk at the liquor store,
and from the bed of your truck, he asked us
for a ride home from AA,
and then for some beer.
We left him on the corner of Wilkens and Fulton
and he popped some pills, ducked into a stoop
and out of our lives.
We never went back.

Left on Rolling Road, we pulled into U.M.B.C.
(You Made a Bad Choice we’d joke),
threw such lofty fits in the the dorms,
pushing each other into and out of new -isms
and your finger slammed like an apple
in the basement door, its skin
dangling from the bloody core,
and we rushed you to St. Agnes in our pajamas,
sat out front with the addicts for hours
throwing bottle caps in the birdbath.
Those ambulance sirens were little lobotomies.

Why were we so lost then?
Past the rowhomes we ran downtown,
Charm City rising in Bromoseltzer hues
And were we falling to the sidewalks like beetles
drawn in by neon letters, places with names like “BAR?”
Did we want a death like Poe,
worthy of the gutter?
Or to pass through the Blues like those other
assholes bitching about their mothers?

We rode through the streets and out to the diners,
the Double TT on Rt. 40, smoked cigarettes,
drank coffee until dawn, our books left in their bags,
wrote poems one line at a time, sharing the rhyme,
the accordion paper stained with doubt.
It’s odd how in these habits,
you blink and you miss it.
We paid the bill and out in the street,
the sun etched its impression onto the bay.

In those days we were looking for so much more.
but memory has no direction or logic,
like the Chesapeake, only buoys light the way.