Dan, you were right,
I should never have gone
near that bar.
Talk about your cesspool.

That tavern’s built
on the misspent wages
of a crowd of tattooed behemoths
with the combined thirst of a desert.

They dragged me into their conversation.
For an hour of boring bullshit,
I sipped on flat beer
and didn’t hear one sentence

that didn’t contain the word “fuck.”
The TV wasn’t working
so I couldn’t get the score.
As for the girls I might have

gone home with,
one’s head finished up
on the bar-top,
half-drowning in vomit.

And the prettiest one,
voted most likely, by me,
to please a man,
collapsed on the floor,

was eventually dragged out
and dumped on the sidewalk.
But it’s typical of
my quests for local color.

I end up in the worst dives.
Whiskey-chic just doesn’t do it for me.
Not even my imagination
could fuel up on the surroundings.

Just people at their worst
when that worst is of no interest to anybody.
I go to the museum tomorrow.
Great art and no artists to prove otherwise.