I'm Tending Bar in Fulbright

by Esto Banga

here's bobbi driving her astonishing
turbo-butt into the Dead End Saloon
(not the original you know the one on
Route 8) right past some kid wowing
the tourists by lighting farts
in the parking lot maybe later he'll

set himself on fire then put it out with some
ripped off red-eye snuck inside a
brown bag first toted by a drunk with a
legal i.d. now trying to fall down
and mess his pants
on a tight schedule

bobbi likes to write her drink orders
on a napkin so she doesn't have to
talk she won't like anyone
seeing her teeth which do sort of
look like they'd be better used
as tent pegs for some table-top
caterpillar circus

she's gladly got a dead crow
in her purse to keep it from
floating off her arm or her arm
from floating over her head
and whacking herself when she's
not paying attention

ebby J. is here (yip yip)
in a nice green party dress
we must say THE nice green
party dress worn by five generations
of the J. family (no need to be specific)
she's got a hard job watching out
to be sure her leg jiggles at least half
good to the music and she doesn't let
her head fall off to the right
which isn't her good side

rufe "my man" (so he says
i don't claim ownership)
has coupled onto the
end of the bar we took the round
part of the stool away so he could just
shove his ass down on the pole and
not have to worry about toppling off
we spin him around some to keep the
blood flowing then give him a new beer
to stare into looking for a
reflection he's sure is still
there from last week

sam ("say it don't spray it") drops by
with news about his pasted-up wife sarah
some "desprit" jewish girl he got
pregnant while letting his mind
drift during a three-day pool game
then marrying so he'd have a good
story or another source of income
or someone to wash the Ford

so I let a little piece of the ceiling
fall into his drink and scamper down
beneath the ice cube looking right
there actually better than sam does
when you look at him with one eye
closed through a cloudy margarita

then nature's own patrolman ed falls in
right like a doctor checking a
line of pus-wrapped tonsills
with his cool two-meter flashlight
and twelve pounds of shiny metal
stapled on so he shines like one
of those mirror-ball things
and twists around fairly frequently
being sure everyone sees his big hip
gun might be the only thing he's got
that shoots

not that there's anything to shoot
worth shooting that hasn't been
shot once or twice so it lies there
leaking all its brake fluid into the
somewhat waxed up floor tile
you think I'm going to stay late
to clean all this up think again

think about what happens when
all these dapper humanoids start
to talk to each other breed even
trippy million bar larva
on beerstalks and perma-smirks
tumble through the doors and
windows maybe spilling right
into the once happy suburbs
honey, bring in the baby
the lawn, close the slats and

Mary, can I tell you that
I'm not really doing much better
no though Saint Jude and
all the little saint puppies
say I got to do something new
shuck the malarkey, the Dead shirt
think about raising kids, pygmies
scrape the shit off the mattress
try to find a few new syllables
to impress the language with

see what if one day all the road maps
got eaten by fricasseed hand puppets
and no one could find any
place except this place and
these bunched-up chipsters
run so much out of BS there's
just popping sounds and little
hisses beside their mouths
well

wait there's a riot in stall number three
and a fairly huge sudden hole
in the mookie haze and
some crud-paint-green light comes
down from heaven right so
wham we get a vision and
we see this pudgy festival is
just a bug-jar version of
the whole wooly universe

and the next universe
as brown and firm
has nothing better on tv
and even there
these great bar jobs
are hard to come by

Esto Banga lives all over the east coast, and cannot usually be reached. He is rapidly gaining a reputation as the wild man of poetry