You good, bro? Are you gonna lower your voice and leave my friends alone, or are we gonna have to take this outside, where the crisp, late-autumn air carries the sweet scent of decay, and in that decay, memories are held?
I swear, if you take one more step toward me, I’ll have no trouble taking this outside. I have absolutely no problem catching the final golden shimmers of the setting sun, taking a breath to feel grateful during that amber moment of transition, and letting the breeze rustle my hair just so, as if in conversation with the universe. No goddamn trouble at all.
You wanna take this behind the bar? Cause you say the word, and we can take this out back behind the bar right now, asshole. There’s a family of robins who nest on a fire escape in the alley, and if you watch them for long enough, admire their tenderness, and share in their vulnerability, their chirps begin to sound like language, as though dreams are universal.
The birds’ dreams are our dreams, motherfucker. You got that? We all want to be held.
Oh, what, you think you’re tough? You think you’re a big guy, huh? Well, let’s see how big you feel when we take this outside and turn our heads upward, toward the night sky. Each dot of light is a setting sun to barren satellites and, perhaps, creatures like us who look back at our sun, a pinprick in their perspective, and wonder whether it warms the ground of a dick like you who cuts someone’s girlfriend in line for a drink. That one right there is Venus; you can tell because it doesn’t twinkle, bitch.
I’m gonna mess you up when we take things outside. I’m gonna take your ass to the ground. Once there, I’m gonna guide your hand gently toward a fallen oak leaf. Tenderly, I’m gonna instruct you to hold it up to the light of a street lamp, and together, we’re gonna consider the leaf’s inner structure. Look, really look, at its veins. We all bleed. We all churn.
That’s right, you piece of shit. There’s motion in all of us. We are the tides.
Oh, come on, are you scared to take this outside? Well, you mustn’t be, for nature’s indifference is a gift. Once outside the bar, lit by moonglow, we can meditate on scale. When pondering the fossils buried beneath the asphalt onto which I’ll slam your head, we’ll realize that maybe in this moment, our hands are balled up in fists, but in another, our fingers might interlock. And soon our lips, until finally, the distance between us is just as small as the distance between the molecules within ourselves. Perhaps we’ll move to New Mexico. Perhaps we’ll adopt. Perhaps we’ll die, fulfilled, in forty years’ time, hand in hand, in a hiking accident.
You hear that, asshole? We’ll embrace as we plunge toward the shimmering sands of New Mexico.
So why don’t you and I take this thing outside and see who’s so tough without his posse of douchebags. Or, hey, maybe we can keep things inside, and you and I can share a drink.
