Here's the revised version. Again, crits are appreciated.
“Aubade”
By K.J. Hascall
8/19/06
Revised 8/26/06
I slip out to the back stair at a late night, late summer party,
alcohol charging through me like a hysterical moment,
giving my tongue courage and my feet clumsiness.
The lightning bugs drawn by the sweating night circle the building,
and their flashing can almost be mistaken for cigarettes glowing lonesome.
The white stairs zigzag up to other apartments older than the current occupants,
and the wood floors creak in poignant wordless groans.
This wooden speech amplifies movement, but the tenants only notice
when the countertops aren’t covered in bottles of rum and tequila,
spilled soda, and ice cubes melting in unnoticed puddles.
On the back porch I pull the pack of cigarettes from my purse and ask for a light.
It’s a bad habit I picked up this summer, but the surprised faces are confined
to social gatherings like this, for the unassuming death sticks are at all other times confined to my sock drawer.
I loosen up around these people, gorgeous but dropped from society,
and so this old apartment becomes the gathering place of brainy fags
who drink and smoke themselves into artistic oblivion.
This is America’s Lost Generation,
revised, revisited, and reborn.
This spawn of Gertrude Stein, version 2.0!
Instead of salons in the back alleys of that French city
we meet in shit-hole apartments in a shit-hole town where the scent of people tired
of the sideways glances and judgmental stares
leaks out of the walls in a perverse kind of perspiration.
Tongues slip around words.
Tongues slip around the filters of cigarettes.
Tongues slip around the tongues of other people.
The pale gray smoke and ash climb and fall on the back step,
and we are buoyed by the superiority of our mutual oddities.
We lean against the walls and railings; content to enjoy the polite talk,
sometimes we are the only people who are polite to us.
We have no Picasso in our number to paint our pictures in such a way
that the portraits will become the way the future remembers us.
The only way we may break from these cubed rooms is to become so
fucking great at what we do our judges cannot ignore us.
I drown my loss in cheap booze and shitty cigarettes because I will
never feel acceptance from anyone but these few people
who have learned to change the way they see, not the way they look.
Jazz piano slips over the nozzles of liquor bottles and the cold water
on the countertops grows stagnant as people drift out into the night.
I ache bitterly for these friends the moment I leave them, but learn to avoid slips
of the tongue in casual conversation outside that apartment.
When I go home tonight, I’ll put the cigarettes and my soul in the sock drawer,
where the world cannot find them, saving both only for back stairs.
Points: 890
Reviews: 63
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