They don’t walk into a bar. Not all at once. It always starts with going to a bar and the fatal flaw. Drinking alone. Bringing the horse to water. First thought, best-thought credos, and disposable stanzas of quaint poesy. It’s in the cards they’re playing with death, dealt by the devil's hand in their game of last chances. Fold, all out. They can’t play fair. They can’t even make a bet. Broke and broker. Losers in life and love wallow in the mock misery of poverty’s playpen. The poor wordplay of sorry assed degenerate gamblers in the poetic comeuppance of self-defeat. It does not matter what they do or say. It’s written for the ages to any wandering soul. The snake-eyed crapshoot comes up empty-handed when the dice are loaded. Pitching pennies into a bottomless wishing well. Throw a coin in the collection basket, or go to hell. Either way you lose. Another player of chess on a cheap checkerboard of missing pieces.
Drunk on words, they blather on about the lousy odds against them. How life somehow passed by without them. Bad luck, or no luck. Or the opposite, how wonderful and beautiful the world seems. Life can stink and sting and smell like bouquets. It’s only natural to feel like you have been had. Cheated by the odds stacked against all oddities. The day you were born is all the days gone until the end. A sucker for a pretty face caked with too much makeup. Short-lived in the annals of bad literature, the writer dreams up scenarios of simply being. The authors of their undoing. The poet confronted the ancient bard, who requested advice from the sick sage, who had nothing to say. Nothing to lose but unwelcome news and bad advice. The way of the world has zero meaning for habitual dreamers. They just reinvent it. Apart from having a reverse image, it’s the same vision. A room without a view, from womb to tomb.
The cosmic joke is told by a fool to an idiot who laughs even when they don’t get the universal pun. Take my wife, please. They've heard it all before and never get tired of hearing it. The nature of the beast’s rigged stacked system, the big buildup to a zinger that’ll never be funny. Yet they laugh long and loud. A hearty comedy of errors in the service of, and at the request of stupidity at its best. Belly laughs and knee-slapping guffaws from the peanut-gallery bleachers, way up in the nosebleed seats. You can’t even see much up there, barely hearing anything at all, except for a meaningless word or two; here and there they capitulate. Sit down, shut up, and laugh at the mirth and enjoy the merriment of the lyrical moments. It’s a setup for suckers like us to figure out what to expect from the likes of them. You know who. If you figure it out, then you should know better, so be it. No, somebody doesn’t have to do it. Why should they?
The mundane babbling conversation between them staggers on. Sick stumblebums teetering on the edge of dreams deferred. Oh no, not another book of useless pontifications to rot on dusty shelves. Better yet, the garbage heap library of literary litter. Fueled by inferior bottom-shelf booze and top-shelf delusions of ivory towers, fame, fortune, notoriety, and well-deserved recognition. Ha! The words trip over themselves, each syllable a sucker bet placed on the syntax prompt that someone, somewhere, is listening. It’s your wager. Maybe someone will buy it.
The poets argue over rhymes, platitudes of hot air. It’s idiotic fighting with bards who boast incessantly about imitation battles never fought and the sages who sputter wisdom that sounds vaguely profound. Collective hangovers of meaningless meanderings muttered on spittle, puke, and drool. They circle the wagons back to the beginning, the serpentine ouroboros of each yin and yang melodrama. Thoroughly convinced the importance of poetic punchlines is waiting just for them patiently in the lobby to perform a grand entrance somewhere between infinity, spilled drinks, and the barren wasteland of blustery barroom banter. Busted heads and broken bottles.
As the night wanes, they’re clutching empty glasses and staring into cracked mirrors. Words unwind in smoky silence, too much regret, echoes mock laughter. A smattering of applause from the wings. Visions of what might’ve been. Their greatest achievement? Surviving another drunken night, one more round, one more toast, one more lost cause to art and truth. Tomorrow's stories will be much the same, yet still, they raise their glasses: cheers and proclamations to the unknown within us and mostly them. Hoist your dirty shot glass to the hopelessness that lingers at the bottom of every empty word. Write a poem about it, or better yet, write a damn book. Nobody wants to go home alone. I never had the heart to tell them that it’s futile.