This poem is still in the editing phase, but I think it's pretty close to being finished. It was inspired by a fishing trip with a childhood friend. The muddy banks were so bad they sucked the shoes right off his feet and he had to pedal home barefoot on his bike. He got the crap beat out of him by his parents for having lost his only pair of sneakers.
On Having Lost My Shoes in a Bar Fight
Foam and an empty can come floating down
The river, a last gasp of air trapped inside
Keeps it above the rushing current,
Bobbing up and down along a thin skin
On which insects glide across.
A Coke can maybe, flung indiscreetly
From a speeding car miles from here, and now
The logo worn away, like the edges of a rock,
The last swallow sipped so long ago.
Grasping at it with my eyes and baited breath,
I tread lightly down the muddy banks.
A low tide gently scrubbing the sandy shore
Sends murmurs between the stones, as water
Follows and slips into the footprints that I leave
behind.
In time, one fateful footfall splits the earth,
The warm mud clasps around my ankles,
And spills over the mouth of my empty shoes
Like wet cement poured into some die I’d cast.
But that of course, was years ago, the nights
Gone rushing by and I, now drunk, too drunk to
drive,
Steal an unchained bicycle, and with my feet
Stained black and cracking, begin the long ride
home.
Each oncoming pair of headlights like a drink
Slid down the bar, vanish in an instant,
Their light still felt in the memory of places
They had once illuminated that now grow dark.
The wind from each slow-passing car kisses my cheeks
Like a fever on the handlebars of a dream,
As barefoot on the pedals I recall
My lonely pair of sneakers caught there,
Counting, watching the cans go down the river.
