The Drunken Bus

Growing up is the realization
that you've outlived all your tragic idols.
Dead poets, rock stars
make you lose yourself in their myths
until one day jade and disgust
stain you like mud splashed
by speeding thoughtless passersby
driving drunken
busloads of once-dreamers
like the trains to Auschwitz
these fenced with white picket not wire barbs
no literal death torture unspeakable horrors
wait you now but the cattle call
life laid out neatly like a child's first school clothes
souldeath numb endless days waiting for the call
the bell the thing that brings this to an end
expect no future
hope for no future
fear any future offered
in a slick salesman's smile or a politician's
promisory paper--
kill time until
you'll-know-it-when-you-see-it
shows up, wags its ass in your face
and says i'm here now. what?
now what? now
what took you so long?

It's not too late.
Let's go back
before the days when
it was open season on our hopes
and we had to shelter them like cold shivering refugees,
before we counted time backwards from the end
of history.

Let's be audacious. Let's remember that
the right song can still save us
from the world,
shout dirty limericks in the museum
brown bag it to the opera,
sit on the floor in lavish hotel lobbies
in tie-dye evening gowns
eating french fries and debating dead
German philosophers as if we
understood them,
make snide comments to rude overeducated
art snob ticket takers and rabble removing
doormen, disgruntled security guards with
inert toy guns
without feeling the pressure
to make apologies we don't mean
let's jump off the drunken bus
clean ourselves up
and walk home together.