Next Exit - 13/05/2015

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    " I'll tell you the truth. All the good ones are gone "

my little sister pronounces
through the electric blue lines
rolling over the windscreen
from the tollway
as she drives me home

the good ones, she says
are all gone by now
paired off in their twenties
leaving the rest of us dregs
to just vainly, randomly bump
compatible injuries together
trying to add insufficienies up
for the remainder of our single lives
hoping it all cancels out
and we can call that love

                   a tollway beep from overhead

musical chair monogamy
we're playing with no seats left
want her to be wrong
but her words are divorced
of sentiment, plus a husband
and make more sense
than anything else
I've heard
the pulse in my ears
on them nights spent
pretending sleep in the bed
next to someone I'm not touching
to prove that I can behave
act like one of the good ones
restraint to beat the odds
play with tthe hands I'm dealt

                                                              it hurts

                                            a night like that

                                 all your problems

                       stuck to the ceiling

              and are also taking up

   too much of the mattress

    the love of my life
               is not the untouchable body
                            I'm lying next to

flat pensive, empty hands

my sister calls me a hipster
because I live in Brunswick
I call her a fucken bogan
because she lives out in the burbs
we're both of us wankers
for doing Bikram yoga

her ex husband changed his mind
decided he didn't want kids
wasting her fertile years
til finally she left him

the last girl I was with
asked me to fuck her with a cucumber
then she left me to finish off
myself
while she went and had a shower

                   that finished us

another beep overhead
from the tollway
change lanes
watch the limit

little sis gives me a lift home
from the burbs back to Brunswick
it's a long drive
might as well be
worlds away
between the destinations
that separate the two of us

separate us
from all those good ones
who found somewhere settled to sit
when the music stopped
somewhere we're not going to find
out there tonight,

down this highway back,

                              to where it is that I live

__________________

-Peace.







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