A Conversation at Trials (Pam the Funkstress Remix)

It was the hour where the night is golden, and we were sitting at the pub

Talking about art and faith, but really just making jokes about moxie

The whole time we were thinking of reasons not to quit

Hoping none sounded too convincing

Little is worthy of perfection

The leaf bed of a garden hiding place, sleeping with eyes open

And the resonance of spruce and maple

To name a few things

Somehow free beers kept coming: a sovereign and uncomplicated good

Our faces were Christmas red and got redder as we laughed

At imagined pick-up lines from American men with Celtic knot work tattoos

Suddenly the place felt like home, which is to say we felt captive in it

The mahogany slanting inward and the second-hand smoke

That moments ago an aging marine held tightly inside him

A beacon in the crowd. Here it seemed okay to hate yourself

As long as you did not say so, as long as you chose

Some pieces to tear and did it quietly

One of us said something (or maybe just thought something)

About truths we cannot repeat or un-see. And we played the game

Where you flip the coaster and catch it, mid air, still talking

About trauma and risk and whether feeling whole is a prize in a case

Or something that breaks the fall when you let go

The marine seemed to be listening. He was famous of course

For his unwanted advances, but the cigarette cloud around him shimmered

In an Irish stained glass sort of way. And the openings in the gutters

And the black of the alcoves appeared to widen as if making a confession

In a language we had forgotten