Guess We Always Knew We'd Need a Spare Bedroom

from Perfect Sleeping Weather by Larry Fulford

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Scrawled into notebooks from the familiar comforts of temporary homes and the passenger seats of mechanically unsound vehicles adrift on the highways and back roads of America, Perfect Sleeping Weather is fifteen years of thoughts, observations, facts, and fictions hammered into a collection of poetry that, according to one reader, "sounds like a sigh."

In this, his first book, writer/drummer/comedian Larry Fulford reflects on the usual -- life, death, love and leaving -- while still managing to name-check Van Halen. Twice.

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lyrics

Frankly, I’m surprised this house still has walls
to hold the roof up,
that the whole goddamned thing hasn’t collapsed on itself

that I still plug quarter after ever-loving quarter
into jukeboxes to hear songs
I could hear for free at home
inside walls that have surpassed and undermined
my expectations.

I’m not surprised that nothing I’ve said
has been recorded for further analysis and criticism.
Not yet.

He’s trying to wash his clothes while she’s in them
scavenging for loose change and trying to mend torn stitches.

Hunkered down at a desk with a computer on it
turning a deaf ear to the questions and comments.

Makes about as much sense as the President
of the Coors Brewing Company swearing off drinking
or R.J. Reynolds speaking out against cigarettes.

Fueled by fire
and booze bought with what should’ve been gas money,
he staggers out into the street with no shoes on,
not even the ones she said
he looked so good in.

No shoes and a plain white undershirt,
plain with the exception of the pit stains,
trying to talk so fast his tongue’s bleeding
from biting it on accident.

While she sleeps
nestled in with a lukewarm cup of Nestle’s Quik
on her nightstand and a roach she’ll never see
inching its way along the headboard.

Wet from sweating and the dew of a stellar southern morning,
he wakes up in the yard with one hand in an ant bed
and the other tucked under his body with no blood in it.

Tingling. That not-so-fresh feeling
like all the stars joined forces
to form another sun
to battle the other sun.

His feet are muddy — good thing he didn’t wear those shoes!

There’s a world of difference
between bullfighter and rodeo clown:
one is there to kill the creature,
the other to save the cowboy and put smiles
on the faces in the crowd.

Neither was there for him last night.
His hair, a greasy tangled mess of barbed wire
wrapped around kids who threw caution to the wind.
His heart at the bottom of a paraplegic’s golf bag
next to a blind man’s old pair of reading glasses.

The screen went black, then to color bars
and nothing’s in focus
and none of us talk.