Soldier in Position

from Perfect Sleeping Weather by Larry Fulford

	/

Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$1 USD or more
Buy the Full Digital Album
Perfect Sleeping Weather (the book) (signed)
Price includes shipping to anywhere in the US.

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.

Sold Out

lyrics

Cold as a fox in the snow
albino month pans out gray and quiet
with a bullwhip on both ends.
Our washer and dryer battle it out
to see which one is loudest.
Our makeshift fireplace
will surely be used
and be blind soon.

I positioned myself like an author
at a glass tabletop altar
with a beer I wished was colder
in a chair we bought from our neighbor,
ready to write a story long and hard and soft,
documenting nothing
but my own meandering thoughts.

But now I’d rather just sit here
with this beer
in our neighbor’s old chair
and enjoy the stillness of the pool water
and the always-ringing of crickets.

The AC has clicked on now
and puts the washer and dryer to shame.
Japan has never seemed farther away.

All I’d need tonight are some fireflies
and those flowers we drank from at grandma’s house
and you’d be here with me
or we’d be in a tent in the backyard
with snot frozen to our noses and lips
and my brother trying to scare us.

The woman fears nostalgia.
I feed off it.
In a present boring and too certain
staring down the barrel at a future
sought after yet uncertain,
all that we have is the past.

Ours sewn up with tires
rolling over heads and accidental backflips,
swift kicks to the groin
and rude dogs stealing our empty cups.

None of that happens anymore.
Children get to live in movies.

I should be writing you a letter
but I’m writing you this
from across miles of dark water.

The proud, the few,
the kid who seemed convinced my dad had lassoed Santa.

Never thought this was where I’d end up,
drinking a beer in my neighbor’s ex-chair,
an unknown soldier of something
writing about a soldier I’d give anything
to be sharing this beer and this time with now.

Still walking around the briar patches and the cactus,
enthralled and in love,
older and fatter and wiser.

The haunted dogs,
they’ll tear your face off.
Rocks through Slip ‘n Slides,
they’ll break the skin,
but only if you let them.

The water will wash away the bad blood.