The Unbeatable Odds

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

It’s July 4th in my hometown.
My mom, her boyfriend, my girlfriend, and I
are waiting out the rain,
which is truthfully a drizzle at best.
It’s the lightning that keeps us under cover,
scratching across the sky like there’s a panther
on the other side — the sunny side —
going mad.

A couple of blocks north is the lake
where the actual display happens year after year,
the climax of a day full of funnel cakes, midway games,
helicopter and pony rides.

Tonight is no different.
The townsfolk have come out in droves
to congregate under the unpredictable panther
and its claws,
beneath a constant mist of rain or cold cat spit.

Amateurs ignite their own shows all around us and,
coupled with the shitty weather,
make it feel kind of like a warzone.

It’s amazing how patriotic people become
when you give them lighters
or something sparkly to look at.

One night a year – even in nasty weather —
hundreds stand together at the edge of this gross lake, gazing up at
the same sky,
and those might even be tears in some of their eyes.

Or it’s rain
but that doesn’t change anything.
This is still a paperback mass of hope bound together
with a secondhand thread of disaster.

I like that.
The coming together.
The commons
surrounded by unbeatable odds.