Happy Hour

Unruly, beer-bloated Charlie
noted duly the post-dusk sky,
mothered, as it was,
in whorled-pearl patterns,
shimm’ry with salmon-scale pink’s painted,
inhaled abrupt a double rye,
feinted at the men’s room door
and rudely left his coworkers
shoveling over-rich,
franchise restaurant food
into their mindless maws,
sucking sugary sours
through cocktail stirrer/straws forevermore-
and made for the unpeopled,
disheveled hovel he called home.

A radio sound bite
from the nightly news
the night before’d
taken restless root
in the fecund loam
betwixt his ears.

Desired he the privacy
to explore his funked-up mood
a-haunted by the ridiculous
epaulettes and epithets
of a glutted General just returned,
still high and haughty, from the slaughter.

Wherein certain merely moral mortals
went down in dismal blood-soaked droves;
social disobedients who’d populated
the low end of the learning gradient
non-martyrs, radiant nevermore,
murdered sans ceremony,
somehow more vicious,
with something akin
to officious sanctimony.

An absence of cable coverage,
precious little media drone,
no celebrity, well-coiffed wanker
of an internationally acclaimed anchor
expressing mid-left rancor,
no scrambly cameraman,
cigarette a-dangle,
to record the wild wail,
fresh tear-whet cheeks,
of an aghast family-
grisly death met, alas, alone-
sans spin or angle.

From such gloomy ruminations
by a gull perched and screechy
atop a parking lot lamp-post
was disgust-weak Chuck
brought most quick and timely to.

Certainly somewhere lovers lay
sated, spooned and snug,
while jade-sick Charlie chugs down
moonshine by the earthen jug.