Nine facilities and more than forty
mattresses and beds and compressors
to our name because we are professional
bad asses walking the Chicago plain and
pained for words after talking up
and down elevators and disappearing
hospital staff and it feels like the end
titles to a movie shirts stuck to us
with salt and sweat and cigarette smoke.
Nodding to the breaks
and joints in the highway coming south
with whipped ash in our mouth in the cab
of our truck and the road here has been
harder than the ring of the company cell
dispatcher telling us to turn around for
a late added frame exchange twelve miles
out of the way and the road there will be
harder than the rays of the sun we saw rise
bricking off asphalt like the hot screws
on our sides where food should be.
My scars are itching from growing up
harder than a puppy in a refuse bin
gone so hungry the only way known
is the opportune binge and him?
His are from a few stints in the reserve
to get away from the city's inner drama and
support a baby mama's two kids and a cousin
with drug sunk eye lids, but I never
see him scratch at it, though I know
he keeps his keel even with
some kind of pill habit.
These days the afternoons feel like
some kind of wolf looking for a fox
in the high grass and finding only us
rabid rabbits swifting through Chicago underpasses
trying to make something green out of
diesel fuel, 16 thousand pounds, and a box of tools,
tucked shirts, leather belts, and a logo on lapels.
It made us feel like angels
making up for past distress and
advantageous ill gotten angles
delivering equipment to hospitals
was kinda like a god send
before we realized we running fool's errands.
Hand on the knob and turning the music up
so we can't feel our heads bang
up against the rut.
It never really was about eleven hour days
to get that time and a half pay and stay
on top of the cue and delivery windows
that made lunch fly by and time burn away,
or about being hard enough to take
the dog shit thrown our way.
All it is, mashing the horn at drivers
heading to homes on our road back north,
all it could be was the knowing
neither one of us should be there then
lighting up again to stay awake
taking the wrong exit.
He puts his elbow on the high sill,
our windows down and rubbing eyes
filling high with night air and
truck exhaust dead locked in rush hour
harder than 12 hour syrup caked
to plates of unfinished breakfast left
to take the el this morning, and speaks.
I just want to be successful.
