Austin at Night

Austin only smokes

At night

During the day

His tie’s too tight

And he can’t catch a sweat
To save his own ass
So--at night
That's when he does it

The passenger door

On his car won’t close

And his breakfast is two cups of coffee

And ten minutes of guitar practice
That's it, Kit

The girl he lives with

Who isn’t his girlfriend

Tells him the rent is overdue

And so is her period

He wants to ask if it’s his

But it has to be

Because the girl he lives with

Hasn’t left the house in two months

She thinks somebody's waiting outside

To kidnap her

He doesn’t ask questions

He doesn’t know what questions he would ask

Even if he wanted to ask any

His vision is getting worse

And his hands hurt all the time

Austin thinks he might be dying

But he’d have to ask questions

To find out

So instead

He just picks up extra shifts

At the bar

And tries to numb the pain

With conversation

And girls named Monica

When he drives home at night

He plays songs by artists

He used to hate

When he was younger

He’s got acne now

And he never had that before

He’s got a better attitude though

And a better work ethic

And a better job

Because when he was younger

He never had a job
So compared to nothing
This one's an improvement

Unpacking cigarettes
At the warehouse
Out by Tula

Back when he was younger
He didn't mess around much

Just a night here and there
With the first Monica

The older one

The one who used to buy him shit

Provided he came by her place at night

Austin’s better at night

She’d say

That's when he gives me
The best kind of attention

She died two days after he turned twenty-one

From an overdose

When her kids came to bury her

They asked Austin

If he was the boy she talked about

The one who came by

To clean her house

Once a week

Austin said yeah, that was him

And he agreed to be a pallbearer

Because the woman only had one son

And he had a bad knee

Her youngest daughter

Took a liking to Austin

And let him stay in the house

Provided he really did clean it

And fix up all the things

Her mother had let

Go to shit

The last few years of her life

Austin didn’t want to hook up

With the daughter

For obvious reasons

But it happened anyway

And once it did

There didn’t seem to be any sense

And trying to stop it from happening again

She was a pretty girl

Not beautiful, but pretty

And she made him toast every morning

And beat the shit out of him one night

When he came home

High off his ass

From some shit

His buddy Chris gave him
After they were done for the night
At the warehouse

When she told him she’d kick his ass out

If he ever came home like that again

He promised he wouldn’t

And the promise lasted all of six days

Before he met up with Chris again

And then he didn’t even bother

Going back to the daughter

Or the house

He just drove to meet up with his cousin

Over the state line

And that’s when he found out

His cousin had enlisted

And his wife was scared to go outside

Because she thought

Somebody was going to grab her

And that’s where he is now

At night, he tells himself stories

About next year

And how great it’s going to be

This year’s gone for him

Even two months in

He can tell

It’s a wash

Dead on arrival

So instead, he thinks about next year

Not next week

Or next month

Sure as hell

Not tonight

At night, Austin thinks of something

So far away

He knows he’ll never get there

And even that

Doesn’t seem

Like far enough