Nothing Stays Open Late

*




You can’t do what you should,

so you’re sitting in a diner by yourself

at sometime like 2 in the morning,

wondering where it went;

what you had just yesterday,

that life you knew was just about to suit you,

but you couldn’t convince to happen.



You and your pride are the last one’s out,

into a night that feels like a second chance.

Only the stars see you smiling.

Everyone else has gone to bed,

and that’s good, you think,

because you couldn’t breathe in

these hours with an audience.

You couldn’t start again

because they know you.



These stars are out for you alone.

The moon makes even your sadness glow.

This time it’s gonna be different

and everything is really gonna work.



You roll down your windows

and sing out loud to the radio

The air you breathe is telling you

that you are still alive,

lucky to be alive.



The highway and the stars must be in love

and you’re catching how they feel.

It’s all for you tonight.



You wonder how far you could go,

if you pointed your car to the moon,

and kept on driving.

Finally you’d be something beautiful

a guy and his car that vanished in the night

and left a shining.

 
                     -Brent Allard

May Break Our Bones

*





Down all these streets, in all these cars,

we’re safe enough from sticks and stones.

Although none of it feels like it’s really ours,

just so much steel and skin and bones



I’ve wandered through a city,

where streetlights have eclipsed the stars.

Nothing I touch connects with me,

just empty streets and passing cars



Children draw their futures bright.

on plastic tables, soon outgrown.

the use for hope not yet in sight,

still content with sticks and stones.



We never became what we wanted to be.

We stopped too long, comparing scars.

We never saw what we needed to see,

just had a dream, that wasn’t ours.



Tomorrow, all the lights will change

and we’ll repeat what we’ve always known.

But tonight the world is large and strange

A maze of steel and skin and bones



                             Brent Allard

Pioneer

*



You’ve looked for the myth of America

across every state in the union,

and you’re no closer to finding it now

than you were at six years old, looking out

the back window of a station wagon, believing

that corn fields ran under the whole length of the sky.



Now, you know that the highway

hides her broken back. It makes sense

to you, following the crooked spine,

that something  in your gut feels like glass breaking.



You stop for gas and look at everyone

under the bright and unconnected ceiling,

punching numbers, lifting handles, sticking nozzles into tanks

and squeezing. They look at their cars or straight ahead

caught up in movements that don’t require music.



And you can’t help feeling lost

driving out from beneath the lights,

the smell of gasoline still faintly on your hands,

because you know you’ll turn left to get home.

                              
 
                                          -Brent Allard