what if

specifically,
the green of the car wash,
the lurch of the drunken man.
these kinds of things are meaningless
unless you love the car wash,
unless you love the drunken man.
**
i once rode through a car wash
whose soft green liquid glow was so
exotic that i still remember it.
i once loved a drunken man
who never drank.
he was just drunk on life
all the fuckin' time.
i'd have fucked him in an
instant, though it never came
to that. though we did
take lots of long hot
showers together,
in the college dorm,
a magical environment where
darn near anything could have
happened,
like in the car wash,
when
the green glow of happiness
could have
stained the
skin
of the strongest man,
made little boys
weep
with giddy bubbly
excess.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem also appears in my book Gorilla Architecture, published by Interior Noise Press in 2011. It first appeared in My Favorite Bullet, Volume 11, Issue 1, January 2012. My Favorite Bullet is an online magazine, and this issue may be found here: http://www.myfavoritebullet.com/2012-1-Main.html.)