Laura Solomon

Closing Time in the Pub at the End of the Mind

We are the dregs.  We are what’s left over when all the sane, the normal people,

The people who instinctively know

How to keep away the wolves,

Have gone home to their wives, their lives,

Their mortgages and their other illusions of safety. 

We have no nets.  Beer is our high wire; our tightrope. 

Drink up please.

See that one there, at the end of the bar

There’s a shadow that’s woven itself through all his days,

All his could-have-beens that never were,

There’s a darkness that’s woven itself

Into the very fabric of his being

There’s a hole where his soul should be

And nothing could ever fill it. 

He defines the word ‘insatiable’.

Don’t we all?

Drink up please. 

We are what’s left over.  Scraps of people, walking clichés,

Ordinary statistics in an ordinary world,  

The others feed on our misfortune.  It makes them feel better about their own lives,

To see us drowning in each pint of beer. 

Drink up please. 

Greatness dribbles away.  We let it leave.

It exits via the gaps in between our fingers

And we know better than to attempt

To clutch at it as it departs. 

You might as well clasp at empty air.

Maybe if we’d made it to Finishing School

We wouldn’t feel so unfinished.  Unmade, incomplete.

Somebody just had his pacemaker fitted.

Heart was beating irregular

But now he’s back in time, two-four,

And we’re all back under the table

Which is where he drank us to.

Well, we would say, hurry up,

But what is there anyway to hurry up for?

Nothing but it’s fine.

It’s dark outside but in here there’s light.

The captain bailed overboard decades ago,

But the ship sails blithely on.

Are there icebergs?  Is there ice?

Yes, we are the ones who forgot to think twice. 

I’ll only say this one more time.

Drink up please.

Who was it that turned water into wine?

Well, I never saw him

Don’t believe all that shit,

That gliding across the surface of things.

We sink.

We’re ten truck pile-ups on high speed motorways

We’re decades collapsing into days

We’re full of everybody else’s ways

We’re all the things that’ll never fit. 

We’re not really alive

We just resemble it a little bit. 

Drink up please.

We’re every book you never read

We’re fucked in the heart and we’re fucked in the head

We’re all the things that are left unsaid

We may as well be the living dead

O yea we’re doing fine. 

We’re what’ll be left at the end of time

We’re staccato rhythm and a corny rhyme.

We’re all the things you’d never want to find.

Closing time in the pub at the end of the mind.

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