Lessening the Commas in Convalescence

Beer and cigarette apocalypse she said holding her lower lip between her teeth. A slight smirk and a shift of gears. The fact that she moves like chess pieces, deliberate in her actions and yet unsure of herself, sauntering to the counter in what I consider a negligee; she wears what she thinks is proper.

We've thanked men for printing words on the ass seats of short shorts, these are the kinds of billboards that eschew the Marlboro man while juicily divulging Vicki's secret. Sweet melons of ripe young asses over which I am the old hat of the USDA. Long since past the time I inspected them, I am relegated to the clipboard and merely mutter approvals to the ones who can ink them with their post-teen stamps.

I'm not old. But I am pretty fat. I never had the ability to conjure up conversation, just the ability to make them smile. Like a third down back, that gains a few yards but never really moves the chains, I am only useful to myself. The sparkling ability of cutting back quickly, upon a right knee that doesn't work. Back pain since I deck dove for the Sox in 04. The only thing that I have managed to grow is deeper in debt and a semblance of a neck beard.

I see flashes of hope in what seems to be the open flu of my future. I can manage to dry the kindling of my spirit and strike the match to the tinder in time to look up and smirk into the deluge that has nonchalantly snuck from clouds that gathered from the Berkshires of my declining work years.

I took her up on the offer for a drink at lunch and I like how she drove. I took my drink as my lunch and tried to see what she was driving at. It turns out she was driven to finish high school, and go to college to feed her kid. I was driven to be a drunk at her age, when I had all ever needed and complained because it cast a sultry shadow on my future.

I took my stamp out and patted her on the ass to say she passed. The others would have pasted her as rejected, and in my years all I see is her shelf life extended, like her arm when i shook her hand until the next time.