Convenience Store

I spent the last few years
On beef sticks and annoying lines
Talk is cheap, that's why
It's on the bottom corner
Of the drive-through menu--
Nobody orders the unkempt smart-mouth
In a mottled dust jacket.
Time, I sing, in off-key wisdom
Avoids only those who refuse its tawdry advances
Nothing like that ever
Happens under a quart of sunshine
Like on every July Fourth since
We stole the firecrackers from the yard
Popping them faster than our knuckles, knees shaking
As if they were pills instead of bottled gun powder,
I tell the unamused and uninterested in bright summer dresses.
Plinking the cashier with peanut candies,
Maybe I've got nothing to say
That the Midwest hasn't heard twice already.
It's better to shut up, but I can't.
Not with this explosive scoop on the tip of my tongue
That'll never see the six o'clock news.
But you'll have to hang around and hang on
Before I let it slip in the form of a
Grade- B compliment,
Reaching into the cooler for pocket change I never carry
It's the Fourth.
The guy in paint-splotched jeans
Rolls his eyes at the first mention of summer corn
Which is all I've got after the beef sticks are gone.