I recognize my middle-age nostalgia for old rebellions. It’s human to cherish bravery later, after you’ve yanked the cornerstones of its beliefs. To admire on a shriveled road of compromise the swelling of a stubborn chest struggling through welcome hells, face to face with fire like the lord, searching for maps marked with the treasure of love. Now, it seems prudent to turn down the heat and suffer the penance of silence. I try to bury the bubbling in the froth of a Guinness, but by midnight ale makes me divine. I buy a round with my right hand and lecture a legion of lost angels on the witness protection program of our souls. How we sold out for shelter, traitors to the crooked rain of our nature. We’re mascots for our cold feet, hiding in thin tents of affection, wandering the wasteland of fuck buddies who will never brew us the tea of comfort at nightfall or help pick tomorrow’s proper shoes. We pay for our sins in bad gravity, whirlpool with the romance of our youth. Providence always finds the drain in times of cowardice. We’ve lived in the thrillparks of fast delight, have become malignant charismatics like the kerosene drunks of the Depression, philosophizing on the black holes of our lives in the shadows of crumbling railway stations, skunked on dollar wine. We say things ain’t like they used to be, wear self-pity on our sleeves. In each word there’s a glory, in each glory a story. And when we say tomorrow we mean yesterday, and when we raise glasses we mean we’ll be brave again, but not today. Not today. (first appeared in The Pacific Review) by Patrick Carrington

art by Pat Jones