She was a pretty little chick, living on his arm, blonde and brunette in the same breath.
He accused her of believing in God and silenced the room
like blasphemy
and this was the woman
he kissed.
But she was just a woman and still a viable target for his scorn.

“Do you know what happens when your liver fails?” He demanded of her, or us, as he drank whiskey from a diamond. “You bloat like a bitch. You shit albino mice and grow an itch on the inside of your skin, so bad you can’t sleep.”
He met eyes.
“So don’t tell me I’ve had enough,
“I’m still alive.”
Spoken like a challenge he was all too happy to lose.

He turns on us
tells us we’re all ambitionless drunks or narcissistic assholes dwelling in our fatuous pasts.
And he would know, a leader of men, past his prime.

This occurs two hours after he demonstrated why it was possible for a gymnast to have only one leg, whereas “there will never be a one-eyed gymnast.”
No matter how good she once was.
No balance.
Which reminded him of a joke he couldn’t remember.
Back then, she smoked Marlboros and he cupped her buttock through a hedonistic pair of strained denims.

“Love is rotted teeth,” someone said, but we accredited it to Shakespeare.

In this bar, we write sad-syllabled odes with indecipherable titles to the careers we once had,
the fame we never did.
Perhaps that’s the meaning of ‘family’:
A room of people who have all failed to escape each other.

But, God
I hope not.