Last Breath
there were two people that owed me.
on my last stretch of my last pay of my last job
I had been generous on the promise of payback.
now with $1.16 in my savings account, I was looking.
they weren't in the bar;
a beautiful girl
walked up to me and told me about how somebody on campus
had pulled out a rifle and cocked but it jammed.
She heard it on the news. I don't get television or
the newspaper so I couldn't be sure; but earlier...
Well, I had been sitting in the classroom waiting
to learn something when people started running
down the halls screaming and crying. I thought
it was a fight and I didn't feel like moving
to see a fight. I continued to read the brutal
campus newspaper. Pretty soon the reports filtered in
about how someone had pulled a gun in the next room
but the damn thing had jammed. No one knew where
the gunman was but he was surely nearby.
The editorials made strong points about how
racism was bigoted and ignorance was stupid, so
I didn't take shelter and I didn't look for the
killer and I didn't put down the pathetic
newspaper. But it's a sad state of affairs when
murder backfires. I've gambled money to try
to win money and once I even risked more than that
to try to win more than that, but this would-be
murderer, wanting to see only
one thing before he died and I turned
to the cartoons and then the want-ads,
needing a laugh and a job, but not expecting
either. Of course
the cops had surrounded the building before
anybody could breathe correctly.
"No way--are you serious?" I had had people tease me
in bars before about stuff I couldn't care less about.
I walked away to order a beer.
The beer went quickly, according to plan,
and I headed for the front door, to make my escape.
The beautiful girl asked where I was going.
I reached in my pocket for the gun but there was no gun
just some lint and a luke-warm beer and a phone number.
I didn't know who any of it belonged to and
the beautiful girl watched me go out the door and go
wherever I went after that.
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