The Season of Fat Monkeys

The Season of Fat Monkeys
by Brent Austin
Georgia is hot, Carolina less so
The highway bucks underneath
It bounces my pen to a tribal downbeat
We go from fresh and black
To gray and cracked
Howlin’ Wolf bleeds out over us from the radio
His harmonica blows rust
His voice does itself credit
It brings beasts out of the Eastern World
To play with our inner ears and fiber-optics
It is our fifth day on the Dwight D. Eisenhower
National System of Interstate and Defense Highways
John is our wheel, Tom the noise
Will and I stand guard, port and starboard
Luck had come this far with us.
Clean, pristine, sunset beyond the dunes
Talk with pretty young things about infinity
We super sized the moon.
Free eats, bare feet, tent-living
It’s hard to believe
That the season of fat monkeys is ending.
The neon strip is less inviting
Daytona was an exhausting display
Desperate tattooed and studded bloody youth
Decked out in green and gold
Springtime screams of a hajj to the coast
Everyone’s Irish today.
Trespassing, drug trafficking,
My brain has quit firing
Hard to believe
A yard away a naked friend
Trips his head off.
The jellyfish sacrificed themselves at our feet
While we tried to stay three-D
Still trying, we are refusing to be clean
So that at last when reality zips its fly
And we call our girlfriends, family,
Our one-night stands
We can say we survived.
“With two beers, a ukulele,
And a pull of bourbon to spare.”
Not too bad, Huh?
Not too bad, and still
Hard to believe.