Poetry

Where am I?

By GREG MAFFETT | Published: February 3, 2012

It is too early in the year

To lose my sense of place

But I've misplaced it, nonetheless

I'm on beer two when I turn to my right

And notice the lady to my right freeze, busted.

Scoping me out, no doubt, she then jerks her head right.

Ok, there is a little doubt.

But she trashes that tiny doubt when her husband

walks to the men's and she can't stop chatting me up.

I'd like to say that I was paying attention to whatever

it was she was on about, but she had nice boobs.

There was more talking, enough for me to check

out her legs as she went into some diatribe about

her husband trying to get her to join him

in a bland diet.

Now this, of course, would be the time to chime in

with "But you don't need to diet!"

If I were on the make.

I'm not. I'm almost done beer two.

I am, in truth, a two beer kind of guy who is, as noted, nearing the end of beer two.

She gets a puzzled look on her face as she ponders the diet.

The face!

It reminds me where I am!

Colorado!

A state full of Iowa faces with California bodies!

I look around the bar and see this pattern repeated over and over

and over again throughout the bar.

Bikini model bodies topped with farm worker faces.

Sure, they had the bodies to get out of the midwest,

But arriving here they must have heard a strong voice assert

"This far and no farther!"

Gandalf himself must have stopped their advance at the continental divide.

That can only mean but one thing.

I'm in a western bar.

A bar in the real West.

The same West that was once the "Old West."

Genuine America!

But I'm no cowboy.

And her husband will be back from from the men's soon enough, so...

It's now or never.

Yet I waffle. Is it really now or never?

Is there not tomorrow?

I ponder a second, at least two.

Then. fortified, I make my call.

"Bartender! Whiskey! Neat!"

Thumping my fist on the bar for good measure.