The Drunk American Brings His Existential Crisis To Rome. by John Grochalski

they have the waiters

dressed up as pirates or bandits

i can’t tell

except that they have scarves

wrapped around their heads

and high maroon stockings on

they look like the characters in the princess bride

which is a cheap thing to do in writing

because if you’ve never seen the movie

then you have no frame of reference for my description

so let’s go with pirates

they have the waiters dressed up as pirates

although the restaurant has no seafaring theme

it’s another run-of-the-mill tourist trap

serving mushy pasta on an overcrowded side-street in rome

and i am drunk as we walk along cobblestone

though i’ve vowed for years

never to be drunk outside my home

what this means is…. i stay in a lot

i’m carrying a big bottle of beer

calling all italians fascists

and complaining to my wife about tourists

as if we were hustling around them in manhattan

on our way to the MoMA

and not a part of the big fat carbon imprint as we are here

i’m not familiar with the open container laws in italy

and there’s a group of cops heading right toward us

if those cops are anything

like they are in america

then this bottle of beer isn’t worth the trouble

so i slam it down

next to a basin full of used silverware

raising the ire of the waiters

dressed as pirates

or bandits

or whatever

they begin yelling at me in italian

violent gibberish that i don’t understand

so i nod my head at them

and whisper i’m sorry

oh, so sorry, man

hoping one of them doesn’t whip out a sword

before falling to the pavement

and looking up the starless mediterranean sky

wishing that i were in china

instead of this soulless fallen empire

full of loud, boorish assholes

getting quitely drunk on wine

with the ghost of li po

trying to hug

the goddamned moon instead.

John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections, The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where the garbage can smell like roses if you wish on it hard enough.