Hell Ain’t Half Full by Guinotte Wise

We rode fast between towns don’t ask me why
if there was a bar or a pool table or a cold sixpack
we hung around then rode fast somewhere else.
My panhead was a pre-AMF shit-years Harley
chopped, lowered, unsafe but it would blow the
sunglasses off your face and peel your eyelids
back, torque that would pull stumps that rat bike
bellowed unmuffled, fire shot out of its ass and
heat blued pipes and it wanted to cruise at eighty
a sweet spot then with a throttle twist it was up
over a hundred and building building building
passing a train, a tour bus like a town standing
still, faces bugeyed at the windows looking at
apparitions thirty of us passing passing again
and again old men wishing and admiring us and
cursing us to their wives, we race headlong to
a place where the bus passes later and the old
men say hurry up for nothin’ hell ain’t half full
they’ll get there in time. We’ll see you there.

Guinotte Wise writes and welds steel sculpture on a farm in Resume Speed, Kansas. His short story collection (Night Train, Cold Beer) won publication by a university press and enough money to fix the soffits. Five more books since. A 5- time Pushcart nominee, his fiction and poetry have been published in numerous literary journals including Atticus, The MacGuffin, Southern Humanities Review,  Rattle and The American Journal of Poetry. His wife has an honest job in the city and drives 100 miles a day to keep it. Some work is at http://www.wisesculpture.com