Onward by Jeff Weddle

Every hot day, hot night, 

all the beer and pool, 

even the bowling, 

every minute spent talking stories 

and poems, 

barrooms, cigarettes, 

the spectacular vulgarity 

of bright youth, 

everyone in blue jeans and t-shirts 

or those all in black, 

the ones hiding 

in back of the classroom 

and the loud ones in the street, 

friends, enemies, neighbors, 

the cheating girlfriends, 

the backstabbers, the saints, 

the as-good-as dead,

the punks and hippies and bums, 

the good dogs and shifty cats, 

the drugs and the jails 

and all the nights 

spent beneath 

the rain, the stars, 

or the beckoning moon, 

all of it gone. 

Sure, write it down. 

Take a picture. 

Paint it in oils. 

Nothing works, 

so there’s nothing to do. 

You can’t go back 

and it’s not 

like you thought it was 

anyway. 

So forget it. 

Move on. 

To hell with everything. 

Keep burning.

Jeff Weddle is a poet and writer living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His most recent books are Driving the Lost Highway (Uncollected Press, forthcoming) and a volume of selected poems in Albanian translation, VRITMË NËSE KE KOQE (Kosovo: Sabaiumbb 2023). His work has also appeared in Spanish translation. Jeff teaches in the School of Library and Information Studies at The University of Alabama.