Christmas Night in Chicago

I find you elbowed up to the bar,
bored, crunching ice cubes. Your English underwear tight.
Wiggling the backwash of your mortally wounded soldier.
Fidgeting, sucking your teeth,
dying for a cigarette,
staring at the bar tender’s artificial tits.

“Those are not real!” you complain.
You complain a lot.
Because it’s not L.A.
Because the snow is a dirty gray.
Because you had to shovel.
Because. Because. Because.

The bartenders’s bolt-on breasts not withstanding,
I thought you were having a good time.
Doing your little dance on my dime.
Instead, it keeps creeping back, this thing you cannot understand.
Why I don’t live somewhere in the sunbelt.
Live a less funky representational Yule Tide.