Bar Friends

 

A bar’s the perfect place for making friends.

 

You don’t have to constantly watch yourself

The way you do in a bank when talking

to whoever the gray decider is

of whether or not you get that loan.

 

Or at your daughter’s school

where the teacher’s obviously had no experience with genius

and you’re doing all you can to keep a parental cool.

 

In a bar you observe that all the men and half the women pat

your wife’s ass

every time she wends her way back towards the shadowy john,

and you can tell they’d all like to fuck her.

But you know it’s all just part of being in a bar

and that most things everybody there’d like to do

they never will.

 

You just can’t beat friends you make in a bar.

You never see them again.

 

 

 

Reid Bush has been both a Denny and a Davoren Hanna award winner since beginning to send poems out in January of 2000, and has had them accepted by 80 journals in the U.S. and abroad – including The American Voice, The Comstock Review, The GSU Review, The Louisville Review, The Bedrock Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Underwood Review, Barrow Street, Free Lunch, Nexus, Plainsongs, Poetry International and  Rhino. Last year, Larkspur Press International published a volume of poems, What You Know.