Peter M. Gordon

BAD HABITS

If I still smoked, now would be a good time to slip
outside, spark a match to tubed tobacco, suck blue

fumes into lungs, feel lazy alertness nicotine bestows.
After I stubbed out the butt I’d walk back in the bar,

order another scotch, neat. Luxuriate in slow spread
of warmth, from solar plexus to shoulders, toes, fingers.

It relaxes my gluteus maximus so I can sit on this stool
long enough to offer the tipsy blonde next to me

a drink. By then I’d be sure no woman could resist
my charms, yet invariably she would resist, pick up

her cosmo and stroll, unsteadily, to a high table a few
yards away. I’d gulp my scotch and follow, bar chatter

fading away as I tried to remember my best pickup line.
“What brings you to a place like this?” “He did,” she would

say, pointing at a barrel-chested barfly buzzing over fast,
twenty years younger, mad drunk. Instead of retreating I say,

“The lady’s with me, punk.” We go outside; instinct
helps me duck his first right, even land a couple jabs,

before a left crashes into my temple like a tire iron. Wake
in the alley, wobble home, ice on head, medicate with

a sea of Scotch, swear to quit -- until one day I did.
I’m safer now, hold a job – but it’s quiet. Very, very quiet.


Peter's YouTube video reading of "Bad Habits":



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Peter confesses: "Mark Twain said, 'Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.' That might work for some habits, like forgetting to shut lights out when you leave a room. This poem is about the bad habits that grab you by the throat so you must rip them out of your routine. They become such a part of your life that quitting them, even if you know you will be better for it, is like losing your best friend."

PETER M. GORDON is an award-winning poet with more than 100 poems published in various magazines and websites, and over one dozen poems on The Five-Two. He's authored two collections, Two Car Garage, and Let's Play Two: Poems About Baseball. Peter is a founder and current President of Orlando Area Poets, a chapter of the Florida State Poets Association. He teaches in Full Sail University's Film Production MFA program.