Track 5: Runnin’ with the Devil by Chuck Sweetman
I live my life like there’s no tomorrow
—Van Halen
I remember a flag-football team in college that named
themselves Barney Clark and the Heartbreakers:
a mash up of Tom Petty’s lady-killers
and the first-ever artificial heart recipient.
When we drove to our games that fall—
windows down, cigarettes, speakers throbbing
with the bass beneath Van Halen’s anti-hero riff—
Clark’s beat had already dropped
off the charts. One-hit-wonder. Perfect front man
for a band of cynics with whom we laughed,
mashing up a philosophy of no tomorrows
with the conviction of many more.
Chuck Sweetman is a senior editor for december Magazine. His essays, stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in such places as Verse Daily, Brilliant Corners, River Styx, Poet Lore, Black Warrior Review, and Notre Dame Review. In addition to chapbooks, he is the author of a book of poems Enterprise, Inc. (Dream Horse Press)
