Friday Nights


Girls flirted outside the Pinball Palace,
Outside the din of Rock and Roll
And clouds of pungent cigarette smoke,
 With stern-faced boys in tight white t-shirts
Tucked inside their tight blue jeans
Proclaimed their manliness.


Pedestrians crossed the hot blacktop,
Wary of the evening ruckus,
Wary of the aggregation,
They went about their business urgent,
 In the heat, the heat, the inescapable, clinging heat.
The payday cavalcade went slowly, 
Cars as far as eye could see
Crawled, inched past traffic cops
In the payday parade.


The boys and girls,
The luster and bluster
The hubris and the boasting
The laughter and the smoking
Soon became a throng
As some boys sat on car fenders
And their black engineer boots swung
Back and forth, back and forth.



G. robert Nordling