The title sounds like a clickbait headline, the kind of come-on that promises a spectacle if you'll only stop scrolling. Nathaniel K Smith lets that cheap promise hang over a poem that delivers what it threatens: a sports-bar parking lot where nothing is ever really cleared away. The central idea is that time here isn't kept by clocks or calendars but by damage and bodily waste, and that anyone caught in the cycle can do little except repeat it and hope.
The first stanza gives the lot a mind of its own. It is "once filled but never empty," a paradox that probably means the cars and crowds have gone while their residue stays. The lot then "counts the passage of time," like a prisoner scratching tally marks, but what it tallies is "piss drops and puke buckets." The sound does the work here. The stresses pile up, and the hard p's make the phrase feel almost spat out. Then the line softens into "through meth mists," where the m's blur together and the drug becomes weather, something the place simply breathes. The short final line drops like a shrug.
In the second stanza, "every morning" turns the horror into routine. The sweeper is never named, only "bandaged hands," so a body part stands in for a whole person. The bandages hint that whoever cleans the glass has already been cut by it. "Blood splattered" floats ambiguously between the hands and the glass, as though the poem can't separate them. Then comes the odd coinage "inkscaped," which I read as ink plus landscape, with skin or walls turned into scenery. Its "jolly rogers" are pirate flags, skull and crossbones. If so, the smashed windows read as plunder and the lot as a lawless harbour. The cheerful word "jolly" sits uneasily beside the blood.
The form supports this flatness. There is no rhyme and no capital letter anywhere, and the only full stops come at the end of each stanza. Each stanza is therefore one long sentence, rolling on like a day that can't finish. The lowercase gives the voice the tone of someone too used to the scene to dress it up. The first two stanzas run five short lines each, but the last has only four, and its lines stretch out as the poem slows toward its ending.
That third stanza shifts the poem's ground. "Bathed last night in blue and red" almost certainly refers to emergency lights, though the poem never says so. "Bathed" is bitterly ironic, since the only washing here is done by light, and it cleans nothing. Then the poem turns to "you," echoing the title and putting the reader in the scene for the first time. Who "you" is stays open. It could be a car owner, or it could be the lot itself, which the poem has been personifying all along. The heat arrives in a rush of s sounds, "simmer under confused / summer swelter," and "confused" seems to transfer the speaker's disorientation onto the weather. The ending is the weakest kind of hope. All that remains is an "errant wind," a stray, wandering breeze, and it is asked to carry "better news." The poem stops on the word "you," with nothing delivered.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It names no villain, offers no lesson, and doesn't explain how the lot got this way. It gives a sequence of images (waste, glass, blood, flashing lights, heat) and trusts the reader to feel the weight of repetition. It also finds real craft in an unlovely place, through the clash of hard and soft consonants, an invented word, and a sentence structure that mimics a trapped day. By the end, the title's joke has turned sour. "You won't believe it" is how an outsider would react, but the poem's people believe it fully, because they sweep it up every morning.