Love Poem: Last Stop

After I met Kathleen on my bus trip back East to do a couple of poetry readings, thanks to Shann Palmer, I was absolutely smitten. I stayed with her as long as I could, then took a 36-hour express bus back to Long Beach, CA. Las Vegas was our last main stop, where I penned this one. Usually I write poetry at my computer, but on trips I resort to pen and paper. I sometimes think my penned poems better, and except for laziness and my current abdication from poet ingloriate (semi-permanently; upon reflection I am likely addicted to the art so I plan to take a year's break, as I think LKD suggested). In any case I'm on a trip south to Long Beach to see my baby graduate from HS. I would put her picture up again but fear if I did, no one would read the poem, due to her charismatic beauty. But if you go to my archives you can see my dolly-wolly. Enough Papa talk: here's the poem, written in a more contemporary manner than my usual reified "classicism."

(Remember that when I thought myself a poet, the most common criticism leveled at me was that my poetry was "inhuman." I understand that now. I must engage the reader more conversationally, as in this offering. I have dwelt too long in Eliot's formality and Yeat's Byzantium, not that I ever approached their eloquence, only that I thought in writing for the ages, as Eliot said, "And every poem is an epitaph." I thought the only poetry worthy of writing was that which deserved being carved in stone. Now I think the effect was to petrify my verse. As Sam Rasnake said, "If you have to call yourself an ex-poet, you must be a poet.")




Last Stop

In Vegas on a bar stool,
between buses, I watched
cocktail waitresses cinch halter tops
and women divers on TV
swathed in spandex, twats like vises,
balanced impossibly ten meters up
before they flipped and knifed
into their up-hurtling reflections
like cormorants, scant froth sucked
under by a slant of toes.

On all these women I imposed your face
like a mercury dime.
All I wanted was you beside me,
mocking my commentary.


Later, kiloneutral,

CE