Random Poetry
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
Six bucks on a vodka tonic – and pleased to get it so cheap. Anything but writing tonight. The sky is draped with clouds, pavement pocked with holes and rain drops. Me wanting to walk out on myself so I mosey to the car, parking lot, bar ledge, pink drink with two black straws and crystal ice cubes. Across the street lives Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, Nikolai Gogol, E.M. Forster, Tolstoy, Freud, and Shelley. Bald men and babies in the book racks, both completely confident and asleep to the world. Women in casts and tennis skirts – the same woman, actually. I walk to the window on the second floor and look down on the neon trim where I was before, the revolving door, people crossing just right of the crosswalk and people still stop. No Rimbaud in the store, bare is his place on the poetry shelf. Most – the best – writers dead. I see the local interest books for identifying the birds of Missorui for the people who don’t notice them. God books, fat books, new age books written in the 1970s. Books on bi-polar disorder jump out at me as a man with a cane coughs himself up on the escalator. The stairs fold under themselves like applause, the down set on the other side, across a broad opening, so the entire upper level must be walked through before departing. What words are these people looking for? Can they be found here? Have they been written or can I write them for them? I have no need for an audience tonight – except for the Japanese girl in the cards (I haven’t seen her face but can tell her nationality from behind). So selective and yet she carries a pink purse that matches her lips. Back outside on the sidewalks, mist, the jewelry stores closed and no more engagement rings to be sold tonight, love closed until 10 AM Thursday.
