Bus Stop

Tedium happens when the corporeal limits of
our desires become long yesterdays and we
put a period at a place where it needn’t be
as a folly to indulge in. We make all of our
narcissim public like a slip underneath
a sheer dress.

*
I am preparing for the hour when I might wait
for the moment of being so properly dressed
that I scoff my lonely nakedness and allow myself
to be as brilliant as a colorful big bird
waiting for Miami Vice to pick me up in a
snapshot and terrain through the horse stalls
to the gates. On the inside of my shoes made
of soft LEATHER is an Italian name as I walk
spellbound into a bus.

*
Footing some other territory that is clearly
marked for the company of those who
would not deny my wishes for a handsome
man, I struggle to keep my head above water
in such an ocean as poets swim. I am
tangled in a deceptive web of a strange
youth in his prime. He is a discovery,ions
ahead of manhandled rhymes in a hazy
praising of the city for community poetry.

*

A gentled breeze blows near the city’s bus
stop. In the space of an hour his secrets and
his desires to be on his own and dismiss
desperate living for another place in the
sun culminates close to his heart.

*

Now the poets are applauding the fools. I
sink from the fear of missing the bus dest-
ination in the right zone, dream of poems
like gemstones which had small maxims never
before heard of and sounding like the
“greatest show on earth”. Somewhere in the
midst of a dull evening’s lesson, I am
captured by Proust while I read him in
bed.

*

I know that the youth on the bus could finish
me off with the art of a wealthy complexion to
his style or with a letter as fat as a thick
sandwich. Like the bondsman his word is
money.

*

I had to write to tell everyone how he unbuttoned
my dress and pinned a package of my omens to
an apology, but to no avail. We did not love anymore.
I realized losing him was hard, and I was never so
lost as when I recall him throwing pebbles at my
window. Somewhere soft music from a GUITAR
is playing for us, the way we were.

*

In the lamplight, shying away from the window,
I dream I'm skimming the nap of fabric with thistles
of teasel and whispering to myself: “I am seventy
years old, still harmless and wondering where my
brim hat and my cat poems went.”.


THIRD PLACE WINNER OF OUTLAW POET'S WEEKLY CONTEST.