To Fill Their Glasses Once Again
Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and
Frederico Garcia Lorca
walk into a bar.
That’s all. No joke.
Just one magical evening
in a dusty corner of a long-forgotten dive bar
where poets convene
to drink coffee and laugh at
the sadness and ridiculousness of humanity.
We aim to please our personal demons
while the crowd outside struggles to keep warm,
clustered at the dusky windows,
using torn sleeves to clean the pane
to get a closer look inside at the splendor
that is a small group of dangerously beautiful minds
coming together to explore the foundations of joy,
the meaning of life, and the spaces between time.
Ginsberg says to Whitman
‘Ooh what have you done to your hair, Walt?
It’s vibrant and alive tonight.
It really brings out your eyes!’
Whitman shyly smiles and
tosses his tresses back like
a shy high school girl about to hit her prime.
Lorca sighs and sips his almost-empty cup,
his luck worn thin.
Salty as the bottom of sailor’s boots,
he rises to fill their glasses once again.
The Poem Escapes Me
I thought of a poem
on my way home in the car and
when I turned to look at it
when I parked
it had gone.
Must have snuck out
the window
when I was daydreaming,
looking up
at a yellow sky with
the sun
in my tired eyes.
You know I like to run the ac and
roll the windows down
on these hot summer days
on the way home.
A small luxury I afford myself
for windswept hair and
chilly feet after a long day of
gazing into the abyss of
nowhere-near retirement, of
too-short weekends teasing
luridly
from the beginning of
a long week.
The poem escapes me regularly,
as life does at times
when I get too focused on
staring internally,
not looking at the sun,
the stars
the people who surround me.
The air hanging desperately
in spaces
just waiting
to be discovered
were every day
a Saturday
with no plans.
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