Last Call
Charles Leggett
This is the place that is the poem
This is the place you don’t care that your colors don’t rhyme
the length of the lines awry and free
angsts in squirming stitchings
successive visions foisted upon
an augmentation of one
mathematical vibrant string of sound
This is another of the places of the lovers and vividly
they appear to the lonely green eyes
waves of dark and complicated hair
their own eyes a landmark dark brown
their careless ocular intimacy
arms and hands draped in each others’ smooth as
palace marble in a fairy tale
phalanx of empty pint glasses leaning
as in warm trusting fright
into the shoulder of Himself
the almost pathological calm of one alone
arm draped over the booth back
painting of a Session that hangs above him
patchwork of brushstrokes
reds blues yellows incongruously bright
pitch browns and blacks for the locks of the players
This is the place of the poem of foolish last-minute too-late exuberance
for when you see you hadn’t the wits or the courage to find it
the soiled perfection the guts and soul of it the violent mystery
seamless not puckered but scarlet and ready to speak
for when comes burrowing the sensation
overwhelming explicit like a new pair of spectacles long overdue
of much more than time having passed
of skipping flat pebbles over bright brittle skins of a deeper and murkier sea
But it has to be the place of the poem of you don’t care
the glances almost discreet masking amusement with scorn
or is it the other way round the care of them discarded
one black spade from a hand of cherry red hearts
This is the place on that part of the road when the “click” when the snap when the piss
of the piss is poured and pours and pools into desire for the right language
of this road of this place its givens taken its ebbings flown
of the resources of a person’s night
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