portion of the artwork for Charles Leggett's poem

Last Call
Charles Leggett

—The Cobblestone, Dublin, Ireland

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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FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry | Issue 46 | Fall 2015