He’s wondering if he’s the poet obsessed with street lamps
Or the poet obsessed with Kenneth Carrol.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out
That neon, rain and a broken heart with no umbrella
Brews inside the sensory pot
To make good poetry—that one’s common knowledge;

But it takes a genius
To tell her that she’s effervescent at the very least
Though this would be the last one about her.

Not too sappy though—poets hate sappy poetry
(and this one outgrew Neruda a long time ago)

What he wanted was Kerouac tinged with de Palma
The beat, the bongos and the beer with a premise of noir:
A certain offbeat loneliness that attracts attention
The candor of a silhouette of smoke, the classic blue tint of
A cigarette extinguishing in a gasoline rainbow diluted with water

He wanted her to dance under rave lights in a hellish disco on the
street where crackheads live
Maybe throw in a flood gushing down the sidewalk as she struts down
16th Ave with a clutchbag filled to the brim with
scattered photographs
Preferably of him but not necessarily.
It just has to be pretty. He has it all thought about in his head

And he wanted coffee.
Imagery of something hot—it’s a ghost of the night in all ways;
Coffee in a hotel when he’s all alone and she’s just behind him
In a mirror. She’s smiling. That’s all that matters.


But that’s fiction and that’s not poetry God says.
And he thinks “So what? It’s jazz at least.
The motherfucking hipsters won’t say a word”

And the meaning is lost to him,
She becomes another unfinished poem, and lies untangled
In his life for art comes before living

& in his room, the police sirens scream and he loses tracks of all the metaphors he already had
because these goddam junkies can’t make a decent living he says but in truth
it was because his words made no sense to him anymore
and he refuses to accept that he’s lost his soul.

If you [Log In] as a member you can discuss this work with others