Well, gang, it’s been fabulous trying to get these in here. Hopefully one or two are (or will  some day be) helpful and insightful to someone. I think I’m all versed out for another five years or so..Once upon a time, I read that the perfect age for writing quality poetry is twenty-three. Apparently most of T.S. Elliot’s stuff came out then, the rest having to do with prose. I realized January 19ththat I will turn twenty-four in three months, and since I started writing some poems before it’s too late: forty-six poems at twenty-three. I’ll post each Friday until the last week of March, then I’ll post one a day until my birthday on April 30th. Here’s the finale:

Sometimes you know when it’s over
The monitor stops beeping
He storms out of the house
She cries out in pain before you hear the baby cry
No one needs a cue

Other times, when great men (or weak men aspiring to greatness)
come to finish what they promised, deliver
their word
awkward silence meets you on the other side of Bell’s
Telephone.
Then who ends the conversation?

She wanted to break it off with this guy at my third place
(I knew neither of them, let the record show)
But he manipulated her into giving him another shot
(I wanted to shoot him instead, or pray that God might,
While I wrote down their interchange in my journal – which reminds me, I have got to start recording real dialog)
She deserved better, this woman meeting this man who schmoozed her into a “when we… I get all… remember?”

You’d think he looked like a used car salesman,
some schmuck with Dapper Dan hair
But he fell out of a Hollister mag
Onto that porch

Know how he broke silence?
“Oh… and… I brought you some songs you’ve gotta hear. The lyrics are a. maze. ing.”
On his way back from the car, he was humming some mainstream Bon Iver song from several years ago.
Jerk.

I nearly stood up and yelled “THE END, PUNK!” or perhaps a
French “FIN!” – that sounds nicer, anyway

But life is no sonnet
Life gives us no curtain call by which to shepherd our applause
We hold no periods at the end
No guarantee of easy closure
Instead of commas, semi-colons and nice grand-finales we get:

…