Recent publication of "The Accident-Prone Boy" can be found here:
https://www.grandedameliterary.com/post/the-accident-prone-boy
Scarlett
Scarlett, sometime in the seventies
On the black and white basement TV
We watched Gone With the Wind.
Over the years, I've heard men
Deride you as hateable, manipulative,
But Scarlett, you lived for what you loved.
I was ten years old and knew nothing of the world.
And so when my brother said,
"She spends the whole movie crying
Just to get her way," I was puzzled.
I wondered what was wrong with that.
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From Lucky Time poetry collection.
Previously appeared in Comedy on Parade Programme, July 2008; Recited at miscellaneous readings, including Loudmouth at the Mack and Poetry Prose & Pints.
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Argyle Report
A starry night where there should have been none,
the sky clear -- what was no longer there:
the Victorian dinosaur, Argyle Avenue -- gone!
And reduced to rubble, its energy
reaching out a bony hand, the fornications
and confabulations resonate still.
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I made no living as a gossip columnist
-- only enemies -- like a blonde who cornered me
with demands of cease and desist of her coverage.
It was born there, on Argyle Avenue, that newspaper
that fly-by-night rag, alongside,
the dawn of our life where we played house
and your cat leapt out the window.
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They built it wrong, anyway, set off the main strip,
useless for commerce, cumbersome dinosaur unrentable
but to students and career girls and gay men
who complained that our parties rattled their ashtrays
until they joined in.
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We trashed it and flipped it and danced it,
on the roof of it, high above the hard pavement
manic over a sleeping roommate's bedroom
and didn't we love the metalhead and didn't we try
to help him, to give him a bed, a storage space,
but we had no comfort for his father.
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A place of doom, a white elephant.
Blondie, listen: It wasn't you
I was writing about.
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From Lucky Time poetry collection.
Previously appeared on Chance Operations
blog and recital 2011 .
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