Soon, Again

grooveamatic

Sitting beside my mother in the pediatrician's office
My tiny unsure hands clasp a brightly hued book
Which I earnestly and quite seriously pretend to read.
Are you reading, honey? she asks, grinning,
And I, thinking she is fooled, reply,
Yes Mommy. She nods, still smiling. I am very young.

And now years later letters tumble out hell-for-leather.
It is too easy to mistake learning for love, words for wisdom.

grooveamatic

And the world goes by so fast
Sometimes.
All the concrete
Anonymous trees
And today, the rain.
Things run by so fast
Some say
Reaching your hand out the window
Could rip off your arm.
I believe this.

Stopped at a traffic light,
The rain slows to a patter.
I can see folks milling about,
Buying soda out of soda machines,
Under the hoods of their cars,
Pumping their own gas,
Paying, paying, paying.

The light turns green
And I am off again,
Fast through the world.
The rain joins the chorus of movement.

grooveamatic

It is quietude I seek, you see,
in this room
in this quiet room
I seek it away from you,
these moments passed
unretrievable
unremembered
anonymous moments
where your face does not
present itself to me,
fades with each
steam-soaked moment.

pearlposterfan

If I were a publisher I would publish this piece and sell it at Starbucks. Thank you.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Top-notch stuff, Groovemeister! I like the very subtle shifts of nuance, in lines 1-3, between the existential state of quietude your speaker presents, and his description the physical quiet of a room. I also like the consonantal equivalences of "m" and "r", which suggest, in their very sound, a round, warm room, a womb! This insular, soundless place is the speaker's protection from the spectre, the recollection of the poem's addressee. The build up is good, too, from monosyllabic to polysyllabic words ("unremembered", "anonymous moments") which beat like a heart within the womb, a place of distance and comfort from an unwelcome memory.

Yet, one asks: although the poem's chief subject is this room, the speaker seems to overreach himself in claiming he is safe from his memory, though he claims it fades. This is one reason why I like the poem so much; it understands irony in a nutshell, and with it, much of our human predicament: our failure to escape those who affect us most deeply. The phrase "you see" beautifully gives the game away: the addressee is most vital to the poem, and is asked to see what the speaker sees in retreat.

Clever work!

grooveamatic

You were wearing those loose brown pants
(the ones I like)
the day we saved it's life;
we stepped from the hot car
onto the shade-specked access road
(our feet had just met)
and the whir of cicadas
(or were they just crickets?)
was distinct and distant
in the air around us.
You were pretty that day
(and I was handsome)
although we rarely touched;
the woods, I am certain, noticed us.

The turtle in front of the car
wasn't pretending to move--
it may as well have been
a steel shoe,
dropped and forgotten
by some steel, green-hued princess--
I tapped it's shell with my Converse
and it sucked it's snakey head
inside. I gasped, the way I always do
when turtles do that,
or when anything green
moves too fast.

You picked it up
like it was a softball
and sat it gently on the mushy
leafy road shoulder,
although I suspect you didn't care much
for the creature;
still,
your indifferent demeanor was like
telling the world
(or at least those woods)
you didn't really care one way
or the other,
but you were sure gonna change things.

Walking back to the car,
I decided right then
that you could have me,
that I'd be your Prince Turtle,
your Hot Shining White Sugar Man.

justam

This was a fun to read because it has such a buoyant feeling.