It Takes a While to Disappear
by Ralph Angel
The city purrs, it hums along, the morning hardly risen.
A well-dressed drunk smears her finger across a doorman’s lips and whispers.
Someone stumbles. Someone curses. Someone hoses down the pavement.
We must have made a mess of things again, all fuzzy black and white
and greenish at the corners. Some final thing
that put us in our places.
You’re still standing in your winter coat alongside
everything you wanted and deserve. But you were thinner. The desk clerk
looked right through you. The cabby didn’t listen. You were
out of sorts back then, you say, but
you’re still frowning!
In vain a shrieking siren repeats itself
and fades. The quiet idles there, a crosswalk signal chirping. You’re still
standing in your winter coat, but I don’t know you. Someone
scrambles down a fire escape, his shirt a flag
that’s shredded. A boy
salutes. And then his mother, too.
She stoops to smooth his collar. She makes a sculpture of her packages.
You’re a different person now, you say, but
you will never happen.
—————
The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
Poetry Monster — the ultimate repository of world poetry.
Poetry Monster — the multilingual library of poetic works. Here you’ll find original poems, poetry translations, ancient verses, ballads and even folk tales.
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Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)
