He sat in a given place at a given time feeling and thinking.
At his desk; in a restaurant; on a park bench.
He sat on his toadstool thinking of memory and desire.
But he was only a boojwah American with a Nissan Sentra
and half of a serious mind. Yet
when he saw
the rainy streets of Manchester Connecticut in memory
with mud and gravel on one section of the street
near a certain Shell station and knew almost something
about the years and the years how they settle
gently and persistently down in their
soberly aging geological strata establishing their
long-layered kind of non-jubilant beauty
then he felt as if it would be right, would be
not just paltry arrogance to form up
what he saw or the tone and cadence of what he almost saw
up into what he might then offer forth as a [____].
Then
just one day later at a shopping center
the sense of ubiquitous small-soul boojwahness spread in
and he felt quasi-shame and quasi-hated his little [____]
as the effete flowers of his under-tested life,
and in this mood her poured quite persuasive scorn
on someone else's book, testament of another boojwah brain.
But
back on a damp street in his own, Annie moved seriously
fourteen years ago in a dark blue raincoat.
Mark Halliday teaches in the Creative Writing program at Ohio University. His seventh book of poems LOSERS DREAM ON was published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press
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