1 New Poem

Tribute Acts

Something still flickers, soft age
haze of moonlighting fish and chip
and vinegary black-white television’s
over-pouring ennui backmasks
tape tale too strong for telling
in beer can snap crack
or nerves of sincere Judas
coming across in tender-handed
compliments you pay to shirt
corner raggedness as signs of
authentic outrage, smooth
talking a sales job made
in social pyre for our
selves as whittled ornaments
from oak crosses, refined,
tempered by half-glass
of young years.

It isn’t like embers anymore,
grander stage for smolder of
televisions versions of  crying
sessions, a single wearing
of cut flower cloth for
rose boquet tosses in
off-hand kind of ways,
the hurried undoing years
you make up for in Christmas
dinner acts of middle splendor,
in standing in banquet hall
doorways waiting for the
moment to say of leaving:

“we never should have, not us”.