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sometimes, the city hits back
by Gabriel RicardI’m out of my gentle mind again.
Still can’t drive.
Still fear big dogs roaming streets without electricity.
Still walk through them anyway,
because it’s the only way I’m going to meet
anyone new or outwardly new.
That’s not my need for romance talking.
I’m doing just fine with that, sweetheart.
Just fine.
What that speaks to is the need to have
someone different to converse with
when the sun finally shines,
if only a little,
on the old women selling coffee at the docks.
My idea of courageous
is someone who can remember the rules
of a long, boring card game,
after their spouse has burned their home down.
My love of Australians
who argue that we’re in Providence,
even though I tell them we’re in San Francisco,
knows no bounds.
People who need me to keep it together.
It’s not a damn hero complex.
I just like measuring endless fits of madness.
And,
no,
I’m an idiot with the metric system
when it comes to that.
Who can actually calculate such a thing anyway?
I’ve had needles left in my back for fifteen minutes,
but I’ve never given money to a healer
who only tries the rain dance when it’s snowing.
Slept on the clean laundry pile in a stranger’s house,
But haven’t been around to a movie theater
where the hookers and skid row bakers
try to give dialog to Chaplin’s silent classics.
Sought medical attention on a backyard picnic table.
Didn’t go to college to meet girls.
Didn’t go to college at all,
but I have eaten a lot of Chinese food,
slept with older women
and thrown up from drinking too much
Halloween punch.
A mime told me last week that I’m not crazy.
Just dumb, dumb and stupid.
Haven’t gone so far that I can’t get back.
Have definitely gone further than I’m comfortable with.
You get it, right?
03/27/2012 Posted on 03/28/2012
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Sandy M. Humphrey on 03/28/12 at 02:55 AM Your words flow like a quoteable author of renown. I even have some saved in a book or on a post it taped to my desk. Everytime I read one of these scenes I wish it would continue cause I want to know what happens next...So whether you are out of your gentle mind or measuring madness or keeping it together, the prose flows and I as a reader appreciate that and I do get it.
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| Posted by Elizabeth Jill on 03/28/12 at 02:53 PM I am always marveled with where you can take people in your writing. In my distance, I hand you rooms full of people whom I know would love to sit in suspense and in audience, and simply listen to you pour another poem, flood us with walks on the wild side we've either met or want to meet. Rock on, Gabriel, Rock On. |
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