STAG

What can we do but exchange pleasantries? 

We grapple with the thought of slapping one another hard, 

once or twice on the cheek, 

and lean in for a handshake instead.

Long have I known you and the hatred that brews 

in steel chambers of your soul for the woman who cost you 

the long war of your early years.

Still she roams freely, unaware of the lasso you have thrown 

and are inching close around her,

so when she glimpses it in the corner of a dream 

in the form of your freckled palm, 

all of love in her heart diffuses like an atomic bomb.

but she wakes and claims to remember nothing.

You seek the bitter sting of a cold hand in humid air 

on the fourth of July in Brooklyn,

when you are looking at her eyes 

unable to see the pigment in irises you used to know like the back of your hand.

Our love; a dreamscape thought up,

no longer in use.

Reviews

[Gerald Parker]

Oh, how do you do this? A great poem, but I am slightly perturbed by the lasso bit - if the woman in the third person is you, how can you not be aware of the lasso.... sorry, I'm sure you can explain this to me. I'm easily confused. (Brooklyn is so far from CA - is this someone from your past (short) you just happened to bump into?) Love the 'cold hand' line!

[anamezic]

This is about a boy I loved madly in my youth, who I know I will run into when I move to Brooklyn, because we will be attending the same school. When we were young I made some mistakes (probably due to my insatiable moodiness), and he grew to dislike me.

As for the lasso bit, I was talking about myself, thought slightly in the past. For a number of years I felt a very small longing for this person, that I wrote off as normal after any bad break-up. But as I continued to age, the longing only seemed to draw in and become more acute. Like a lasso.

[Gerald Parker]

A poem ANTICIPATING 'the bitter sting of a cold hand in humid air' - now I'm even more impressed!