The Gloaming

What if beneath the gloaming sky
and all the Pacific wonders-why
The starry, starry night stares us blind
We shudder, shiver, slowly we succumb

That sea salt smell really travels boy
It wends and wafts and crawls upwind
You can smell the sea when it isn’t even there
The ocean flows the tides of air

The evil gulls black-blinked and banked,
Turned and called with their crybaby pains
creative cries, delinquent gains
Sacrifice that car! We need a canvass to shit our graffiti!

The waves chew the earth with their inexorable hunger
Slapping the sand’s thighs with its foamy sighs
Determination of the damned this can’t go on forever… can it?
Only all the way to Tahiti!

So it goes, on and on forever, as the eye
can clearly see, the seas
Green and frothy, a soup of something surely
I march to be mixed, attached at the hips

The flagpole is gone

There was a WW1 veteran across the street
He put up a flagpole
Now someone has taken it down
Maybe it was too much work for them
I would walk by his apartment
He would come out and walk beside me
He asked “where you going”?
I said “downtown here”
He said “I guess I am too then” and would pinch the fatback of my arm
Hard
We would walk that way, I didn’t have much choice really
He would say “I am blind you know…I was in WW1”
I forget how old he was then but damn old anyway
He always wanted me to come in and sit
He was shot in the leg one week after the war was over
It took a little while for the word to get out to everyone
I suppose
Hey it is over now, we are all friends now, and some day, some day we will even
Use the same money
He was lonely and blind and everything he fought for had been forgotten
Now the flagpole is gone too
I had forgotten about him myself
I just remembered him through its absence