Day 28

For today's prompt, write an end of the line poem. Maybe the narrator of your poem is at the end of his or her line. Other possible lines that have an end: assembly lines, phone lines, power lines, rail lines, graph lines, dotted lines, waiting lines, lines of poetry, etc.


Next Year's Lemons

I was looking for my flathead screwdriver
where I keep my jackets that need buttons
hotel shampoos
wrapping paper and sparklers
and found a phone
and old one
its cord wrapped around itself
choking the neck of the receiver
and on it - in blue painter's tape - the note:
"Save!!! Richard's voice!!!"

The only person I ever enjoyed
talking to on the phone. No pleasantries.
Straight into it: "I read the book you
recommended. It was crap
- but where she says..."

And we'd talk for an hour
the snow falling around me
(little bird hopping through branches knocking off ice)
/ the glare bright off the Dixon wild oats
(the unsmoked smoke: blue, exhaled grey)

Now he is ash under my lemon tree, having had enough.
(spring lemon rot / votive holders filled with muck).

Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.

I will drag that old tape phone machine wherever
I go, as long as I live. But I'll never need to
wire it up to hear Richard, worn and present, on the end of the line
deeply, actually, talking to me, or

smoking (the last idea exhaled grey in the cramped, empty room)

thinking