Open Mic at Shades of Green

I’m too old for this place.
I order another drink anyway.
Tired of the poets, I sit at the bar
talking to the Irish tourist
who's 40 years younger
and mad at her husband
for reasons I can’t comprehend.

Just then Dave brings me a drink
he got from the other bartender
by mistake. The Irish tourist
likes me even better.
He’s not my boyfriend, I explain,
but she doesn’t believe me
and invites me back to the hotel.

No thanks, I say. I’m here for the poetry.
That’s too bad, she says. I agree.
Do you know Patrick Kavanaugh,
she asks. Can’t say I’ve met him,
but there was a night a few years
ago, when high on mescaline 
with 2 younger coworkers we
listened to a recording and laughed
our heads off. Almost literally.

My name is called.
I walk to the stage.
Read a poem about
my sister’s suffering.
A smattering of applause.
The tourist is gone.
Long walk across Manhattan.
Train to New Jersey.
Dreams of immortality.

For Eva

What you call kindness
is sometimes me stating the obvious.
You are late, I wait, glad
to be with you on a day like this.

More than a nothing day really,
I try to match wits to no avail
slow tongued and plodding,
my entire life swirls around.

I wish it would stop
not my life but the swirl.
The dead won’t leave me alone.

Driving over the 7th circle of hell
namely the Pulaski Skyway built obsolete
before complete, Southside Johnny warbling
on the radio “I Don’t Want to Go Home.”

as you offer running commentary
on the driving habits of New Jersey.
A silver Mercedes zigzags across lanes –
the Jersey Slide.

I am prone to pronouncements
You make small observations
riddled with allegory
General Pulaski was a so and so…

I overshare the past. Again.
You call me a replacement child,
but I’m the happy idiot of my family
the one born into, the one I raised.

 My mom called me good time Charlie…
You ask questions I don’t understand.
I smile, I nod, I smile some more.

Let’s enjoy the September sun.
This isn’t history class, let’s call it life,
the shifting earth beneath our feet.

We trek past silk factory ruins
along the chromium banks of the Passaic –
The Great Falls of Paterson…

 then the slabby cemetery
below ominous power lines
idling refrigerator trucks hummmm…
under the bluest skies Jersey can offer

a little slice of heaven in Newark
sunflowers in hand
looking for Ginsberg’s grave.

We sit outside generic Hoboken bar drinking
sad Red Needles, tequila and cranberry,
in honor of Leonard Cohen on his birthday

discussing endangered writers like
Philip Roth or Mordechai Richler
(A moot point since both are dead)

on what I planned to
be a literary day which has
taken a turn towards the Jewy,
as it so often does.

These are my happy places
shared with a new friend.
Looking home through your eyes
makes it new, meaning infused.

Old friends bring up memories
I wish they wouldn’t, the nicknames,
the shit I made up but don’t remember,
the inevitable surrender to inevitability.

Everything changes
craggy eyes, body sags
dying season extends
You make me smile. 

Standing at the edge of town watching
you descend the PATH stairway,
a come to life Springsteen song.

Obviously.