the poet PD Lyons Reading from As If The Rain Fell In Ordinary Time ~ part 3, w/text

~todays menu~

Pensioners Remiss

Knowing Now the Healing Ways

Atlantic Luncheonette 

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themes: growing old, 1970’s, love, city

 

PD Lyons Reading from As If The Rain Fell In Ordinary Time erbacce~prize for poetry 2019 erbacce~press Liverpool UK

Pensioners Remiss – incorporates a variety of scenes from my home town Waterbury Ct. St Johns Church for example is still there on the green.

Knowing Now the healing Ways – again influenced by my hometown and my first apartment back in the 70’s. 

Atlantic Luncheonette – one of those classic coffee shops in America long before Starbucks or cappuccinos. On the corner opposite the exquisite white marble Waterbury Post Office. Many a skipped school day involved the Atlantic – strategically placed half a block from the library. How ironic, skipped school to hang out in the library. They even let you smoke in there back then but that’s another poem or two…

 

Thanks for spending time . 

cheers.

good luck

bye

!

 

• Pensioners Remiss

When I wanted to see you,

Young and available

Dresses out amidst a blue jean wasteland

Stoned as laughter smoky charms

Dancing any moment unannounced

 

On the steps of Spanish little Harlem

Turquoise as your eyes church doors

Sacramental wine just opened

A spiral of possibilities each as believable as the past.

 

When I wanted to see you,

Roads wide open looking to ride

Strong summer muscles

 Love like horses into sunset.

 

 Diamonds across that midnight sky

 Alive only in your love me eyes.

Breathless barefoot pirouette

 Limitless kitchens, dull Frigidaire light.

 Icy India Pale Ale fast as you can drink.

 Third floor back porch dawn

Aegean blue amongst a city of fearlessness.

 

When I wanted to see you,

Saint John’s Chapel Christmas

 Balsam crushed blood velvet

Crystal choir angel

Mysterious as snow.

The mouth you used an accent of hypnosis

Lead like sorrow obsessed with green

 As if summer returned between live pines

 My hands held by your own to cup each one instead.

 

When I wanted to see you,

So much more so than wherever you were

Sharper than anything ever dreamed

So much sooner than now.

 

• Knowing Now the Healing Ways

I could touch you then. I knew you, just around the corner you. Halfway Up the stairs, you. A single rose growing between back yard rubble, you. Travelled by Grey Hound, cross the country, park bench dreamer, double dancer Zelda, you –

A tide of whirlpools. An antebellum majorette beauty queen. You were the most beautiful woman in the world. You were me as a woman. Wanting to be the first one to make love in a whole summer of dry attics never believing for one minute we could end up on the street by Christmas in Connecticut.

I was gonna. I was destined. I was the one. I was the chosen.  Could have been Jesus, preferred to be Krishna, hoped only to be Watermelon Sugar. A thing delectable to your lips, a thing you might someday remember without lying or regret.

You were anything possible,

Meeting again someday.

Around the corner, halfway up the stairs,

Eyes still same as my own,

Knowing now the healing ways,

Strong enough for love.

 

• Atlantic Luncheonette

     I walked out into a morning

 too bright against my shadows.

Three steps down I’m on the pavement

wondering just how able I am to get along –

Stable as loose change,

  balanced as a junkie on the prowl.

   Still can’t stop thinking about moving

 where it is, I’ll finally get to.

My boots are holes turning into blisters.

Cigarettes keep tempting me with immortality.

Girls across the street dare me to smile.

 

 I make up excuses to call what I’m eating food.

The waitress sings to the radio

 with commercial interruption asks how I am.

  My eggs keep running into hiding,

The coffee strives vainly to hiccup,

 I leave a quarter for the singer,

 a dollar for the poor.

 Ask the women on the corner, how much for conversation?

They say they don’t cater to perversions – try my luck next door.

  I bump into an old friend who asks about my wife,

I say I didn’t know I had one.

Then he’s handing me a ten spot

 says here go catch a cab.

I hand the driver a social security card

he says this ain’t worth noting unless your old.

I tell him my hearts just gone arthritic

He says here pal try a gun.