Date: November 23rd, 2020 11:41 AM
Author: Glittery doobsian foreskin legend
On Leaving DC
Dirty City, America’s Dear Core, Desperate Courage, Doubtful Commuters. Darling Capital, darlings killed. District of Columbia farewell!
No more wine and oranges with Mia during a summer play.
No more dozing in the public library over history books.
No more sleeping in my unwashed shoes.
No more on a green park bench, reading novels.
No more police sirens nearby. Changeling, they accused.
No more to see Massimo for Italian lessons in his spotless basement apartment.
No more vegetarian dinners with his blue-eyed baby and American wife.
I won’t hear him tell me not to be so serious.
I won’t hear him lauding at his son scrambling over the futon.
I "a via, Simon! he would cry.
No more reading lessons with institutionalized Sarah, with her smile and disheveled hair.
Her six children were taken away by the state, but she had taken herself away long before
that.
No more Mary Ann, except in letters.
She was so beautiful that I couldn't believe we were together, and wasn’t surprised when
we weren’t.
But still Kallmann Syndrome.
I had an arrangement with God— Let that syndrome be the worst thing to happen to me.
Then I had a protective stamp on my forehead, visible only to the angelic orders.
They could hear my cries.
I was a really noisy guy.
No more file-clerk job, where I scrawled my own initials two thousand times a year.
No more parking tickets on sunny days.
No more shattered parking meters— their strange fruit burst for the quarters inside.
No more hydrangeas by the low black gate; no more tulip bulbs.
I never planted them; they were pre-existing and perennial.
No more tyrannosaurus bones, excavated from Montana.
No more Madonnas in blue, with placid northern faces.
No more with Greg on Sunday on his porch to toast the passing buses.
Always we’d see, through the bus windows, the silhouette of a passenger toasting us in return.
This cheered Greg considerably, Greg with his Russian novels. Greg the indefatigable
houseguest of everyone he knew, Greg the sultan of sofas.
No more free lectures at the Library of Congress: Plato and Blake, Boswell, the evolution
of feathers, Hubble telescope, Umberto Eco’s condescension.
No more poetry slams where the person on-stage before me simulated orgasm.
I discretely left before my turn.
No more underground photocopied poetry magazine.
I was an intelligent editor, only sometimes sinister.
No more Metro cards.
They still leap like crickets from my old coat.
No more my roommate saying. Don’t go to Korea. You like beer—they don’t have beer in Korea.
He was wrong.
He kept my room deposit. He kept a Harley in the den.
No more asking myself what I was doing with my flagrant years.
I want now to see the me that was then.
And tell that me I feel nostalgia for you.
The younger me would think I was crazy.
But I thought practically everybody was crazy then.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4696303&forum_id=2#41420845)