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Along the Way MAG
How many faces and birthdays will I come to remember
before my eyes shut for the last time
and I find myself in that closet I hid in that smelled of laundry softener
in the third grade because I didn’t belong in a girl’s house?
How many fingers and palms and fingernails
will I see amid how many trees, swinging green and happy branches in the spring
like the clasped hands of middle aged lovers who left the kids at home with a babysitter
so they could go for an afternoon walk?
I imagine there will be enough smiles and enough tears
that if I wanted to I could flood the city of New York
and swim through those blurred lights in the dead of an August night
and sing along with the crickets and the distorted sound of drowned car horns.
Hopefully I’ll have a bag of forehead wrinkles and boxes full of voices
from teachers and friends and train conductors
who say the most unimportant things like “May I see your ticket?”
Hopefully there will be shoes and coats from parties
and sloppy kisses on doorsteps in cold January nights
where my breath will be visible in the air and the ice near my feet
will sparkle and gleam in the periodic flicker of the dying bulb
in her porch light.
Even if things go wrong,
at least there will be the smell of honeysuckle and sweat
in my mother’s hair as she held me to her chest as I came fresh from the womb
and there will always be those fluorescent lights.
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This article has 216 comments.
Wow, I really really like this. You convince the reader throughout the poem to keep on reading, or at least that was the feel that I got.
This reminded me of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Read it? You should. Great great read, interesting style, just like your work. =)
I love this! So many words...so beautifully put....For this sort of poem I might say it was cramped by the extensive vocabulary, but I can tell that was the point of the poem. The words really make it come alive. Wow...just stunning.
Please check out my work!
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Favorite Quote:
Let us endeavour so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry- Mark Twain