
I saw them going to the Drake concert, T-shirts the primary merchandise, sexiness the ticket, young white girls with glossed lips, nubile breasts showing, their faces dead, a crazy person blocking their way for a few seconds as they piled off the train, obvious to me, a license to be sexy the sole reason for this so-called music's pounding, inane success. "But sure," I thought, "my poetry has always been the same thing, a pathetic attempt to get laid, my inane poetry a ticket to learning supposedly, but in the end, just sex." Remember quoting poems with that beautiful woman at the bar? Years ago. Iowa City. She knew "Prufrock." What is a lyric poem after all but a wooden flute played outdoors in the evening, one tremulous note worth an entire song? Near the alley of trees near the museum, the flute guy was there, playing, a slow, languid sound. Modern life temporarily like a dream. My train ride from Boston to Salem had been uneventful, my mood neutral. Just as I turned into the alley I thought how nice it would be, look---here comes the poetry--- how nice to make love to her as the wooden flute fanned out its somber wavering sound and then a homeless man on a bench received soft announcement after soft announcement from his old cell phone, the same ring my previous phone used to make when happily she would call me. "Hello," I said to myself, how peacefully I murmured it, completely out of my mind, "hello?"