Slightly Different Version

Not many poems appear here under the 'Poems' label these days, mainly because there aren't many. There isn't really anywhere else this can go, though, without being associated with 'Rainyday Woman' to which it is a sequel, for want of a better word, which is predicated on the idea of poetry being a sort of girlfriend. It makes less sense if you don't know that.

Doing other things instead of what one once did, with some detachment, is a sort of theme and it might recur again as long as I don't feel as if I'm being lured into a 'sequence'. The horror of the thought of anything quite as spuriously sophisticated as a 'sequence' is one of the several things that put some distance between me and me wanting to be a 'poet' in the first place.

Slightly Different Version

Sometimes I see her and we exchange looks

As if to say we loved each other once
Or thought we did. It’s difficult to say.
We have both moved on in the interim.

 

In the same way two wrongs don’t make a right
Two misfits do not make a perfect match
But I still think of her on rainy days
Or when reminded we once thought we were. 

 

So I wrap myself in Shostakovich,
Short change myself by cashing out a bet,
Work hard at being a dilettante,
The words are recycled, just like we are,
From what they were the last time I used them
But all of that is another story.