“Movie or Too Late” by Walter Bargen

Photo by Jeremy Mu00fcller on Pexels.com

1 RSVP
Your promises of paved horizons
and 57 Chevy’s parked in bedrooms.
Curbs of licorice and no braking allowed.
Wrangler of illicit black holes,
space travel in back jean pockets,
surfing lips of gravity waves,
tangled in unified shoe string theory─
I should be there if I don't get tied
down in a parallel universe.
 
2 Questions of Etiquette
He no longer knows what to ask:
his supernova against her Magellanic clouds.
So he looks for something easy,
why are the oak leaves growing
beyond this window such a deep green
that the whole field and the next valley
are suffocating, in a verdant vertigo?
 
The poem his 40 year-old son wrote
when he was in first grade:
not many people
mostly trees
and woods. Not many
houses not many
things to do.
There is never an answer that satisfies
only a reaction and questions of greenery.
 
He no longer knows what is acceptable
except the trite where the only danger
is a suffocating boredom. Sure he’s quick,
spurs rattling through the dust
at the showdown on main street,
leather holster worn smooth,
half the bullets still ringing
the asteroid belt of Orion.
 
3 Acting Out
Gone from having tried too hard,
the town folk watch from second story
windows, crouching behind doors,
under a windowsill, but it’s a shootout
with an invisible man, and when he slips
falls on horse hockey and cow pies,
it’s self-inflicted and when he finally
stands up, dusting off derision, the pistol
empty from the beginning of time, he’s no longer
sure of his quick-draw limitations.

Copyright © 2024 Walter Bargen
All Rights Reserved

Walter Bargen has published 26 or more books of poetry including: My Other Mother’s Red Mercedes (Lamar University Press, 2018), Until Next Time (Singing Bone Press, 2019), Pole Dancing in the Night Club of God (Red Mountain Press, 2020), and You Wounded Miracle, (Liliom Verlag, 2021). In 2023, he released Too Late to Turn Back (Singing Bone Press, 2023) and Radiation Diary: Return to the Sea (Lamar University Literary Press, 2023). He lives in Ashland, Missouri, with his wife and countless cats, raccoons, and snakes. He was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri (2008-2009).

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