Marie
Oh Marie, you are
an aging wreck;
your dangling dugs,
your languid wrinkled Miss Muffet
won't bring the milkman early;
dirty and smelly
slattern of the month,
the epitome of
everybody's discarded laundry.
Lapses in motor function
mental focus
get you to the streetcar
late every day
and late to work;
booted out
sooner or later
when you get home
what will he say?
What a burden
for our pity and revulsion;
you're frightening
in your squalor.
Night and day
a dead soul
an endless round
of apathy and despair,
what kind of life is that?
That's what we think.
But some rare times,
God knows why
somehow roused,
triumphant
between the bed posts
like a shaky marionette
you rise and fall
to the challenge
of bleary marital bliss;
for those few moments
assertive queen,
sweating with your
hirsute timorous king
dismantling him,
cannibalizing him,
you burst forth new-made,
king and queen together,
amorous two-backed beast
before your reign fades away
in the glimmer of tomorrow
and you come apart,
Priapic darling,
again become
what you were.
Alas, Marie, time's more
than a placeholder;
eater, destroyer
changing Nineveh
and all of us to dust;
false fellow traveler
rubbing us out
of our space and place
before we know it.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry Life & Times, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.
His book, Mark the Dwarf is available on Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/Mark the Dwarf Jack D.Harvey Ebook