Poets Star Wars Bar & Grill

Ezra Pound once sent James Joyce a pair of used shoes.

Would you buy Faulkner a drink? Have tea with Emily?

Forget that the guests are all dead, would you be on time?

Oh, the company you’d keep. Bukowski vomit in the sink.

Olson vanishing into the Cape Ann fog while Neruda

warms up the waitresses with Spanish love poems.

Back at the bar Berryman and Yeats are not speaking,

staring each other down, while Heaney chortles at them.

Hemingway is passed out. Fitzgerald and Lawrence are

scheming some escape. The haiku crowd has vanished.

Over by the dart board, though, the sonneteers are still at it,

laughing it up in perfect couplets, taking their turns with

end-rhyme darts to pin down the abstract with the real.

They were here first; they’ll be the last to leave.

 

Usual Group at the Window Table

How in Westerns the wheels of the wagons

always spin backwards the faster they go,

how ice and flame at first touch feel the same.

Take a pint and a seat by the window.

 

If all my sins were confessed in Islam

my body would have no extremities.

What do you call what you want to forget?

Take a pint and a seat by the window.

 

There are faults in the sky that insult me,

slick birds with no wings that call themselves souls.

Without your lost beauty no one knows you.

Take a pint and a seat by the window.