.................................
How to Listen to a Meal Ticket
.................................

A monologue likes to dance
Heavily upon your cinquain placed
Under your gingham tablecloth inside
The restaurant where you broke the hard
Flakes of crust from the garlic bread you
Ordered.

And your poem stands silent
Against the window of the counter-
Top, speaking more about the taste of it
Than the woman sitting in front who offered you lunch.

And her monologue leaves you thinking
that friendship is a sorry thing where
sinners look to feed their sins to poetry and
lovers charge their emotions to your ears from their lips
where credit limits do not exist (besides
you were born for this:

                                      )

silence is as quiet as it gets.

.................................
Ryan Deschamps
.................................

 
Copyright © Ryan Deschamps
July 1996

... a poem in this room by Renetta Deanne Garrett Myers...
surf and rescue
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