EN240

EN240

When will the week end, they say,

asking, praying while seated at round tables

for relief, from the work, the rush of college life –

ticking off the days to the weekend,

to drunken stupor and land of non-memory.

The irony of youth wishing away the days

while the old lay in bed, dreaming of more:

more time with family, more time to learn,

more time to breathe, and for that one more

Ginsbergian poet to rekindle their flame.

Bitterness and reason has burned low in their hearts,

The faded embers and charred masses of the heat of passion,

of rights, or equality and cause passed on to the next generation

where it becomes shriveled down

to internet arguments over the reign of JoePa,

to bitching and complaints of parents, of professors,

of paying colleges to make them do work,

and the very last coal of passion now turned to this:

a grocery list of ‘eyelashes’ and ‘alcohol’

cradled between two lacquered fingernails

while Coltraine plays in the background

and Ginsberg is on the lips.

For once in this cinderblock box of Hell,

I have found that coal of passion, burnt down to a grain of sand

but still smoking,

and just as the sax solo enters, I see her mascara-ed eyes fly open wide,

and I think “My God, she feels it too!”…

Tampons.

Tampons, she adds in a scribble

as if the world depended on it.