Just Another Evening in Paradise

The Kings of Leon could still use somebody, Caleb sings in his Kurt Cobain voice

& the Kurdish Freedom Fighter comes on too strong to Lynne, wanting to whisk her away with his Hindu Kush eyes

& the woman with the Mastiff shoulders walks past in her low cut dress

& sniggering sneer

& Des starts knock knock  knocking on Heaven’s Door again because he knows we’re all here and I tell him to get back in his box coz you’re in the undiscovered country from whose bourne .. well, you know the rest

while Ruth limps off to the Ladies and Ted calls after her, that’s the best part of you gone,

and Sirocco knocks over his second glass of red on the white table cloth and Jarrod frowns and Gerry rushes over

and Max is cuddling Peter in the corner and the mulberry mutt mourns for its owner outside the window

& I’m talking much too loud but I’m in my cups And I tell the funny story about the pony walking into a bar again and I won’t be put down like a mad dog

& an officer from the penitentiary phones and says, no, Ades cannot be let out because it’s a Friday night

& we’re going round and round like skid marks on tarmac

& it’s just another Friday night in Paradise

Reciprocity

I was thinking of Beth’s post*

from the previous night

about the free exchange of art objects

in Ann Arbor.

Beth’s home town

begun by glass-maker Shawn Bungo

& I thought,

hey!

we do that all the time

posting our little gifts to each other:

our poems, ruminations, stories

our apercus

freely on the web,

leaving our comments, LOLs,

emojis of approval

practicing the noble art of reciprocity

that is never lost

& enriches a community wherever

it is found