Tag Archives: Marcus Bales

Sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘Walking in the Rain’

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Today when we went walking it was raining,
Not so hard to keep us from it — still
Distinctly wet. We thought about abstaining,
But March this year has lost its normal chill,
So on we went. She did her bombs away,
I bagged, and she looked up, with fur-soaked skin,
And shook some water off, as if to say,
Open up the door let’s go back in.
Well you’re the one who brought us out this far
I said as if I thought she had a plan.
She body-languaged Well, since here we are,
We’ll sniff back slow and get wet as we can.
And now we’re on the rug here, somewhat dryer,
Breakfasted, and dozing by the fire.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “If ever a poem cried out for explication, this poem is that poem. Its hidden meanings and elusive innuendos chase each others’ tails with such sly allusions that even the b in subtle seems to thrust itself forward in comparison.

“The depths this poem sounds, the heights beyond which it reaches, evinces nothing of the feline grace other poets aim for and achieve. Nothing here looks at the reader and refuses to respond to the call for extra petties. This is a poem that trots wetly over and rubs eagerly against knees, and receives the towelling-off and the “Who’s a wet one, eh, who’s a wet one, today?” with effervescent attempts to put its muddy feet on the reader’s shirt. This poem has but one thing to say, and it says it by leaning in for another pat on the head, and then swiftly shaking that fine final spray of mist into the reader’s face before they can back quickly enough away.

“It is the doggily doggish dogness of the thing that dogs the dogging dog of this poem, and makes it so, well, dogilicious.

“Cry havoc, and let slip the hounds of love.”

*****

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

“Walking in the Rain” by h.koppdelaney is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Down-sizing’

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I will retire and go to buy a ranch-house home,
And a fenced yard build there, for the dogs to roam around,
And raised beds, full of easier-weeding loam,
And cultivate my garden’s ground.

And I shall have my wife there, who knows the signs of stroke.
Morning and night, we’ll take the pills our doctors gave us,
And cook our meals of beans and rice because we’re broke —
And hope the kids vote blue, and save us.

I will retire, and maybe write and, when I’ve napped,
Cruise the internet, perhaps, and lament the loss
Of civility, and watch the fascists arrive, wrapped
In the flag, and holding a Bible and cross.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Yeats‘s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree‘ irritates me. Its narrator, left to live on an isle, would be dead in a week. Yeats’s mode of life was a series of retreats from country-home to country-home, sponging off the wealthy. Retreat is his vade mecum, and ‘The Lake Isle’ is only his most famous one. So I thought, well what the hell am I doing differently? And the answer is, not much. I made a career out of selling expensive things to rich people, too. And my retirement will be a retreat as well. Where’s my Lake Isle? In the suburbs, funded by Social Security instead of Lady Gregory, perhaps, but no less a throwing up of the hands and leaving it to the next generation to try to straighten out what mine has done.

“So Yeats’s narrator retreats to the high-fantasy farming of an isle in a lake, as if farming weren’t hard enough but it needed the difficulties of getting supplies across water. My narrator retreats to the suburbs without enough money to sustain his prior lifestyle. Two silly poets writing silly stuff.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Rosie poising with the garden Buddha, plants, raised bed, bamboo fence, Garden for the Buddha in progress, front yard, Seattle, Washington, USA” by Wonderlane is marked with CC0 1.0.

Non-traditional sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘The Durable Rain’

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The durable rain was conducting its drumming descent
Without any decent regard for the dawning of day
As if a dim evening was all of the morning it meant
To allow from a sun that was doing a landscape in grey.
Never begin with the weather the boffins have said.
If nature’s as stormy and dark as a novelist’s mind
The reader will sneer at the metaphor. Offer instead
A prose that’s so difficult readers are left far behind.
But back to my tale. Is it cozy inside, or does rain
Express what discursive description would talk past in vain?
Does a cry break a heart when the kettle releases its steam
Or, piping, awaken a lover up out of their dream?
What it will mean will depend on your context and age.
A poem exists in the reader and not on the page.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “The first four lines rolled out without much trouble. I had let the dogs out after they’d woken me at what they thought was the right time but which to me was five in the a.m. It was cold and grey but not rainy at all. Who can figure how the brain works. I did worry briefly about the alliteration but finally put it off, hoping it would sound like rain on the roof. Sort of. And it seemed portentous and poetry-like, but where to go from that?

“I don’t know where I first heard that you’re not supposed to open with the weather. It sounds like one of those pieces of advice the internet kicks up from time to time purportedly by Elmore Leonard, along the lines of “You know those parts that readers skip over? Don’t write those.” Or “You got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.” Advice that is absolutely both spot-on and worthless at one and the same time. If you know you don’t need any advice; if you need advice, it’s because you don’t know. It makes sense in that maddening way of all advice, but it is untakeable. However much you may agree that the reader doesn’t care what the weather is, they care what happens and who it happens to, there I still was without anyone there to have something happen to, except the damn rain.

“Sitting at breakfast reading my usual dollop of Wodehouse, I noticed that when things are going well for his characters the weather gets some generous play, and when not, not. Then I reflected that really I don’t have a large supply of written descriptions of the weather from anywhere. There’s ‘Neutral Tones’, of course, where the weather is a metaphor for the breaking relationship, and “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” And ‘Stopping By Woods’ where the weather is the reason for the stopping, or the first lines of ‘Journey of the Magi’. There’s Auden’s ‘In Memory of Yeats’, Housman’s cherries hung like snow, if that even works, though who Snow was and how Housman knew is a mystery. And after that it’s vague references to this or that month or season generally in Keats, Poe, Byron, or Shelley, and the inference that all of Yeats happens in the summer what with swans and people fighting the horses of the sea, and all. And finally, again, all those descriptions of the morning in the Blandings and the golf stories. After that my memory starts to flail about. This isn’t the sort of thing where research is indicated at five in the ack emma. Perhaps you remember more examples of how the weather is used in prose and poetry, but it’s too late now, isn’t it.

“I wasn’t sure how to go on. It seemed as if nearly the whole practice of poetry in English was against me, aside from the sub-genre of song with all those deep and crisp and evens, and sleigh rides that began to echo in the back of my head, along with all those singers who seem to be perpetually crying or dancing or walking in the rain. Then I thought well, why not use that? I might get three or four lines out of it, and then maybe something else would occur to me. Well, I got my four lines and arrived at the volta of the sonnet, if sonnet it turned out to be. What now?

“Turning at the question that had stopped me I trod upon that patch for a few lines, and then I had got to the couplet. Well, I really had nothing, did I, among all this meta- bit, and what I had seemed to call for some digging into the whats and whys of how literature worked. Well, of course no one knows. I worried some about having failed to provide any context for the reader to see me through, and put it aside to eat breakfast.

“After that, and a shower, and a bit of humor watching the dogs return to the scene of the five o’clock crime outside to chase a squirrel in the yard, somehow the notion of context reasserted itself, and I remembered a sort of juicy quote from a professor 50 years ago who was gassing on about how a poem isn’t the sounds or the words or the meanings as the poet meant them, but rather the unpredicatable ways that the people misread poems. I recall he had half a dozen examples right to hand, as scholars so annoyingly seem to do, but I couldn’t bring a single one to mind. Fortunately, I’m a poet, not a scholar, so I don’t have to be able to give good – or any – examples, so I decided to steal his assertion and let it go at that.

“And there it is. A complete mishmash of false starts, interrupted middles, and squishy endings. Enjoy!”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Rainy Day” by SammCox is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Sailing to Margaritaville’

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That is the country we go to, all of us
Made young again by music, smooth with oil
And lust, all generations generous
With youth and laughter. Couples coil
And uncoil, casually amorous,
With booze in the blender and shrimp beginning to boil.
Everybody dreams they have the chance
To chase the charms and challenge of romance.

A laughing bard is the essential thing.
A patterned shirt, an old six-string guitar,
Who urges us to sing and louder sing
And clap and dance and order from the bar,
And thank hard-working servers as they bring
The stuff that lubricates this whole bazaar.
And though the bard is covering the bill,
Tip well when you’re in Margaritaville.

Oh, parrotheads — imagination’s fire
Illuminates the marvel of it all,
And conjures every sorcery we require,
The call to the response, response to call,
A consummation fevered with desire,
Beatified by the local alcohol.
The song creates the dream. The dream creates
Another song the dreamer celebrates.

And once reality is far away,
Our youth returned, our stamina restored,
We eat and drink and sing and dance and play
And manifest ourselves within each chord
As if we might entrance ourselves to stay
Within this reverie we’ve found aboard
The magic vessel Margaritaville,
Distilling what distillers can’t distill.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Someone immediately floated a raft of shit my way over this poem, claiming, in a local Cleveland group generally given to local music, that I’m normalizing alcoholism. I know — it’s an astonishing misinterpretation, but there it is. And in spite of my protestations, he insisted on shouting that I was a lush, a drunk, and an idiot for promoting and approving a disease. Well, it’s not as if poets aren’t used to being misunderstood.

The odd thing to me about this is that I work hard to trigger people through poetry. That’s what art does, in my view, confront us with our frauds and foibles, and makes us look at them in detail. If, of course, we read poetry at all. There must be some corollary to Murphy’s Law that states that when a poem can be misinterpreted it will be misinterpreted. Normally I’m delighted by responses to my poems that are outraged and offended, because normally those responses are from the people I’m trying to outrage and offend. But this blindsided me. The entire Jimmy Buffett phenomenon was built on the fantasy of sun and sand and sea, which is only tangentially alcohol-fueled. No doubt alcohol plays a role in lubricating the enchantment, but it’s the enchantment people go for, not alcoholism.

And that enchantment is powerful. It makes people wear loud clothes and play loud music. But the central lure is that we can think of ourselves as all multi-talented and tanned, slim and young and horny. It’s not the lure of tales of drunkenness and cruelty on a summer afternoon, but rather the opposite: tales of slightly disreputable fun, but tales of the lure of the freedoms from regimentation for the freedoms of a more relaxed like-minded culture where everyone is youthfully attractive and eagerly lascivious.

And what a lure! Even those of us whose only encounter with youthfully attractive and eagerly lascivious were our own dreams had those dreams. And with Jimmy Buffett the price of admission was a seducing tune and a clever lyric. You didn’t need a white sportcoat, much less a pink crustacean. All you needed was a sense of lockstepness of the modern bourgeoisie and a desire to escape it. The whole thing is all in your mind. You create your own sensitive young poet self in a lubricious setting among the young and eager to love you. It’s thrilling, it’s fulfilling, it’s art.”

*****

(Editor’s note: From the title, to the ottava rima form, to the themes, ‘Sailing to Margaritaville’ pays homage to Jimmy Buffett by riffing on W.B. Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium‘. Beginning with Yeats’ opening words, “That is no country for old men” and all the way through, Bales echoes and plays with Yeats’ words, bringing everything to Buffett’s Margaritaville.)

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Wasting away again in Margaritaville……..” by efleming is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Labor Day 2023 – RIP Jimmy Buffett’

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He died on Labor Day, the end of summer,
And left us going back to work or school.
The days are shorter, now, the parties glummer,
Less heat and light, less beat and life, less cool.
We fall back on our favorite expressions
Of what it means to be young, tan, and free,
And weigh the anchors of adult discretions
Imagining we sail a sapphire sea.
The songs he sang, those figurative vacations,
Have turned our water into stronger stuff.
We toast each other, changing our frustrations
With dailiness to fantasizing fluff,
And drink the happy liquor we distil
From metaphoric Margaritaville.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “My favorite Jimmy Buffett songs are ‘A Pirate Looks At Forty‘ and ‘Tin Cup Chalice‘, but I think his best song is ‘Margaritaville.’ I’m not as fond of ‘He Went To Paris‘ or ‘Death of an Unpopular Poet‘ as other celebrants of his work, and ‘Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw‘ is certainly the best of the more raucous end of his oeuvre.

Like many other singer-songwriters Buffett seemed to me to work without an editor, possibly because the music business is such that even when you find a peer-group that you trust to say this or that just ain’t right, it’s hard to get the group together often enough, and for long enough, for the trust to re-blossom so that real reflection and re-working of lyrics can happen.

Those circumstances lead a lot of singer-songwriters, I think, to something that is not exactly laziness, and not quite smugness, but rather perhaps more like a sense that they’re the only ones whose taste they trust to judge their own work. Then they slide into a state where they are not themselves as critical of their own work as they once were. They get a good idea and a good line or two in the chorus, and the rest of it gets sort of clamped and glued together without a final planing, sanding, and paint job. The music is well-arranged and well-performed because you can’t fool musicians about music, but the lyrics tend to seem a little hasty, a little down-at-heels, a little scratch-and-dent. It’s too bad because their early work is almost always lyrically inventive and musically simple, while their later work is musically slick and lyrically spotty.

When I first heard A1A in 1978 I was entranced. No one else that I knew of was trying to sketch people and places from the point of view of a sort of scruffily aimless charmer. Oh, there was Tom Waits, but that was more noir and Bukowski than charming. Buffett’s work was entrancing, a refreshing way to write songs and perform them. A lot gets forgiven in the enchantment of the charm, but eventually the clanker lines and the narratives that don’t quite hold together accumulated, and I started to notice the tarnish more than the shine.

So the later work did not grip me as the early work had, and for most of the last 40 years, as the work drifted into crowd-pleasing medium-tempo rockers with a cheery tale told by a richer, more self-congratulatory narrator offering a smoother sail in a bigger boat crewed by professionals, I became less and less interested in what I had come to view as a pervasive sloppiness in the contemporary singer-songwriter tradition. It seemed to affect them all as they worked longer in the business, except perhaps for Paul Simon. But Buffett, Diamond, Prine, Browne, just to name a few, seemed all to become more facile than artful And Buffett in particular seemed to have decided to pursue sing-along music for the car instead of headphone music for the chair, and it started him on the path to wealth. And good for him.

But what I celebrate overall, and I hope in this poem, is the work that tried to be more than a pop song, that was striving, even if slyly and beneath the listener’s first perceptions, to be art. That’s what entranced me at the beginning, and that’s what I want to remember most fondly.”

Editor’s note: Jimmy Buffett died on the night of September 1st, and the news came out over the Labor Day weekend.

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Marcus Bales, ‘Lighthouse’

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She needed constant, searching light
And some firm continent
From which to dive into the night
To find what darkness meant.

She fought the horses of the tides
And they her urgency.
She caught their lunar reins and rides
Triumphant out to sea.

And now she knows the powers of
The dark sea’s character,
And scorns the note her former love
Moans out, moans out to her.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Probably poets ought not tell this sort of story about their work. I found a stash of very old poems, carefully typed out on now-yellowed paper in a metal file box amid 5” Tandy floppy discs, and printed on a dot-matrix printer, a little faded, some months ago, and have started the often painful task of retyping them into my little electronic library of my work. Many of them are obviously student stuff, but this one seemed a little less studious than the rest. It brought back its context in my mind pretty clearly.
This is a very early poem, maybe sophomore year. I’d read someone’s comment that Yeats wrote about his friends as if they were characters in a Greek myth, and it had struck me as a sudden truth — to me, anyway. Nothing would do, of course, except to try the thing on my friends. Then a woman I knew gave me a copy of Adrienne Rich’s ‘Transformations’, which tells the stories of ancient myths about women, mostly, as if they had much more contemporary attitudes, and that seemed like a much better model than the Yeats tone and manner — and besides, Yeats had already done that tone and manner. So though the idea originated in Yeats, it is really Rich’s idea that I tried to follow, trying for the tone of metaphor in a contemporary voice. And Larkin was in there somewhere too, as I recall, having discovered him when asked to write a paper contrasting and comparing one of his poems to one of Wilbur’s. The Larkin was the one starting:
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And that led me to many others, notably ‘The Trees’, with its amazingly unlarkinish  repetition at the end.
Steal from the best has long been my motto.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “my father was the keeper of the eddystone light” by sammydavisdog is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Helpless’

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Life is one long horrible disease.
As victim or as witness it’s the same:
There are no opportunities to seize,
And helplessness leaves no one left to blame.
The path ahead seems only downward, slick
As running water on a plastic slide,
And pausing seems to be a magic trick
That never works however hard you’ve tried.
Eventually of course that blame gets laid,
No matter what you want. A gap, a fault,
A wall, some outside force that can’t be stayed,
And you become at one with the gestalt.
Some love, some fear, some cry, some laugh to death.
You cannot talk to addicts. Save your breath.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “This sonnet began as a set-up for a re-write of one of the terrible-pun-spoonerism poems from February 2023, and it sort of got away from me. It happens sometimes — you start out with one idea of what a poem is about and then the poem just won’t cooperate. At every line i was trying to tell the story of the alcoholic swami with cirrhosis who had been unfortunate enough to have married a woman who was impatient of inheriting, and who finally killed him when she weighed down upon the swami’s liver. As you can see, the poem was determined to have none of that, and went its own way, cleverly taking all the addiction and death for itself and leaving me with nothing I could use for my purposes. So to punish it I let it sit for a few months, hoping it would come to its senses and realize that the only way to see the light of day was to accept the purposes I had had in mind for it, but even there it was too smart for me, and kept quietly to itself until a day came when I hadn’t finished anything else. With a sigh and a shake of my head I posted it. So here it is.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

“Helpless” by Scarlizz is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Air Guitar’

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Bit by bit they deconstruct the thing:
no frets, no pegs, no bridge, removing its
harmonic parts until at last each string
is slack, and lacking resonating bits.
They put the rest, the body, neck, and head,
aside as too much like a prop for those
whose earnestness is all they need instead
of craft and art to fake that they can sing.
So there they are, on either stage or page:
The foremost poets of the modern age,
Who, writing their relineated prose,
Will swagger as they grimace, strut, and pose
Pretending they are better than they are
While playing nothing but an air guitar.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Back in the day I spent more time than I should have arguing that freeverse was prose, and that freeversers are prose writers, not poets at all. Of course, when you strike at the core of a belief-system those who believe it feel you are attacking them personally, and respond with insults. They cannot address the reasoning of the arguments, so they resort to ad hominem. I was searching for a metaphor to substitute for argument, something that would reveal the fundamental paucity of the entire freeverser credo that prose is poetry if only they say it is. What I was looking for was something to demonstrate the posers as mere posers. What, besides writing prose and then arbitrarily or whimsically relineating it to resemble the ragged-right look of poetry on the page and calling it poetry, was an even more ridiculous example of that pose? Here it is.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Airnadette: Air Bass Guitar” by DocChewbacca is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0..

Using form: Ballade: Marcus Bales, ‘Scary Home-Life’ (for GTZ)

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Get up, get out, and get away–I went
as early as I could to leave one vile
exposure for another. School. It meant
escape from home at least a little while,
not long enough, and trading family guile
for reading sullen peers and teacher spin,
except for you, beside me on the aisle–
I was the girl with the scary home-life and bad skin.

I was first to homeroom every day.
And how did Mr Romo ever know
that half a sausage sandwich was the way
a skinny girl survived. He’d always go
“Good morning,” handing me a half as though
that half were mine and we were somehow kin;
I’d nod my thanks and sit in the back row–
I was the girl with the scary home-life, and bad skin.

And you, who sat beside me, always kind
to me, and always kind of sassy tough
to other kids who other years combined
to make me almost miserable enough
to stay at home, from you I learned to bluff
my inner fear, to fake a cocky grin,
and start to walk as if it wasn’t rough
to be the girl with the scary home-life, and bad skin.

L’envoi
Yeah, it was you and Mr Romo, in the end,
who gave me things that I could not begin
to pay you back for, so even I’d befriend
the girl with the scary home-life, and bad skin.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “I have a modest file of poems that have got me unfriended, blocked, or banned by people or publications, for one reason or another. Sometimes, as in this case, the reason is unknown to me. 

“Back in the old days when I was a working salesman at the sort of retail store where it takes an hour or two to walk around the store with your salesperson and discuss wants and needs and preferences, it is often the case that the customer gets comfortable enough to tell things about themselves or their lives that they might hesitate to repeat without canny encouragement. Here, a vivacious and attractive young couple were moving in together and needed furniture and a bed. They were excited, and money was not an issue. It turned out the young woman had been an officer in the Marines or the Army — I forget which at this distance — in one of the rougher, tougher units, and I admired her for having the stuff to lead in that mise en scene. She recounted that she had felt driven to it by a harrowing early family life, complete with the sort of acne that is every teen’s nightmare. A scary home-life and bad skin was her description of it. After the sale was completed I wrote most of this poem in the break room in the back, after climbing on the table to turn off the Muzak speaker so I could think. 

“I discovered she had friended me on Facebook and had written some nice things about me at the store, which was very nice of her. Of course even back then I was posting my poems on Facebook, and posted this one, without her name, but with her initials. All the details are entirely fictional. I made them all up, except for that one line. She blocked me right away.”

Editor’s note: a ballade is a very suitable form for this poem, with iambics for thoughtful mood, claustrophobically restricted rhyme scheme, steady refrain, and final summation addressed to a superior person. From the Wikipedia entry ‘Ballade (forme fixe)‘: “The ballade as a verse form typically consists of three eight-line stanzas, each with a consistent metre and a particular rhyme scheme. The last line in the stanza is a refrain. The stanzas are often followed by a four-line concluding stanza (an envoi) usually addressed to a prince. The rhyme scheme is therefore usually ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC, where the capital C is a refrain.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “skinny girl” by Villegación is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Me and the Moon’

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Her presence was the organizing spice
that made the dish; the multivalent pun;
the compliment whose humor takes you twice
as far aback in unexpected fun,
her laughter tinkling like a scoop of ice
cubes thrown on glass bottles in the sun
that heats a summer vacation afternoon.
This morning though it’s only me and the moon.

Me and the distant moon, who’s not as far
away as she and I have now become.
She laughs that laugh while I sit in this bar
and wonder how I could have been so dumb
to leave where all the things I value are
and vanish in this alcoholic slum,
regretting what I’ve kept and what I’ve strewn
this morning when it’s only me and the moon.

And now the moon is pretty far advanced
along its ambit’s arc above this place
where one is propositioned, not romanced,
and conversation lacks both wit and grace.
I shuffle now where once I might have danced
and face the fact that this is what I face,
however jaded or inopportune,
this morning while it’s only me and the moon.

L’envoi
Barman! Bring another tinkling glass
or two, and we will claim that we’re immune
to all this pitiful alas alas
this morning, you, and me, and the goddamned moon.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: ” ‘Me and the Moon’ was prompted by Cleveland singer-songwriter Alex Bevan’s post on Facebook back in the oughties, I think. He posted early in the morning that he was looking out the window at the dark and reflecting on his life, thinking that it was just ‘me and the moon’. He’s happily married, and so am I, but the poignance of the phrase somehow seemed significant, and I instantly absconded with his idea. As I recall, the poem was pretty quickly written because however happy we may now be, we all have regrets or unhappinesses to remember. I’ve never been much into the bar life but at the time my wife and I had discovered a wine bar we liked to hang out at where we knew the bartender, and I was eased into just going to the bar to chill and observe and listen. Of course Western culture is soaked in alcohol, but I had not been. It was interesting to see how the whole thing worked — and didn’t work.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

“LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 100” by Mikes Camera is licensed under CC BY 2.0.