THE GUY PUMPING GAS
All the stories,
all the football pennants,
the multi-signed yearbooks,
the cheers, the adulation,
then silence.
The labors of Hercules
on the gridiron,
the cheering Saturday afternoon crowds,
were parlayed into a job pumping gas.
One wife, not all the cheerleaders.
And she left her adoration at the altar.
“Fill er up,” says the voice
from behind the wheel
of the kind of car he’ll never own.
Whatever happened to the coach’s
“You can do this.”
No writeups in the local paper.
No handshakes from strangers.
At the end of the week,
the boss hands him an envelope,
thin with cash.
No one pays him now
what he was worth then.
IMMIGRANT
You’re from Ireland
but you’ve never set foot
in the Emerald Isle
nor have you ever shown
much interest in traveling there.
Your ancestors left in a famine’s wake,
crossed the Atlantic in rickety ships,
a village-full in a smelly hold,
a long dark sleep
ending in a frightening but hopeful awakening.
All you know now
was foreign to them then,
from the maple trees
to the raucous cities,
the three-floor tenements
to the raccoons rattling their trashcans.
Yours is an immigrant story.
Denial is futile.
And you rub shoulders with an immigrant story.
And another. And another.
In fact, shoulders are an immigrant story.
And you have two.
BARBARA AND BARBARA
You made me marvel
at your transformation
from overweight, stay-at-home
to svelte and clubbing –
but what I loved about you
was how you still had time
for your old self -
that couch-veggie Barbara
was still central to your being,
and you’d have been
content in your sweats and slippers
had fun-loving, head-turning Barbara
not staged an intervention –
even now, you sip your drink
up at the bar, enjoying the male company
but unafraid to admit how much
you miss your Saturday night TV routine,
where life was lived for you
and the box of chocolates you nibbled
you bought yourself,
wasn’t given as a deposit on your affections –
guys want to be with you
but you remember when they didn’t –
you attract company
but there was a time,
when the crowd crowded you out –
the old Barbara doesn’t go anywhere –
the new Barbara looks in
on her from time to time,
finds they still have so much in common –
I can’t get over
how you changed so much
in a bid to stay the same.
CRUISING JOE
Joe drives by
a woman
who’s strolling down
the Main Street sidewalk,
shouts out something
so loud and garbled,
she cannot understand
a word.
On reflection,
maybe her figure is
“Hotenbabe##@$”
and her looks are
“woofruck##spoo”
but she’s not prepared
to take Joe’s word for it.
MARITAL ARGUMENT
Yes, it’s a boxing match.
Middleweight versus fly.
It’s just that no punches are thrown.
The uppercuts to the jaw
are expressions.
The swinging haymakers
are words.
And the noses aren’t broken.
They’re merely out of joint.
There are bruises,
but only behind the eyes.
And we don’t deck ourselves out
in wrist straps, mouth guards,
and gloves.
Whatever we happen to be wearing
will do.
There’s no ring.
Merely a kitchen.
A bedroom.
Sometimes even
the confined space
of a bathroom.
Nor are there crowds
screaming for blood.
Unless, of course,
you count the neighbours.
Thankfully,
the bout doesn’t go on
for round after round.
The bell rings
when we both wake up to
how stupid, how insensitive,
we’re being.
Mostly, the tussle ends in a clinch.
Warm and loving.
It takes more than a ref
to pull us apart.
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