WHEN LOVE FALLS
When love falls
from your fingers
like an old newspaper
wasting on the sidewalk,
kicked by passers-by,
splattered in the manholed gutters,
torn for street-dwellers’ tissue,
blown across the asphalt corners,
gathered for park-people’s soles
keeping off the grass
where chess players
gambit between the squares
dreaming of stalemates
on last year’s page 72,
I will write
my tabloid pain
upon the tables
waiting for the rain
to wash away
the ink of queens
. . . and drown.
Stanley H. Barkan |
