The Crowd -poem 1
It’s Wednesday night at Lucky’s
Sports Tavern, which means
$5 liquor pitchers. My eyes trail
through the endless, wall to wall
Crowd as the Lucky’s Lemonade
blankets my brain with a drowsy
Fog. My gaze is fastened to the
sea of heels, halter tops, tight skirts,
And the testosterone stares
attached to them.
Suddenly I’m winding my way
through the crowd, stumbling
Through the masses to my
destination: the jukebox.
I push through my inebriated haze
and select a song before returning
To my friends. The music begins
to fill the room and there is a pause when everyone hears,
“I threw a wish in the well; don’t
ask me I’ll never tell…”
And then the bar erupts.
Suddenly the frat boys and the
swim team girls, the broadcast kids and the
Weather geeks are one. Lucky’s
explodes with one phrase: “HEY, I JUST MET YOU,
AND THIS IS CRAZY, BUT HERE’S MY
NUMBER, SO CALL ME MAYBE!”
And now we’re not college students,
but one entity who can do nothing but
Sacrifice everything to make sure
every word of this song is as loud as possible.
And as every girl in the bar
jumps and sways to the music, I know
That there are days where every
girl here thinks “I’d trade my soul for a wish,
Pennies and dimes for a kiss”. And
sometimes on nights like tonight
When a summer breeze teases us
outside, we meet that guy
With the Cleveland baseball cap
but the jukebox and yearn to say,
“Hey, I just met you, and this is
crazy, but here’s my number, so
Call me maybe”.
Pretty solid, but there's a little too much telling, I think. Can you enrich the situation with more images? (I love the detail about the baseball cap, for instance).
ReplyDeleteAlso, is this a feeling you might want to question? Good times, good times, blah blah. That's excellent. But what about Larkin's "Reasons for Attendance"? Is there something fleeting, even phony about this connection everyone feels at Lucky's? Or, if it's an authentic feeling, is there some sadness that it can't last?
That sort of complexity would bring this poem away from "story about college" territory into "story about living deeply" territory.
Dave
P.S. And, yeah, you have the opportunity to let your reader feel the way I feel when I fall in love with characters in a book or movie. Let us feel the crush as much as you can without telling us to feel it.
I really enjoyed this poem, I have been in Lucky's when this has happened, so I knew the exact feeling. I thought it was also fun and kind of fast pace!
ReplyDelete