March 2016
Alan Walowitz
ajwal328@gmail.com
ajwal328@gmail.com
I'm a retired teacher and school administrator and I've written poetry, seriously and less than seriously, since I was a teenager. It's only recently that I've taken seriously the idea of sharing my poems beyond these four walls—where they're met with great acclaim by my wife and sometimes by my daughter—and my poems have appeared in journals, e-zines, and anthologies. My chapbook, Exactly Like Love, will be published in 2016 by Osedax Press.
Here
for Jeanette
To get me to go
where I don’t want to go,
my wife will say,
We’re here and we’re here, which means
I ought to get my ass out of the car
and not make her waste another trip.
Or here turns out to be a damn lie
as she points to the map here and here,
which are where she really wants to go.
In any case, I don’t want to hear
some rainy middle-of-the-night
Why can’t I ever get where I want?
which breaks my heart
and makes me mad enough to scream,
What about me? Instead,
I go back to sleep.
Of course getting here
the car gets stuck in a ditch,
or nuclear winter breaks out on the way,
or the radio reports the death
of still one more famous Jew
we didn’t even know.
But she knows me and knows I would feel
so much better about everything
here inside our own four walls.
Truth is, nothing much ever happens,
but if it did, she’d say,
It happened and it happened.
Or, You have so much to learn
and you’re running out of time.
Or, this good old heartbreak:
You call this living?
-first appeared in Leannan, Issue 2
for Jeanette
To get me to go
where I don’t want to go,
my wife will say,
We’re here and we’re here, which means
I ought to get my ass out of the car
and not make her waste another trip.
Or here turns out to be a damn lie
as she points to the map here and here,
which are where she really wants to go.
In any case, I don’t want to hear
some rainy middle-of-the-night
Why can’t I ever get where I want?
which breaks my heart
and makes me mad enough to scream,
What about me? Instead,
I go back to sleep.
Of course getting here
the car gets stuck in a ditch,
or nuclear winter breaks out on the way,
or the radio reports the death
of still one more famous Jew
we didn’t even know.
But she knows me and knows I would feel
so much better about everything
here inside our own four walls.
Truth is, nothing much ever happens,
but if it did, she’d say,
It happened and it happened.
Or, You have so much to learn
and you’re running out of time.
Or, this good old heartbreak:
You call this living?
-first appeared in Leannan, Issue 2
©2016 Alan Walowitz
