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Hymn to the West Side
by Kent Taylor


if the words for these twisting
                               things
                     were real

        the writing wouldn't

         the sun blazes late
                 in february
           somewhere the birds wait

   the park down the streeet
               swings nobody
            mud over lakewood high booted
           ankles   straight hair
              everyone looks like folk singers
            used to look

       down the line
                     where my wife grew up
                leather jackets to the waist
                        stetsons for stomping
              even a store front gospel church
             where a freeway has vacated a legend
                             lorain at clark
            a corner earlier rounded
                              secretly
                   waiting for a forbidden girl
                  who now shares my arms
              and also rounded to basement printing
                   and frenzied excitements
            as levy and i found each other
                     and the same books
                         that changed our lives
                    if hollo printing knew what libraries
                    now own their transformed paper
               early that spring   1963
                          cleveland lit both ends
                     a submerged fusion that surfaced
                      three years later only to find
                              open cannons

        drunken schaff road railroad trestle voyages

        gilbert chan's early morning oolong
               with a burning hand on my thigh
                 and 
                    blazing eyes across the table

our lives have simplified

                               to boredom
            pierced randomly by the flash
              we once lived

              a lucky life
                          finally
              to have known
                     instead of never

 

 

 

 


Copyright © 1965 and 2001 by Kent Taylor

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Light and Dust Mobile Anthology of Poetry