Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
David Adamson Feb 2019
The place smells the same. Garlic, undergraduate angst, oven flame.  The menu hasn’t changed. The Antony and Cleopatra.  Italian sausage and snake meat. The Macbeth. Cooked in a cauldron.  Blood sauce won’t wash off. The Julius Caesar.  Served bottom side up.  You have to knife it from the back. The Timon of Athens. Only bitter, separate ingredients, overcooked to black. The Frankenstein.  Assembled from ingredients at hand.  Served smoking from a jolt of high voltage. The Dramatic Irony. It’s a surprise.  Everyone at your table knows what you’re getting while you cover your eyes.

You said tragedy means playing out a ****** hand. The game has to end badly. Bigger Thomas. Joe Christmas.  Hamlet.  Everybody dies.  No choices. The end. I said, no, it means you have a fatal flaw.  Macbeth and Ted Kennedy—ruthless ambition.  Gatsby—pride. Lear—vanity. Richard Nixon—douchebaggery, deep-fried. Bad choices.  

“Can’t be both,” you said.  “One is character, the other one’s fate.” “What if character is fate?” I asked smugly. “Then we’re *******, Heraclitus. It’s late.”

I smoked a pipe.  You wore a beret and severely bobbed hair. I wrote sarcastic love letters to the universe. You wrote hate lyrics to Ted Hughes, love notes to Jane Eyre. We kept relations on an intellectual plane. You had a set of big firm ideas, dark-eyed principles, and a dimpled scorn of life’s surly crap. My eloquence was tall, square-jawed, curly, tan.  Together we solved the world’s big problems as only undergraduates can.

“Can pizza be tragic; or is it merely postponed farce?” I wondered. “Here it is clearly both, though not at the same time,” you said. “Does tragedy plus time equal comedy?” “Sounds right.” “No, tragedy plus time is any order in this place on a Saturday night.” After what seems like decades our orders finally arrive.  

“What did you get?” I asked.  “Looks like the Double Tragic,” you replied. “Flawed choices and fate. I leave you. You were unfaithful to every love sonnet you ever wrote.  Yet you are the first man who makes me feel loved, the only one who ever will.  I strain for that feeling again and again but it becomes a boulder that keeps rolling back down the hill. And fate—my beautiful ******* that got so much attention from men will **** me.  The only thing they will ever nurse is a cancerous seed. You?”

“The Too-Many-Choices, done to perfection. Choosing everything means choosing nothing. Loving too many women, I love none.  I follow a simple path home but try to stay lost. Living in the space between lost and found has a cost.  My life becomes a solitary pilgrimage to no place.”

“Let’s not reduce our lives to a Harry Chapin song,” we agreed. So we toasted the beauty of what never was. I went back to my hotel to write, found my way to a few easy truths, and called it a night.
Redshift Apr 2013
tried to write three poems before this one
trying to put down how i feel about you
right now
in this second
i can't even get it out.
to attempt to summarize:
i pretty much just hate you.
also you lie a lot.
the night consisted of me hinting at the presence of a guy
a guy i really like, a guy whose name
like a reverie, i could not bring myself to utter

i talked about everything because i do not care
i do not care about you, your enamoured face, your
saccharine words, instead i batted them away
as if they were unwanted flies harassing a dim light
of which they are enraptured by, devotedly yet
foolishly

by the end of the night i had grown tired of entertaining
the ghost of the guy whose name i could not utter
of glimmering gutlessly at my blatant apathy
of being a subject of novelty

you were the kid, strung on by a piece of nothing
and i was the power-bearer, merciless in
faithless speeches, indulgent in frivolousness
so i halted the meet, streamed mindlessly towards
a place where i renounced my false interest
my douchebaggery, then proceeded to wipe off
the kiss you'd left on my unwitting, unwelcoming lips

i do not like you, do not want traces of you to
envelope, overwhelm the traces of him on me
but i don't think they ever will
Bohemian Mar 2019
Somewhere in a casket,
Random in my ransacked room,never opened.

I have your silhouettes stored,
Those which I presume a man would never behold.

I imagine your shoulders broad,
Splendid as a bridge across my glee,over which my eyes could be driven.

While I could be soaked in your chest,
For you be so taller.

Your skin being tight and thick,
Such as it already feels to be bugging in.

Your kurta being loose weighed down,
Revealing the sweated collar bones,and much of the rest.

Your complexion could melt upon me,
Wallowing under the sheets.

Your caustics could potentially outshine mine,
Up to the brink, your douchebaggery could shine.

You may sing anything, Ghazals or even hums,
Your baritone could lull me to sleep,with the heft and flatness of it,with some added tunes.

Our towns could be kilometers apart,or the residents even for light years,
Might be the same for our creeds.

Your breath could be a bower,
To the desert of mine.

Your eyes being shrunk crescent moon,
With the lashes too dense,but sight like an arrow piercing.

Your poetry could define,
And for being poet from you I wouldn't envy.

Your resilience could be better than mine,
And your adamant nature,suffice to repeat an act a million times,to achieve the desired.

Unlike me an ergophile,
You could draw a better parallel line.

You were allowed to smoke,
For it, I have an affinity untold.

Your profession be any,
Your passion be vehement,I promise then, to find you in graphite and mullar and heard in Mozart's.

Your hands masculine,with the veins bulged,
And circlets and totem wrapped,red and orange around.

Skies be your preferred roof
Under the rainy sky,the sharing of petrichor shall feel sanctified.

Your gales be a crescendo
Of delight.

Your age could be more to mine,
But things could be divine.
| Preferred but do not care |
Welcome to the graveyard
for those not forgotten,
and for friends who turned foes
to have some place to rot in.

Her name was Sophia.
She was my friend,
‘til her boyfriend’s douchebaggery
caused our friendship to end.

Here lies Michaela
who couldn’t care less
about facing the problems
we all would address.

Cody was trouble,
no surprise to all.
But he’d make you feel special,
then leave when you fall.

Beloved Jennifer
who moved far away.
“We’ll still keep in touch”—
the last I heard her say.

Kyle was funny
then he turned to a ghost
who now speaks to no one.
I miss him the most.

— The End —