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A Nov 2010
I won't be that girl,
the one who follows "the one"
because he's "the one".
or so she naively thinks.

I won't follow you,
never.  and certainly not
to another state-
all the way to Oberlin.

I won't change my mind,
change my life plans and life goals
just to be with you-
for I can survive alone.

I won't even look
for colleges where you do.
I'll stay in the east
and I'll be content with that.

I won't try to go.
So why am I applying
I will let you go.
to Baldwin-Wallace?
Written 11-4-2010

Note: Oberlin and Baldwin-Wallace are two colleges in Ohio about 25 miles apart.
Lucius Furius Jul 2017
Death!
seems y've won;
body's resistance,
all worn down.
  
Flirted in Oberlin ('68):
frozen in headlights;
jump left --
or right?
  
West Virginia.
Kinda teased ya:
One-brake bike on
truck-filled highway ('71).
  
Asleep at wheel
('77, Tennessee),
drove off road --
pillar or cliff . . .
woulda been dead.
  
Suicidal,
love-hope lost.
Asking for
oblivious embrace --
you scorned me
('79, Illinois).
  
Full of cancer
(hospital, now).
Ready for cold kiss,
end-pain.
You're a knockout!
Let's dance.
Hear Lucius/Jerry read the poem:  humanist-art.org/old-site/audio/SoF_033_shaves.MP3 .
Wk kortas Jun 2017
The classically-trained and symphony-polished,
If someone deigned to listen to their disapprobations,
Would tell all and sundry that he was playing it all wrong;
Indeed, his technique so unsound, his ******* so maladroit
That those who had wrestled with that stringed contraption
Reportedly favored by the angels
For years, indeed decades, at Julliard and Oberlin
Insisted that he couldn’t really play at all
(His opinion of his critics remained unquoted,
Though it was said he tuned his instrument
In such a fashion to ensure that he alone
Could produce notes from it)
Yet every night, in the middle of another knockabout farce,
He would sit alone, under a single light, and pluck away
While the gathering in the seven-fifty tickets sat rapt,
Commutes from Chappaqua and mortgages in Great Neck
Forgotten for the *****, wholly transported out of themselves
By the shabby- hatted and unruly-mopped figure before them,
Even the cognoscenti and conservatory-bred
Bewitched in spite of themselves,
Though they regarded the strumming
Much differently than the great unwashed in the stalls
(The author of these anomalous tones, being a reticent sort,
Keeping his opinion of them to himself.)

— The End —