A SONNET

Sentimentality, a bad date

Some things won’t wash—for instance more than one
month after meeting him you’re again fenced

by chairs in the same waiting, watch women
walk their aged bodies forward, unbalanced

by the constant scroll of life’s small symptoms.
And you know the signs better and better—

they flash across the screen as new customs
from a televised tomb in the corner

of these cold rooms we get used to, reading
the roll of what we could catch from the rack

of out-dated magazines, from touching
each other with our bare hands, from each back

to back encounter, from a stranger’s dance,
two-step with lust, that soft spot for romance.

~ by suemintude on November 11, 2008.