Duffy Ain't Here by Jack D. Harvey

Duffy, a couple for the road;
for us sinners
peace of mind seldom settles
at one sitting; who drinks
must mourn his sober self
and Seagram's does more
than the devil can
to justify the thorny paths of sin,
the ungodly things we do,
dirty, sneaky, selfish
sunup to sundown,
making our own misery
every livelong day.

Of all the causes
which conspire to dumb the senses,
assuage the remorse of conscience,
the noise of human concourse
leads the pack, driving us mad
with its demands, over the edge;
buzzing, humming, thrumming
of the human beehive or better yet,
red-hot bronze ready to go,
a thirsty Moloch always wanting.

Man a political animal,
so said Aristotle in cozy clamorous Athens
and welcome to it;
more noise for our own good, he said,
but we know better and so did he.

So I sit and drink and think
and love of solitude and gloom
combine, as I sink in the booze,
my hat on my head,
looking in the mirror
at a man with a hat on his head.

Dark with dirt,
the windows exclude
the remaining light of day;
in the glow of the
green neon sign
behind the barkeep,
in the gloom
of dusty bulbs overhead,
we blink and burp like
pallid monkeys in a zoo.

Passing time
I formulate a compliment
for the lady on my left,
painted to no avail;
I see her full in the dingy light
and bow to her
whose course is run.

A look at my watch,
it's time to go,
hasty I leave,
wave goodbye Charlie
and out the door.

They say small habits,
regular ways,
afford great comfort
if given time, but
too much time makes
deadly dull work of it,
laborious drudgery and
the canary in the coal mine
is when too much time
dwindles to no time at all,
frozen in place
like the great wave of Hokusai,
one eternal day,
like Hawking's space,
or the Schwarzschild radius,
one enormous rigid abyss
in which you sit forever,
a witness who sees nothing
and cares not a whit
for the never-ending day,
the never-ending landscape of now.

The work "Duffy Ain't Here" was previously published in issue 30 of The Write Launch.







Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines.

The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. He once owned a cat that could whistle Sweet Adeline, use a knife and fork and killed a postman.