Our Own Music by William Taylor Jr.

It's late
and the bartender's getting mean,
ready to make good on his threat
to unplug the juke
and not refund our quarters,

because I keep on playing
that one fucking song
again and again.

I guess from here on in
we'll have to be our own music.

If you sip your drink just so,
the feel of it becomes something
like sad old jazz drifting
from a Greenwich Village
dive in 1962,

long and meandering,
with ancient melody
buried somewhere
deep within the noise.

Let it fill the air
as I discover the previously undiscovered
symphony of your face beneath these Xmas lights.

The bartender frowns

as the lipstick on your cigarette
sings like a melancholy love song
on worn out vinyl,

so sad and pretty
down here beneath
whatever's left of the moon.

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, The American Journal of Poetry, and The Chiron Review. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a collection of short fiction. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. To Break the Heart of the Sun is his latest collection of poetry.