Me and Mr. Jones by Christine Irving

Remember the Silver Dollar─ skanky little 
basement dive on a throw away street 
still coughing up stale tobacco ten years 
after the ban. low customers scuttling downstairs 
like cockroaches and a bouncer so mean 
even brave men jaywalked to avoid him?

It’s different now, all uptown and sleek
sand blasted, dry-walled, scoured, polished.
All memories of cheap whiskey and despair 
replaced by spare lines and hardwood floors,
warm candlelight, cool jazz, timeless barman. 
It could be 1920, thirty, forty, or two thousand 
something, newly opened, not yet discovered, 
perfect weeknight setting for a tryst.

We perch at our tiny table 
sharing cabernet and gimlets, I gaze, 
you talk and talk─ it all makes sense,
reflects my own musing, mingles 
with the perfect pitch of a tenor sax.

But I have walked this path before
in other shoes and I see ghosts
pacing the walls, huddled waiting

in the corner of the red leather couch
Though flame flickers sweetly between us
turning your white shirt cream, dappling
your beautiful neck with gold, 
though your blue eyes turn navy
dilating with desire, eventually
we must go home again.

And then there’s this: fulfillment 
nullifies desire, collapses possibilities
concretizes fantasy, defines the dream.

I prefer the swoops and darts of Eros;
synchronistic meetings, unplanned rendezvous,
Karma, tossing her gauntlet over a rainbow
time and time again.

Not knowing your preferred mode of address, I'm sticking with formality till next time.  I found your  site through my friend and fellow poet Michael Minassian. Two of these poems were published long ago in small obscure chapbooks when I was living in Nevada City - you probably know some of the Six Ft. Swells poets. (Tod Cirillo and his friend Matt Armott claimed to have invented the genre "after hours poetry".)  Except for Joe's Bar (new) and Me and Mr. Jones (included in my book The Naked Man), these poems have been languishing without a venue for some time.  North Texas, where I live now, is still a bit too closeted to celebrate this kind of fun aloud. I have other and newer poems, of course, but the rowdier ones and those inclined to noir hold a special place in my rebellious heart.  I hope your bar doors swing open for them - after all, time tends to stand still in low places...