Thursday, June 3, 2021

Back Porch Evening by Gary Adams

Only the lonely stars light dead space
The ones so dim that late at night
On the back porch smoking and drinking hard
They challenge you to enter your mind and see them
To feel their loneliness hung up in multi-dimensional
Darkness, where movement and speed can’t be measured
Where emotions and feelings and matter and energy are one
Love and hate, the color spectrum fanning out
From black to white, higher powers fanning out 
From the many man has made up since the dawn of time 
Through his Odysseys around the globe
A long slow drink and swallow, a deep inhale 
The soothing smoke caressing my lungs
Swaying gently inside me to a waltz of intoxication
Exhaling fast like the black-powder smoke belching from a cannon
Mushrooming with the bang, spewing then slowly floating
Spiraling out to the dim lonely stars of eternity
I stare at, squinting to focus, and fantasize of strange worlds
And situations where I control everything and all remains in place
Just the way I’ve walked it, dreamed it, reacted to it, or flat out ignored it 
Drunk and hoping surely it would go away, but nothing happened
Alone, on your own, looking up and at the lonely stars
On the back porch smoking and drinking hard on a summer night




Gary Adams received a BS in Engineering from the US Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point New York, 1971.  After sailing on an oceangoing dredge in the Gulf of Mexico and working on tugboats in New York Harbor and vicinity, he received a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Oklahoma in 1975.  He has been published once in Alkahest: American College Poetry, Wesleyan University Press, Number 3, Fall 1969.  He regularly posts poems in various poetry forums on Facebook.  He has gotten drunk in bars in the US including Hawaii, Midway and Eniwetok Islands, Japan, Okinawa, Hong Kong, Philippines, South Vietnam, Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, Italy, Sicily, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Germany, Barbados, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.  He is retired living in Illinois near St Louis.


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