No, don't worry, I'm not dying
and about to launch into some
maudlin farewell in verse.

I've just decided this is it.
To make it an assisted suicide
I've asked my nephew Art

(now there's a cruel touch)
to throw me a retirement party
at his place in Riverdale

on Tuesday evening to make
sure I'm too embarrassed
to ever change my mind.

There is one bit of maudlin business,
though, that this poem
has to finish up,

but not in the usual way
where you are expected to cry.
I promise not to try that.

Rather, it has to do with a day
some years ago
when I did something foolish.

Whether I was drunk or not,
I called up a girl, by then a woman,
I had once loved

and I told her I was something
of a poet now, and asked if I could
use her real name in a poem.

She, so sensibly, said no.
She was very glad that I
was something of a poet,

but she had more important things
to deal with in her life
than whatever I wanted to write.

Feel free, she said, to trash or
rhapsodize to your heart's content
but please leave my real name out of it.

I had called up to impress her
and here she was impressing me so much
that before I hang up my hat

I want to say to her, Anonymous,
I did write that poem,
and I confess it wasn't well received.

It was about why I loved you then
when it should have been this,
about why I love you now.


new jars on spec series www.poetrycircle.com/index.php/topic,16199

Another of your voices, Tom. Veritably, you are Legion. I really like them.

And this is very good - regretful, wryly self-deprecating and quite moving. The nephew Art is a great little touch.

Cheers

David

I enjoyed the poem
What comes out strong is your vulnerability
I thought it was going to be disastrous.
I felt genuinely worried
that came out stronger than anything else.
I thought you were going to be humiliated.
I am glad you were not.

Certainly don't like reading any 'last poem' from you, but I know that's not what you really mean.  After all you just recently said you would be writing til you're eighty which possibly gives me someone to follow until I'm in my 70's.  Plenty of time.  But then even that may seem too short then.

David, thank you very much. A joy to hear your reaction.
Yours too, Mel. Thank you. Sounds like the N lives.
Cheryl, thank you. No, you'll not be rid of me that easy! Tom

..moving from Workshop to Submit board..

I absolutely love where this poem goes.  It does take a while for me to get there.  Now why would I write that comment unless I found the while it takes bothersome on some level . . . perhaps I'm just old and cranky and wishing I could come up with something that took any reader along to such an end as this poem does.  Anon.

Thank you, Lynn. It certainly is a feature of this poem, the curling pace. Judging from your remarks, though, I'm going to look at that aspect with a skeptical eye and see if it could better be a few lines shorter or not...Tom