long distance melancholy of love

by salparadise

Posted to Action Poetry on 2001-04-21 07:15:00

i fell in love with a woman from canada
long ago & far away in a burnt orange autumn
filled with powerful liquor & the voltage of laughter
i wrote her jagged love poems on bar napkins
& sang fragments of busted songs i composed
on a beat old epiphone in basement moments
there were nights of bar room music & drunken kisses
there was frantic dancing & the mysterious pained
long explosive spectacle of conversation
lit up weekends careening around corners
drunk behind the wheel challenging bald fate
& bed room dramas in three acts with her
tight pants & sparkling top & black bra
piled on the floor as a cavalcade of sex unfolded
& when she had to trip it back home i watched
as the bus pulled away with that downtown smell
& that faraway sound & her waving sad & beaten
from the window my kiss still ringing her lips

long distance phone hum ohio to toronto
i lived through late night telephone madness
drunken insane talk peppered with hunger pangs
& the fragrant torture of no human presence
enduring the long distance melancholy of love
i gassed up the ride & hit the highway east on 80
crashing the shoreline of lake erie to the border
radio haunting me with vigilante songs
black coffee baking me awake, amphetemine fever
fingers drumming madly on the dinking wheel
into hard pennsylvania with its uglyman cops
now 90, waiting in speedtraps fer my eternal soul
onward to new york state, through downtown buffalo
over the peace bridge into the right arm of canada
like a needle deliberating with sour-faced border patrol
flowing like niagara falls, up the q.e.w. past st. catherines
then hamilton & mississauga & the fringes of t.o.
no road too far to reach her, no country too large
weekend after weekend of crawling connection fever
where there was nothing but us, bolted together

nothing this good was meant to last
it must’ve wilted beneath the pressure of d i s t a n c e
always the distance the damn damn distance
her trapped there, me trapped here & neither the twain shall meet
& when i had to say goodbye i could see the sorrow in her opal eyes
read the vacant anxiety on her thin-lipped smile
that final kiss long it hurt it burned it stripped the skin
from the gasoline murder of my bare bones heart
i turned my back & got into the rumbling warcar
she waved small, shivering in the winter canada cold
i got a letter a few weeks later with a poem inside
a cap from a bottle of blue & a matchpack from
this dive joint where we once imagined it might not end
i still have that letter i keep it in a brown box in the closet
& the beer cap still smells like the air all around her kiss


(sal is also madtolive@hotmail.com)