For Monica

[QDeathstar]

You are old now.

Almost thirty, sitting in a bar off Broad Street
finally talking of the tally of the dark years. pretty plain? The dark years? Is this a reference to Obama's term as president? If not, let us know!

Afraid of some ghost gathered ghosts? or a comma? Or the line break is in the wrong place
under the light of the blue hotel, a lot of the's here. Also, this lacks description. "under flicking light from the blue hotel". Also, why blue?
you keep looking back over your shoulder
and ask in a voice reproachful and low, a lot of ands, if you rearranged this so that the descriptors were in front of the action it would flow better
about a woman you heard I left,
but because I have not made sense of things,
I laugh in denial and phrase my response
to sound as if we departed friends.

There was a doll our mother bought
which hummed Mary Had A Little Lamb.
For years you could not sleep until you heard it,
which was all I could think of that day,
a decade later, when we sat in the woods
as teenagers and you asked what I knew of love. is she your sister?

In your hair a long dark lock
falls to the tattoos you have a hidden, a hidden?
as we rise and clamor into the night.

We leave again – we were always
leaving each other with not enough said -
to your car with a rattling axle,
which you park on a side street,
where up the stairs, past all understanding,
your eyes have grown dark and wide like our mother.

So, listen. I am thirty now.
I always felt strange. I learned to live with it.
I felt alone at times. Others, I felt scared.
I know that I loved a handful of women.
I know, also, that it did not good. did not good?

I really like the images and thought in the middle, which was the strongest. I am bitter about the fact though, that i wasted my time reading this poem to end up with the last stanza. Thats a long way to go to get to what essentially says nothing.