Poetry Journal Dec. 17, 2023

  


She's out there somewhere, stalking me like she did when we first met, her indominable spirit carrying on despite all that she had gone through, all the dreamed forced to give up, all those lost souls she's needed to abandon in order to keep herself a live, a stranger who is not a stranger.

I know as much about her as I know about myself, except for how she ticks -- after all this time and all I've read, all she has revealed, I still can't get inside her skin, in that shell she lives in this time after having left so many other shells behind, the husks of those who professed to love her, maybe who still think they love her when the shell they so admire, so carve for is as empty as a gravestone -- only bones beneath.


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plagiarism strikes again Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Image
    I made a mistake. I didn’t copy the link or download the content when I saw the reporter from the local daily had plagiarized by column. I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it, but it irked me that a journalist that has published throughout the nation should have stolen something a small town reporter like me wrote. Someone said I should be complemented. I was annoyed. Still, I hadn’t intended to complain about it, yet the more I thought the more irritated I got. I reached out to the person who posted my column and asked him to make contact with the reporter or her editor to make sure it never happened again. But finally, I decided to reach out to her editors myself, one editor sending me to the main editor, who took a whole day to get back to me and when he did, he demanded proof, as if he didn’t have the copy himself to look at (he has to edit her work and it would not get onto the internet without him). At which point, perhaps two days after the original post, I c
Read more

All we can do Dec. 23, 2023

Image
    Because Christmas falls on a Monday this year, we had to choose which day we would actually make our holiday trip to Asbury Park. Most years we go on Christmas Day. But since there is no day off from work on Tuesday, traveling on that day will be horrendous as people flock to get home along the Garden State Parkway. We thought maybe we might go down and back on Sunday (not bothering to stay over at the Crystal Inn as we sometimes do), but that really didn’t work for me either – maybe because it is Hank’s birthday and a day when I used to travel far and wide to meet with family in Toms River and then with the Garley Gang at various locations in Northern New Jersey. We decided to go there today, get our coffee, walk around – up the boardwalk, then into Ocean Grove, then back along Cookman (looking over the places where Bruce Springsteen played) before making our way back home – doing our usual Saturday food shopping on our way back (we need to remember to pick up the ingred
Read more

My favorite view Dec. 10, 2023

Image
  My favorite view   Dec. 10. 2023   We found a new place to go to for our walk to the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River and Manhattan, a small porch below the monument park in the town where Burr shot Hamilton, although a section further north from where the shooting took place. During the summer of COVID, we took daily walks from our house to the overlook, settling into a park still further north along the promenade. These days, these walks come once a week, after our food shopping on Saturdays, a slow stroll from out of the town where we reside and into the la la land of the superrich. This has always been my favorite view in the world, something I first saw at age 6 when Selma, my mother’s best friend, drove down the Boulevard towards the newly opened Lincoln Tunnel for a Christmas trip to New York City, the sparkling lights of the Manhattan skyline magnificent even then. Years later, as a teen, I tried to catch the New York City bound bus from my house on Crooks
Read more