October 2021
Bio Note: I have three half-finished novels, and I'd really like to motivate myself to get back to one of them. To exercise my surgically mangled mouth, I'm supposed to read aloud for a half hour every day, so I'm reading one of my old novels to my wife while driving (she drives) to remind myself that I really can do this.
Nouvelle Vague
C’est pour Jeanne Moreau
Anouk Aimee
Jean Seberg
Isabelle Adjani
et Brigitte Bardot
He is riding
the Metro
reading Bonjour Tristesse
remembering sex
young women with
hooded eyes
nipples chapped by the sun
at summer villas
enigmatic
hitchhikers
on the run from Marseilles
shadowy former
benefactors
mostly
he remembers Paris
1968
tearing off blood and
sweat stained shirts
in a fierce brief respite
from the barricades
The Way Back
It is making severe demands on the unity of the personality
to try and make me identify myself with the author of the paper
on the spinal ganglia of the Petromyzon. Nevertheless I must be he....
—Sigmund Freud
A letter arrives, pleading for a new poem.
The sheep are restless; the market
shifts uncertainly; hedge funds
no longer hold back tide or drought.
Do they know how hard it is
to do it again? My plan had been
give them the same poem, word for word,
but what had happened
to the part about about pumas?
It had worked the first time,
got the younger sister,
the dreamy one, to that hotel in Brooklyn,
but she’s been found guilty of accepting kickbacks.
These days pumas are hunted like raccoons,
first treed, and then shot.
They drop like apples.
©2021 Tad Richards
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL