Free verse poetry
Some Lines for Seducing the Muse
by P Hostovsky
Come away with me, he wouldn’t know
a good line if he wrote one.
I love your voice more than anything, more
than the truth, and that’s the truth.
I have no money but I have a great nose.
I have tickets to Sappho and the Bits.
Let’s get a bite to eat with our hands.
Let’s walk along the boardwalk and feel the grit
of great ideas underfoot.
Let’s listen to the gulls complaining
they have no hands
though they have the history of a great idea
for opening the clams–
dropping them from two stories up.
I’m a stenographer in the precincts
of sleep after lovemaking and I have
free passes. And I have
an enormous bladder. And I’ll have
whatever you’re having. Let’s get some air,
let’s get some earth, fire, seawater.
Look at that thumbnail moon out over the water.
Give me your mouth and I’ll give you
my thumbs. I’ll give you the moon if you’ll just
spit in my hand.
Paul Hostovsky’s poems appear and disappear simultaneously (voila!) and have recently been sighted in places where they pay you for your trouble with your own trouble doubled, and other people’s troubles thrown in, which never seem to him as great as his troubles, though he tries not to compare. He has no life and spends it with his poems, trying to perfect their perfect disappearances.
