fall bells

Submitted by booklover on Sun, 08/19/2012 - 10:45am

so didn’t you feel a little lonely on the
fall afternoons when school was over,
when you sat by the edge of the parking lot
on the wet wood bench - the tears cut
cold and horizontal along the veins.
you could hear echoes of bells bells bells -
you know, the tintinnabulation that makes a
clamor and a clangor that so softly sadly swells.

there were dead leaves of poems, ripped
and howling, and leftover scraps of
late night football games - and cars drifted by
on the wind and they were dusty ghosts
in little boxes.

didn’t you feel like the sky was too big -
a bit burst, and your poems were wisps of
clouds that got away. there were burst balloons
and whipped warped trees. and the bells went on
and the bells went on, and it was a haunted dusty
song that Poe would have written down.

so didn’t you feel lonely, because the day was over then
and the sky was getting grayer, and the bells were
ebbs of broken leaves and broken days that
ended cold and faded. didn’t you feel lonely
because the anticlimax caught you in its ghost grip
and your love poems were in pieces and then the
drizzle drizzle rain began keeping time time time
in a sort of endless rhyme
and so they melted into paper pulp across the parking lot
and the bells said, no, no one
and the year was hardly halfway done.