I wanted you in the worst way
but that’s not how I got you. No,
you just waltzed, trippingly, into my life.
I measured you and the band played on.
All our guests shouted, “Ya-ala, Yaw Yaw!!”
as George Washington Ferris awaited the appearance of Gustave Eiffel.
“Well,” my mother asserted, “It’s all for the best”
but I remonstrated: “Not according to Lao Tse!”
The sun was making a botch of the garden.
“We’ll need a mess of rags,” said Palace Ned.
You were feeling trés trés bouffant, amortized.
Yo, Fred! Yo, Ethel! Hey, Lucy and Desi!
Poems never end the way you want them
to. Why is that? What makes so many so meh?
Bill Yarrow, Professor of English at Joliet Junior College and an editor at Blue Fifth Review, is the author of “The Vig of Love,” “Blasphemer,” “Pointed Sentences,” and five chapbooks, most recently “We All Saw It Coming.” He has been nominated eight times for a Pushcart Prize. “Against Prompts,” his fourth full-length collection, is forthcoming from Lit Fest Press in October 2018.
–Art by Steven Gray
