Like the Fella Once Said
"Like the Fella Once Said"
So many of my memories begin like this:
I'm walking down a street alone in Kirksville,
three ante meridian, singing.
The song tonight is "I've Got the World on a String,"
though I know only the first two lines,
and somehow transforms from a Sinatra
to an old Dean Martin number.
How lucky can one guy be?,
I sing to myself in the moonlight,
punch drunk with a certain elation that comes
only so often: that certain wellspring,
bubbling up from the very depths of being,
a feeling that people have died for
and, happily, many have found themselves living for.
I kissed her and she kissed me,
sings Dean through my lips, and I stop
to stare up at the cloudy 3 AM sky,
rolling the rice pudding taste of memory
across my tongue. And then I shout, wordless,
alive.
The echoes wash over the bricks,
and I stand in the middle of them,
wordless and stunned; to any eavesdropper
in the windows above, I'm sure it seems that
I've just been kicked in the head.
-11/19/2006
So many of my memories begin like this:
I'm walking down a street alone in Kirksville,
three ante meridian, singing.
The song tonight is "I've Got the World on a String,"
though I know only the first two lines,
and somehow transforms from a Sinatra
to an old Dean Martin number.
How lucky can one guy be?,
I sing to myself in the moonlight,
punch drunk with a certain elation that comes
only so often: that certain wellspring,
bubbling up from the very depths of being,
a feeling that people have died for
and, happily, many have found themselves living for.
I kissed her and she kissed me,
sings Dean through my lips, and I stop
to stare up at the cloudy 3 AM sky,
rolling the rice pudding taste of memory
across my tongue. And then I shout, wordless,
alive.
The echoes wash over the bricks,
and I stand in the middle of them,
wordless and stunned; to any eavesdropper
in the windows above, I'm sure it seems that
I've just been kicked in the head.
-11/19/2006