6.11.15

Leaving my soccer match on Tuesday I noticed this posted near Roosevelt High school. I know it's hard to read, but the title is "Two poems" by Lawrence Raab. If fact, the image seems to be directly correspondent to this page, so go and view it more easily. Not your normal advertisement for this area, and I was pleasantly surprised. 

The writing all around the edge says "Read this!" "why should I?" etc. The page I found is from Speechless the magazine, the self-proclaimed "oddest little magazine on the web".

Here's the first poem:



WHY IT OFTEN RAINS IN THE MOVIES


Because so much consequential thinking
happens in the rain. A steady mist
to recall departures, a bitter downpour
for betrayal. As if the first thing
a man wants to do when he learns his wife
is sleeping with his best friend, and has been
for years, the very first thing
is not to make a drink, and drink it,
and make another, but to walk outside
into bad weather. It’s true
that the way we look doesn’t always
reveal our feelings. Which is a problem
for the movies. And why somebody has to smash
a mirror, for example, to show he’s angry
and full of self-hate, whereas actual people
rarely do this. And rarely sit on benches
in the pouring rain to weep. Is he wondering
why he didn’t see it long ago? Is he wondering
if in fact he did, and lied to himself?
And perhaps she also saw the many ways
he’d allowed himself to be deceived. In this city
it will rain all night. So the three of them
return to their houses, and the wife
and her lover go upstairs to bed
while the husband takes a small black pistol
from a drawer, turns it over in his hands,
the puts it back. Thus demonstrating
his inability to respond to passion
with passion. But we don’t want him
to shoot his wife, or his friend, or himself.
And we’ve begun to suspect
that none of this is going to work out,
that we’ll leave the theater feeling
vaguely cheated, just as the movie,
turning away from the husband’s sorrow,
leaves him to be a man who must continue,
day after day, to walk outside into the rain,
outside and back again, since now there can be
nowhere in this world for him to rest.

So I shot this because it reminded me of our "poetry terrorism" experiments in college. Whoever posted this, great work, and keep sharing work (yours or others!) where people who may not usually see it! Would you put your work out there in public, or share another piece you loved, to get it seen?