I wrote this Sunday night after meeting Larry Jaffe, a fellow writer and friend of twenty years acquaintance. We had never met in person, just via the Internet. He and his wonderful wife Shelley came through Charlotte to visit and we went out talking half the night to Amelie’s, a local 24-hr French bakery in our Bohemian NoDa Arts district. We tried to save the world, but at the very least had some hot tea and scrumptious pastries and brilliant words. I wrote this immediately afterwards, reflecting our conversation.
Larry and Tom Meet
We met in the east of the West
At the edge of French decadence
In the heart of commercial memory
A tea party crumbled into pastry dialogue
Like drizzled honey boo boo despair
At the midnight well
Of guilt, of love
Full of pain and deep longing
A deep, black helplessness crawling with palmetto bugs
Lynching corporate slave
Drivers driving slower than a psycho
-Tropic drug-induced joy ride
Like a tourist in the fast lane
Of misunderstood fame
And glory holed up inside
The fetal position aborted
A nude-wenched wrecking ball
Of Lost youth plowing, infertile
Through Columbine via New Town
In an abyssmal roundabout
Forever the Queen
City for the day, village for the night
Of all it takesism
Until we reached heaven
And dug down, bleeding out
The years, the Tianamen tears
A salty sweet Monsanto dessert
In the seventh-iteration of a seventh generation
Experimental fusion-based
Phonesexed Facebooked
Eugenics programmed to please
The masses fingering like Charon
The deoxyribonucleic acid ring
Of marriage of ideas
Of life less hope, less angst
Less is more or less
Promoting the deformation
Of corporate character
Of humanity, of self
-Loathing, discovering
Civilization already lost
And yet, unlike Mr Kurtz,
The uninvited guest ain’t dead
In fact, mythically has returned
Resurrected and Nobel-nominated like a laughing polegasm
Standing tall, it’s face shot off
And superheroically put back on
Smiling, teaching, loving
Malala.
[c 2013 thomas fortenberry]