In Edinburgh words matter
Will it matter?
Won’t they read on watches phones
exercise machines?
Now I’ve tapped the tune on typewriter keys
will words utter
from muses that kept me from the gutter.
In Edinburgh words matter.
I once couldn’t sleep in the chair I was lent
stumbled around found fish and chips
somehow survived in a poetic miasma.
That was when I first met her
who left me retching in the street
in drunken stupor.
In Edinburgh words matter.
Shall I give safe harbor to thoughts of her
extolling virtues beauty intellect
how a poet with no income
not a welfare bum
alone with a borrowed car
I’d given mine away
it might have been.
And she carried a bag big enough to suffice
if she had driven away with me that night
but the friend’s old car wouldn’t start
needed a new battery
had to be pushed to the corner
where an auto-shop would open in the morning
and I'd thrown up in frustration and despair
and said goodnight
and goodbye.
In Edinburgh 1972 where words mattered.
copyright (C) Richard M Russell
Dick Russell, April 2023
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