Slow Dance Music

Loving the rhythm and flow of this poem. It's like eavesdropping on a conversation between friends. It's like taking a glimpse into the mind of a stranger. It is at once intimate and intrusive, arresting and free. Loving it!

Thanks to Not that Anyone Deserves Anything for sharing.

Slow Dance Music
BY Tom C. Hunley

I can't explain the rain's attraction to my head,
though I'm touched by its will to touch me,
and I don't understand how I got here any more
than a lobster understands how it ended up in a tank
next to a Please wait to be seated sign,
but both of us can read the faces of the cruelly beautiful
women pointing at us.

I always feel eyes on me so
I apologize to insects after I kill them
and to the salmon on my plate, caught being
nostalgic for home. Everything makes sense if
you squint just right, and at least once a day
I realize that whatever I've been saying
isn't the point at all.

Like yesterday, I heard myself
say "Nostalgia" comes from Greek roots meaning
"painful return," which is why your childhood
home is paved over, a bump in the commuter
path of your old classmates, the ones who have
never gone anywhere.

And so instead of leaning
in for a kiss, I give my beautiful wife the umpire's
signal for "safe." And when I say "I love you"
she becomes red-faced, hits me with the back
of her fists, and calls the cops,
because those words no longer mean what they once did.