By Christopher T. Keaveney
Neither Beethoven deaf nor Milton
blind
I wander home a quarter drunk
cradling the bottle and the sheaf
of rejected manuscripts
and the violin sans case
scored at a pawnshop.
I imagine that I cut a fine figure,
small-town hero despite myself
pausing just long enough
for double dutch in the abandoned playground,
my own memories of school recess on the playground
rusted and incarnadine,
feigning the skinned knees
of duplicity
while hankering for the echo
that comes back louder than the original shout,
a painful reminder that impulse buying
almost never works out as planned.
About the Author:
Christopher T. Keaveney is a faculty member in the Global Liberal Arts Program at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. His poetry has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Columbia Review, Cardiff Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Stolen Island, Faultline and elsewhere. He is the author of the collections Your Eureka Not Mined (Broadstone Books, 2017) and The Boy Who Ate Nothing But Sonnets (Clare Songbirds Press, 2019).