Sunday, June 9, 2019

Bart Solarczyk writes


Special Brownie, Special Friends
(for Scott Silsbe)

Time slows down this morning
fifteen minutes feels like forty-five
as I tingle & get lost
in what passes for thought

I bow your way Mr. Silsbe
my gift bearing buddy
from the east side of town

you travel, we talk
you bring kindness & good things
we celebrate
now I bring you this poem.
Split Lip Magazine 
Scott Silsbe

3 comments:

  1. Like Bart, Scott is a poet in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dave Newman said his poems "read like someone dropped Frank O'Hara into one of Pittsburgh's great dive bars and told him to sing like a jukebox playing folk songs and punk rock." For instance:

    What a Sad Christmas
    
    Christopher’s Bar is all full up and Liquor World is closed already.
    So I wander down the avenue looking for someplace to take me in,
    clutching a Brautigan in my coat in case I need some conversation.

    I used to keep a plastic cooler in the back of my beat-up old Volvo.
    Sometimes I’d put a case of beer on ice in there, sometimes a sixer
    and a nice bottle of bourbon. I like my bourbon with one lone rock.

    But I don’t have the Volvo anymore. Traded it for a book of poems
    and watched it ride off down the highway to the city of lost angels.
    I know it’s just “the city of angels”, but that’s not how I think of it.

    What does it matter? It doesn’t. I do get down like this sometimes.
    Only to remind myself how good I have it. I have my failing health.
    I have a little bit of money. I have the love of a woman on occasion.

    One night in Kalamazoo, I was just cruising and I stopped to knock
    on the door of a girl I knew through a writing class at the university.
    She used to write these fun stories about doing drugs at dance clubs.

    When she opened her door, I said, “Let’s go drinking and driving!”
    She laughed and said alright. We wound up at this Valentine diner
    up on M-140, just outside of South Haven, called Ma’s Coffee Pot.

    We didn’t even end up doing any drinking. Just had coffee and pie
    and talked a while. She was a good talker and she had a nice laugh.
    She made me feel less lonely. Even on the dark and quiet ride home.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Two of our best local poets in a town full of them. Bart, Scott and Pittsburgh.

    ReplyDelete

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