This is one of the Types of Poetry. A series of very short poems about....."The Red Robin". Types of Poetry
Un-named short series
by
Richard A. McCullough
Birds cross in glancing sweeps, their paths that search for trash in the sea swiftly glancing as a swarm of tiny gnats upon the surface of the water, ducking, darting drops of quivering black, fluttering nervously across the wet bed of the wind.
***
Rain across the window streaking, drunken arms of convex clear against the pane glass window where putty cracks against the pleasure of many nights frozen cold and watching the tippled bob of glasses raised in meeting, red lips steeped in laughing to be left in the drip of cracked foam, only to be raised and left in frothing laughter again.
***
There was nothing happening. The gnats just flickering about a clear glass liquid rolled reflection and a whiskered barman rolls a keg across the floor and the song goes on.
Playing fingers across someone's ass, conjecturing with titillative thumpings. She flicks fingers through her platinum hair, assuring herself of her loveliness and she is beautiful and the song goes on.
***
Tugs laden with heaps of rocks to sink its steel bows in the froth and edging out against the smear of coming lights he blows his horn.
***
And she with tintillative fingers is gone. I must dismiss her from out my keeping, to dismiss her to the arms of someone new.
Gallons, quarts and stubies, pitchers to wash such salted foam away. The blues. Joplin singing "Ball and Chain" and I just waiting for when the night will slip in mist-cloaked shoulder out through the fog to smother out the day, but the lights of shopkeeper's street clothe my humped sipping with their dottings of the blue.
***
A swelling whiteness, a Rainier truck whose attendant, leather apron dripping from the rain, brings us refills, hulked in cool aluminum dull, fresh foam to fill our heads with dreaming and to staggered wakeness repeated endlessly day and day.
***
I a traveler, not necessarily by choice, but by need or habit from place to place leaving in wake tall slender good looks, long hair clutched in thumb and forefinger and in tow all that which has passed, been before
and scribbling across bathroom walls on barroom tissues messages to those who must remain to live the repercussion of my passing, must stay to hear the waves of agonized ecstasy lap wood and sand.
I travel, though I may remain.
***
Barman fill my glass. The night has grown gray-black and I am afraid. Ask me not of what, for I cannot tell you. You are not slender enough.
Who is this stranger I wait for? Where is she, this unknown one I long to meet. Ask not for whom the bells toll. They toll for thee.
