Probation Poem 10-17-17….Kissing
I lean against the wall
inside the probation office.
Joint is packed.
Reprobates are jacked.
I read Walt Whitman
at random,
waiting for a form
to set me free.
It’s come to that:
a form for freedom
in a democracy.
Can you believe
they want it in longhand?
I look to my right:
Two couples
make out
before their
meetings and UAs,
wearing her Pink sweatpants,
his black hoodies,
both clutching phones.
Nothing surprises
me in here,
not the sparkled jeans
nor the man reading Macbeth,
not the dog food coupons,
nor the reek of fish.
Okay, this making out does,
these two couples!
It’s like that poem,
“Kissing,” by Dorianne Luax.
Kissing is sometimes
all we have
to stave off extinction,
to undermine Stalin,
to hang from
a thread over the abyss.
Laux writes:
They are kissing
to begin the world again. Nothing
can stop them…
they are doing what they have to do
to survive the worst
It’s the one human act
they can’t take from us.
Even in here:
florescent lights,
plastic chairs,
gray carpet.
It’s an act of
secret rebellion,
or smack dab
in the open,
face to face,
in our faceless times,
not a reckoning,
but a puckering.
I read another line from Walt.
Walt writes a lot about kissing
but never uses the word.
I watch the couples,
the two women
angled toward me,
their eyes are closed.
One has her feet,
out of flip flops.
She is barefoot
and kissing
in the probation office,
and I am no poet
if I don’t write
a poem with that image.
Because it is
a unique image
in the annals
of American literature
and I will take that.
It’s free.
It might even set me free.
A woman emerges
from behind the glass,
long blonde hair,
on taxpayer’s time.
She looks at me,
smiles, turns my way.
We knew each other,
in my other life.
We almost dated.
We would have kissed.
She asks me
how I’m doing.
I show her the cover
of Leaves of Grass,
she nods,
and walks out the door.
One couple has stopped
making out.
The other has not.
I return to Walt.
He’s in love with
democracy now.
No American poet
writes about a love for
democracy anymore.
But more kissing
might help us survive it.
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