Candy

Light on the Walls of Life (Jambu Press)

Print Anthology - Ferlinghetti Tribute (April 2022)

I’d like to live upstairs from a candy store.

Over the years, I’ve read a few great poems
about life amid candy:
                                 Just this morning,
on my reluctant drive to work, I stopped
at the rest area and read all about how
Pinsky wakes up with his new love, looks down
at the sweetshop’s wrinkled awning, watches
an early fog lifting to reveal pigeons pecking
at rainbowed gutters;
                                and the venerable old
Ferlinghetti, ages and ages ago, wrote about
falling  in love with unreality amid licorice and
jellybeans on a gloomy September afternoon
in the pennycandystore beyond the El.
                                                       Decades
later, sometime in my early twenties, a baby
poet, I vowed that I’d pitch a tent outside
Munson’s Kandy Kitchen, and live on chocolate
and peanut butter eggs.
                                    I’m not so old, nor
blind, now, looking back, to see I should have
kept that vow.