Evening alone

by Craig Kirchner

It was a third-floor apartment,

with patio doors off the living room

to a porch looking out onto a 4-lane,

busy with traffic, Moravia Road.

Evening’s gray was giving an edge,

to the exiting orange-glow of the day

that was leaving through those doors,

at about the same pace the Sunshine Acid

I’d put on my tongue a half hour ago,

was coming-on.

In harmony with this transition

I left the lights off, a bit anxious,

synapses popping behind wet eyes, 

that when the total dark of night

controlled the room I would be

peaking in its grasp.

This tic was replaced by

a dawning sense of warm euphoria

as the room settled into a soft humid glow

and Eleanor Rigby’s scraping bows of violins

were totally liquid within me.

I was as alone with its pulsing,

as Father Mackenzie

and the other lonely people.

The darkness, now part of my psyche,

gave a nocturnal life to the walls,

blooming with energy,

textured like fog—

even the nap of my flannel pants

was quivering with a warmth,

and life of its own.

I opened the curtains,

as the beige street globes came on,

adding color and definition

to the traffic that flowed

down roads connecting

the parking lot below, to the planet,

trailers of headlights branching out

in all directions to everything.

Turning back to the sofa

I felt a squash under foot,

as the large-leafed fern

let out a howl of psychedelic mishap,

bleeding green ooze under my now heavy,

traumatized Cole Haan suedes.

Craig Kirchner is retired and thinks of poetry as hobo art. He loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen.

He has had two poems nominated for the Pushcart, and has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. He houses 500 books in his office and about 400 poems in a folder on a laptop. These words tend to keep him straight.

After a writing hiatus he was recently published in Poetry Quarterly, Decadent Review, New World Writing, Neologism, The Light Ekphrastic, Unlikely Stories, Wild Violet, Last Stanza, Unbroken, W-Poesis, The Globe Review, Skinny, Your Impossible Voice, Fairfield Scribes, Spillwords, WitCraft, Bombfire, Ink in Thirds, Ginosko, Last Leaves, Literary Heist, Blotter, Quail Bell , Ariel Chart, Lit Shark, Gas, Teach-Write, and has work forthcoming in Cape, Scars, Yellow Mama, Rundelania, Flora Fiction, Young Ravens, Loud Coffee Press, Versification, Vine Leaf Press, Edge of Humanity and the Journal of Expressive Writing.