A Game of Marbles (standard:poetry, 160 words)
Author: kendall thomas	Added: Dec 13 2002	Views/Reads: 3101/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A man wanders through a city at night.

A GAME OF MARBLES 

By Jack Straw 

. 

I walk alone in the night, 

looking for my Alma 

beneath the neon lights. 

I bum a light. 

I stop to scribble poems on table tops 

and drink coffee. 

I stare for hours in plate-glass windows 

watching ghosts go by. 

I am ubiquitous. 

I am a part of everywhere I've been. 

My greatest works are on subway walls, 

in halls, on trash cans or scrawled on wasted flyleaves, 

litterings on the decaying floors of vacant houses 

that I have slept in. 

I watch the splashing cars 

and the old unsearched for, 

the forgotten people 

through with life, 

abandoned, 

with borrowed shopping carts, 

standing in the rain, 

this way and that, 

looking unfound. 

How does one decide 

which way to go, 

the certain path? 

I light another cigarette 

and watch the smoke 

remembering a silver shooter 

that knocked a marble out of a circle 

many years ago. . . 

and led me here. 


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