Poetry by Dave Worrell

Andrea Merletti CC


last call
 
jodie’s wiping down
the bar and nothing’s
funny now
my bag’s still there
under the booth
nobody messed
with it this time
minutes to catch    the last chance 2:14 to camden
 
the train hangs off
the side of the bridge
gotta stop looking    down at the frozen river
 
plunge underground
narrow tracksquealing
twisting tunnel
signals fly past
red yellow green
searing light    city hall station leaps up out of darkness
 
hard bump stop
my raggedy bag
spills open wide
all my papers
fly wild across the aisle    under six rows of empty seats
 
cockroach scramble
across the floor
scoop up my shit
somebody’s yelling
hold the doors
but the motorman
doesn’t want to wait
the doors slam shut
the train speeds on    far into deep sleeping suburbs




Red Brick Row House, 4051 Spruce
                                                                        William J. Young (1946-1968)                                              
 
He had the ground floor railroad flat. The same cracked
sidewalk out front, cabbage weeds still thriving in crevices.
On the façade, a lone strand of ivy beginning to redden.
October fades as I peer through the window he once looked out from.
 
His Harley hit a concrete wall at a hundred. They say
he’d been working on that bike, removed the seat,
rode it standing up. By then the Army had me. I couldn’t
go to the funeral.
                                   I’d ridden behind him on that bike,
accelerating up the narrow ramp from Admiral Wilson
Boulevard, curving low left, howling manic onto 130 South,
a screeching stop in the White Castle lot.
                                                                                     When he was sixteen,
cirrhosis killed his father. All that summer, he stayed in the cellar
with Tolstoy and Nietzsche, taught himself Beethoven’s
Appassionata.
                             Two years later, playing Lizst afternoons
on the grand piano in Houston Hall, long hair flying
across his forehead, he always left with a woman.
One day it was Ruth, a nice Jewish girl who knew how
to calm him, but a year later he said he was choosing turbulence.
New and alive, his final letter said. At peace.

​

Bio: Dave Worrell’s chapbook “We Who Were Bound” was published in August 2012 by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. His ekphrastic collection “Close to Home” was published in 2015, featuring paintings by Catherine Kuzma. Dave’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slant, Canary, Shot Glass Journal, Referential Magazine, Wild River Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Exit 13 and elsewhere. He has performed his music-backed poems at Chris’ Jazz Café in Philadelphia and The Cornelia Street Café in New York.

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