Aching (CTG)

[Christopher T. George]

Aching

I reach the Metro train just as the doors close,
my hip throbs. Abandoned on the platform,
I remember these words by Leonard Cohen:

I ache in the places where I used to play.

Six decades on and still a poet! I mail
my mate Geoff a birthday card printed
with a melting cake with blazing candles.

Someone left the cake out in the rain.

-- Jimmy Webb's Sixties "Macarthur Park" as sung
by Richard Harris: the Irishman so cadaverous
in his last years, the old father in "The Field."

I ache in the places where I used to play.
Someone left the cake out in the rain.

Christopher T. George