People are saying…
Order lots of poetry from Lavender Ink and especially my book.
“Jeff Grieneisen’s poems are the real deal.”
Antonio Vallone, Penn state university
“Jeff Grieneisen is intimate and intense in his poems”
Roxana Preda, University of Edinburgh
“He shows us where words “lead to the earth.” That’s a great gift in a book of poetry.”
Nicholas Samaras, hands of the saddlemaker
Midway
We should die
before we can feel
our child
torn from his lover,
she running her hand along his chest,
he winning her a stuffed tiger
at the fair.
They will outgrow this
and learn to hate each other’s slurps,
crunches of toast,
the infinite future lost
to the reality of pushing a stroller
along a highway.
Forever is not a long time
but a temporary idea
in the annual, small-town fair,
kids spinning in tilt-a-whirls
or shuffling hand in hand through the junk
of novelty t-shirts or long feathers on roach clips,
eating greasy fries and hot sausages
and deep-fried things.
Once grown, they will go to work,
one-day-a-week off,
maybe a week’s vacation.
Until then, we know them
by the angle their heads make,
tilted toward one another,
making a peak, head-to-head,
as if tomorrow will never come.
They love as if love is all they need.
They could fall asleep right here.
Now.
Forever.
Lost in one another.
We’ve all been there,
felt like the next moment
doesn’t exist—will never occur
because we have this. Now.
But we need to pay rent, car insurance,
and when the fair comes to a close,
we pull our fingers apart,
take our hand out of our lover’s back pocket,
forget the barker’s call,
and rejoin the world.
FreeWrites 