Flyer for Joy Street
from issue Number 3, July 2010
by Stephen Sturgeon

This self-indulgence has not left me.
Normal relations seem mild.

i

Ride on the T all day for three days
reading the seminarian’s guidebook
Cultural Affairs in Boston.

People start to wonder what’s
really going on. “Do I belong here”
they think at the Maverick station

“I just want to see the octopus
at the New England Aquarium.”

ii

John Wieners kept an octopus.
He had it in his piano.

The one way he could sleep
was by listening to his persuasion

tying it trapped. String by string
the music snapped and the joints

that latched the words together.
“There goes another sinister”

from the train you’ll see the hospital
“solitudinarian faceless past me.”

iii

How like the color of magazines
his hair. The advert glaze and wet-thumbed ink.
Now on every fence spike, a strand,
on each gas slick in the Charles and the fingers
of unrepeatable people. You trade handshakes.
They disappear.

iv

Professionally in the bulrushes a violin sounds Auld Lang Syne,
Kidnap requests spin across the dial of AM radio
But for friends enough and hotels any poem is obtainable
The night stops with the questions what is left and who has it

Back to the Table of Contents for Number 3

About the Author
Stephen Sturgeon's first collection of poems, Trees of the Twentieth Century, will be published by Dark Sky Books. He is the editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.