If you're feeling it, in Forest Hills

If you're feeling it, in Forest Hills
many men here, handsome, as some say next to ryes
on thick industrial stools, the rounded shapes of picks,
from Mt. Airy.

I had come under the impression that only my presence, see, from my pal,
of many flightless yrs, was needed.

Here, next door to the cold slope of the river, do the young bucks clamor
the din of gentrification, some say, betterment,
or say, here come less Irish, the transplants here in my home city
home city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I was on Girard & Palmer between the two dark halves, and asked this man,
also dark, ethnic, from Queens, Forest Hills, for a cigarette
both of us lost to some degree,
he, waiting for his girl
I, waiting for my own self to make my quiet way into the draft house,
nodding, a sustained smile, to the two girls,
and two angels from the mountains north-west of here.

She suggested to me that I include artwork w/ my writing
(she was so kind as to engage me momentarily, a distraction, much needed
from the love doves

at my side, between us was a pink man
I had mistaken from afar, a Reds uniform for a Phillies
and would go the rest of the evening never bringing up sports again,
just nodding

John from S Philly who had lived most of his life there, w/ his mother,
next to royal, and was in the computer programming business before it overtook him,
passed him by, didn't have a last name that rhymed
unlike mine,
                 and sidestepped telling me
                                                        "doesn't rhyme, it doesn't rhyme"

A kiss, it is now April.

The most playful of months,
who should for reasons unknown
to me, not smoke.

John had gotten into a bicycle
accident and was really going
to feel it in the morning.