"Provincetown, off-season"

Here's a poem I wrote last week while Tracey and I were traveling around southern New England. I wrote a couple others, but this was the best of the bunch.


"Provincetown, off-season"

A far piece to get here,
through villages nigh smug
in their quaintness, and then a stretch
of shuttered family resorts and lifeless restaurants.
Any deeper into the fall-- God forbid
one come in winter!-- and everything here
would be locked up, too, but we made it
just in time
to be only slightly disappointed.

Were we the shopping sort, the town would
reek of pointlessness;
but as we are not,
the glow of lamps in people's homes, the
thoughtless curvature of the streets,
lights on the Pilgrim Monument, and
the taste of a pocketed Narragansett tallboy
all go hand in hand
with the creeping air of desolation
and the click of drag queens' heels on the pavement.



(written 21-22 October 2014, edited 27 October 2014)