<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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San Francisco, On the F-Train<\/strong><\/p>\n He was a poet and when he saw something really interesting he made notes in a little black notebook.\u00a0 He noticed a young girl in careless hipster clothing scrunched up on the front bench of the antique Milano streetcar.\u00a0 She had a distant look in her eyes, he thought, a blank helpless Rhesus Monkey kind of look.\u00a0 The world around her, the poet imagined, had become a cage that blocked her every move, so that she lived in ever-smaller circles of distress and boredom.\u00a0 He envisioned her numb at work, distracted on the street,\u00a0bored in the grocery and,\u00a0 of course, her lonely nights.\u00a0 When she stood up to get off the train she smiled at him, a friendly unselfconscious smile, then glanced down at the platform carefully.\u00a0 The door opened, she stepped off, and was gone.\u00a0 The train pulled away, its bell ringing, and he took out his notebook as he watched her crossing over Market Street.<\/p>\n darkened ships really this kind of romance she gets off the train <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Charles D Tarlton<\/strong> is a retired university professor living and writing in Northampton, Massachusetts with his wife Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" San Francisco, On the F-Train He was a poet and when he saw something really interesting he made notes in a little black notebook.\u00a0 He noticed a young girl in careless hipster clothing scrunched up on the front bench of the antique Milano streetcar.\u00a0 She had a distant look in her eyes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15264,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15263\/revisions\/15264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\npassing on the sea unseen
\nhe thinks to espy
\nshe barely notices out
\nthe corner of her eye<\/p>\n
\nimagines assignations
\non the sly, cheaply
\narranged.\u00a0 The fantasy guy
\nthe dreamer up on the roof<\/p>\n
\nand walks the block to her flat
\nwhere she\u2019s living with
\na dog and a cockatoo
\nwho stutters and only speaks Greek<\/p>\n