Karen Cline-Tardiff

Friday Night

I’m gonna smoke all your cigarettes,

Make you go crazy trying to

figure out if I’m really that girl

in the album liner notes

of your favorite band.

You pour your beer in the trash,

refuse to drink the backwash.

But hell, it’s Friday night and

there’s more than leftover beer

in your future and mine.

We think about fooling around,

but the couch is full

of passed out hippies and

covered in cigarette burns,

and shit, it isn’t even our house.

I bum your last smoke

but your lighter is dead.

Kinda like tonight you joke

and I give you a pity laugh.

Karen Cline-Tardiff has been writing as long as she could hold a pen. Her works have appeared in several anthologies and journals, both online and in print. She founded the Aransas County Poetry Society. She has a Kindle book of poetry, Stumbling to Breathe. She is Editor-in-Chief of Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

Comments

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from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

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