by Pino Coluccio

I live on a dead-end street.
After ten o'clock
nobody who's still awake
takes a walk.

The stars above my porch
aren't the sparks on charred cloth
you get on camping trips.
Streetlights draw the moth.

But still it's dark enough that soon
I listen more than look.
Crickets in the bristly
grasses tick.

Air conditioners hum in yards
and cars coasting by
sound like surf.
A jumbo scrapes the sky.

You never really notice what
you are until, like a star
a galaxy away,
it's only what you were

and now it's gone. Each day
makes a bigger gap
between the man's world
and boy's map.

But will be will be were.
Regrets are emotional slumming.
What you are you've always
been becoming.

Lager leaving a bottle glugs,
fizzes as I fill
my glass. Killing time
it's me myself I kill.

Caught between the day ahead,
the one behind,
couples snuff the news and slope
to bed, though disinclined.


Pino Coluccio, a former adult film star, placed fourth in last year's Molson Indy and currently runs a modelling agency. His first collection of poems, the subject of one those prolonged and ridiculously flattering Canadian small press bidding wars, is forthcoming with the Mansfield Press in spring, 2005. He lives with his wife and six children in Trono's east end. Its extreme east end. OK, Scarborough.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada.