sport coat

[saw]

you wrote like sanity was just at the end
of the next sentence, like your investment
was blue fucking chip, a can't miss tip
from a bearded codger at the horse track
in a dirty beige trench coat that liked to whisper

psst, hey buddy come here... like your face
was a painting of a man with that
if-I-could-only-make-one-big-score look in his eyes
so you kept up the ruse, bought ballpoints every time
you went to the store, blue-lined tablets

to fill the pantry of your discontent with tools
instead of pork and beans, cous cous, tuna fish,
and you scribbled like an addict fumbling for scraps
of paper in the dark, and a blessing for bottomless ink wells,
you dreamed of black waterfalls to hide the black heel marks

from random shoes that dragged their feet, and if writing
were the Goddess of Repetition your faith was unrivaled,
you spent a lot of nights stumbling into confessionals
like a drunken orator with a pen instead of a pint of rye
in the inside pocket of your seersucker sport coat

[68degrees]

I still have my dad's herringbone sport coat. I don't know how old it is but I'm guessing mid-1960's. I wear it once a year just to say I did.

These lines:

"...a painting of a man with that
if-I-could-only-make-one-big-score look in his eyes…"

IS my dad. Great poem. Hit a nerve.

68degrees

[saw]

thanx 68, happy that it spoke to you......as an aside I began to wonder about the fabric,
"seersucker", ...an odd word I thought...so I looked it up....it comes from the Persian words, "sheer" and "shakar", and it's literal meaning is milk and sugar.....in Dr. Seuss's book, IF I Ran the Zoo, he mentions "a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker Too"....it's also mentioned in the Rolling Stone's song "West Coast Promo Man and in Tom Petty's, "Down South"

from the Petty song, " My jacket's gonna be cut and slim and checked. Maybe a touch of seersucker with an open neck"