Pep Boys

Well.
I've been reading lots of Billy Collins lately.
On the basis of that, here is an apology to anyone who reads this (come to think of it, this also goes out to Billy): the reading is prompting effusions of terrible poetry to come out of me.
more than I've written since--pause for document folder check--last November. None of which I actually posted here, I don't think.
anyway. That's what this blog is for now, a repository for somewhat terrible free verse.

On that note, here's more!
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Was it inordinately pretentious of me
to sit today in the Pep Boys waiting room,
reading Billy Collins while my oil was being changed?
Wearing aviator sunglasses, and a spring skirt?
I took the sunglasses off when I got inside. Does that
even a little, expiate the bringing of poetry to the auto-shop?
Because there was a quiet rattle of guilt in the back of my mind
like the background noise of the small flickering television
(playing the afternoon soaps and Bonnie Hunt’s talk show)
as I sat and read Nine Horses against the dramatic revelations
(from the soaps) and mechanized clangs and whirs (from the garage).
Yet, too, there was the way in which what I read—
the plainness of the words, the precision of the images—
meshed without a visible seam with the movements of the men behind the half-glass wall, with the up-and-down of two-ton trucks on humming hydraulic hoists.
How I knew the poetry and they knew the cars. How the elements of each were perhaps not so different
From what my initial embarrassment painted them to be.
Yet when the man who took my order poked his head around
and told me that my car was ready, and asked me how my book was,
I couldn’t help sliding it out of sight, and standing up so quickly that I tripped a little,
leaving the waiting room.