KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Thomas Pescatore
17 minutes from here
I'm cleaning up
draft poems
that are half poems,
stilted thoughts,
unrealized musings,
most are shit, believe
me,
I'm up here
trying out words,
rewriting rhymes
until there aren't any
left,
and it's a bonus
if they make no god damn
sense.
Buy me a house on the mainline
Morning kisses
on the work line
saddest kisses
watch lovers go
to waste and soften
8 more hours closer to death
sunken eyes
hollow faces
remember when they
walked in fields together
looking up and pointing
at clouds?
they don't look up anymore
just down
at feet and
crumbling sidewalks
white lines
for crossing streets
blinking men
made of white lights
and orange hands
dance to the music of
roving cars
trapped in city frame,
8x5 times 50 years
dragging nothing
but memories
of white walls and
should-have-beens
and longing
to the grave.
Heaven means
There is a secret
stair in my grandfather's
closet one tucked away
behind his clothes
I think maybe he didn't
even know about it,
mainly, because it seems
accessible only in dreams.
I walk up those
steps some nights, having
parted his slacks and
jackets, air getting thin,
sight diminishing,
brain suffocating,
but I never make it
to the top.
I believe it leads
to the roof, or
some other equally
magical place.
Tom Pescatore can sometimes be seen wandering along the Walt Whitman bridge or down the sidewalks of Philadelphia's old Skid Row. He might have left a poem or two behind to mark his trail. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com.