Friday, March 5, 2010

The Talent

I've sealed myself away from love and ceased
To live with passion, hiding where once I wore
Cobalt silk and saffron, where once I stood
In hot white light and stayed up late to have
Martinis.  Eating mussels at the cool club with
The fashionista girls in full throated laughter
Heads thrown back, necks exposed, lips glistening red
We were the ones, the last of the smalltime superstars
In this cozy little world in the good times when money
Flowed like Champagne at midnight, and then one day
It flew apart, and one after another, life took us by the throat, the lovely
Pulsing throat, the long neck, exposed just when it all comes
crashing down, and one by one disappears to babies or booze,
One gets her PhD, another a divorce, one checks her bottom line
And makes a marriage deal worked out by lawyers in a conference room.
In agents terms we were the talent,
We seemed to have it all out there on the
Catwalk in the blinding light, bright women
With talent and brains and appetites flying
Smoking through the evening on the phone
As we drove to the next booking for a big
Show wielding a mascara brush in the dying light,
A flash of red lips and cobalt silk.
You see us in your rearview mirror gaining on you
As the sun sets just behind the island we flash by
We are laughing and oblivious to any danger
We lived on credit like the rest of you waiting
For the good times to return.
And then in resignation get on with living alone in a small house
Kept company, protected by three dogs
Existing only as a cyber link to an outer world I will never likely
Enter again with anything but words typed on a keyboard late at night
In anything but a naked face and beige at the grocery store or the bank

© 2010 Peggy Pendleton

8 comments:

jazzolog said...

As a reader of poems, I love this. As a person of compassion (approaching age 70 next week) I worry about the despair...but it's best to get it out, and you write so well!

I'm presuming you girls ate mussels, but this is a poem...and if it was men's muscles you devoured, I'm hip to the jive. However, Champaign is a town in Illinois.

Utah Savage said...

Thank you for saving me from my incredible stupidity. And despite having to proofread and correct my misspelling you're kind enough to remove the sting. Homonyms are my undoing.

Sorry I've neglected The Wolfshead. I've neglected everyone else as well.

Jenny said...

I listened to Bill Evans play My Foolish Heart while reading The Talent post. Rich visuals filled my mind and I could see you and your girls laughing then...

If change is a constant, is anything ever meant to just be?

In real life, is virtual life. Links are connections which allow me access to your world of stories. Oh my, I'm in love with the morning after. Thank you

Unknown said...

Such a great poem that it's left (even me)practically speechless.

Unknown said...

I'm just an echo of the previous comments...

somehow I don't think of you as not being 'outside' or closeted at all.
you are here a good bit with me...
i get it, how could I not 'get it'... like he said, u write well.

It is an emotionally pentimento poem Peggy. TY.

Utah Savage said...

I write late at night alone with myself and full of doubt and self-loathing, not sure I have what it takes to call myself a writer. I think no one reads poetry and yet the one site here that gets consistent visits is Savage Poetry which has more visitors than either short stories or the novel (down for rewriting a gain). Savage Poetry even has "followers." Maybe I WANT to be a novelist but maybe I'm a poet instead.

Utah Savage said...

Why does kindness make me cry? Why generosity, too? Are we all so insecure, so unsure of our worth, worthiness? Are we all so alone in the center of our being? Do we all feel grief in our isolation (even we who lie next to a person we love in the dark)?

Randal Graves said...

I'd love to write a novel, but poetry is where it's at, popularity of the medium be damned.

This was very cool, write more, or if you've written a bunch, post more.