Circa late summer 1983

After more than 5 years of writing poems/lyrics, I finally wrote one completely honest to my experience. This is almost certainly an entirely factual account of an experience I had on a Greyhound bus traveling between Boston and Pittsburgh in 1983. The only part missing, Prince's "Little Red Corvette," was addressed with that Day 51 Pandemic Panoply blog of Prince. The interesting thing is that I had forgotten about this poem, with its fidelity to what happened, when I wrote that blog about "Little Red Corvette."

"Turned Off And Away"

The middle-age post-vacation blahs

On a greyhound express.

As strangers we never paused,

But turmoil and distress

Flung us together.

Caged with each other for an eternity,

Time gave into lust.

A mouth-to-mouth, hand-to-knee,

And blowing in ears hoping that

Just might obscure forever.

But, that was all she wrote.

I may have had my heart in my throat,

But when daylight came

And then the Pennsylvania rain,

I turned off and away.

Like so many men before, I tossed you away,

But you should not care.

Bus trips have been known to throw together castaways,

Drop one off here

And send the other down the road.

The basic human emotion

Loves to raise its ugly head

And the seemingly magic potion

Now lies inside dead

And turns lovers cold.

But, that was all she wrote.

I may have had my heart in my throat,

But when daylight came

And then the Pennyslvania rain,

I turned off and away.

So now we can look back and think with a smile,

Knowing that we flirted in the dark but emerged in style

And still the same.

We had played the game of the sexes and we both competed.

Downcast eyes over breakfast, as we both know it was needed

And no one gets the blame.

But, that was all she wrote.

I may have had my heart in my throat,

But when daylight came

And then the Pennsylvania rain,

I turned off and away.