Poem for the night

I had a really fun night out with last weekend, and this week I've been editing a poem that I wrote about that night.

Good Old Men

“He looks like my grandpa,” you said

at Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.

Floating in the watery jazz,

I imagined a sunbrowned boy under Philippine sun,

the trumpet player before us speaking something

soothingly, as good old men do, in tagalog.

“I’m 22.” “You’re so young!”

And I suppose that makes you an old man.

I don’t know many old men. My grandfather,

a shoemaker, his back hurts from bending

over the shapes of other people’s feet.

There was also something said

about paper boats and that they were empty, but

with the night so full it’s incidental.

You joke about wanting to fuck me.

The siren before us has just married a man named Brett:

What an American name, how American.

For Brett is a name which celebrates itself,

announcing in a maleness like the light

glancing off the trumpet as it solos –

Brett is a man, and he is here.