Column: Wasted Words; Love and lousy verse

She started reading from her notebook but stopped rather abruptly.? “I don’t want to read this one,” she said.? And while I can’t say for sure, there was probably a moment of relief on his side of the table in that small café.? “OK,” she said as if he had begged her to carry on, “I’ll read it.”? I stared blankly at a story in the City Weekly about the abuses a group of trailer park communities had suffered at the hands of some money-hungry real estate agents. Leftist literature is just as obnoxious as its right-winged counterpart.

I leaned forward on the sofa and tried to listen in.? “Like leeches, they suck me dry. I want to die. The sky,” she paused to emphasize the rhyme, “is falling down around me.”? Her date glanced at me quickly with a “Pardon me, but do you have a gun” sort of look. If I had, I would have shot myself way before she got to her second stanza. Despite his pain, he sat and listened to the rest of the poem – and then two more, both equally as bad.? “Wow. Did you get dumped just before writing those?” he asked halfheartedly.? “No.” She laughed, oblivious to his disinterest. “I don’t have any of my really angry ones with me tonight. Sometimes, I just write and I have no idea what it means. And then, like, two weeks later, I’ll read what I wrote and it will just, like, make sense to me.”? “Maybe I haven’t given this poetry thing a fair shake. Your stuff is really good.”? My friend was sitting next to me at the time and had reached his breaking point, saying he wanted to go outside and smoke a cigarette. I followed him.

Outside, just to the left of the coffee shop door, a homeless man with a guitar and a case of Keystone had cornered some poor woman drinking a latte.

“Don’t look him in the eye,” my friend, turning his back. “He’ll play you a song for a quarter, but he won’t stop. They’re pretty epic tunes.”

The man started strumming on his worn instrument and soft sounds filled the air for several minutes.? “I wrote that one for Elizabeth Smart,” he said when he had finished.? The door to the café opened. The amateur poet and her disinterested date walked outside and he put his arm around her. For him, as bad as her poetry was, it was better than being alone and I suppose I have to respect that.? My friend dragged on his cigarette one last time and flicked it to the ground.? “Let’s go,” he said.? The homeless man was still talking to his one paying customer when we walked past.? “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of something called peyote,” he said, his voice trailing off as we walked further away.

As I made my way down that Salt Lake City block, I felt alone. The dark gray clouds shuddered overhead and a cool rain started to come down. I thought about the poet and her date, and for a second I thought that maybe the sky – I paused to emphasize the rhyme – was falling down around me.

Aaron Falk is a senior in print journalism. Send any comments or questions to

acf@cc.usu.edu