Platonic Love
I am easily distracted, which is a poet thing. The other night I was reading my iPad while sitting next to a fire pit in an outdoor seating area at a restaurant/bar and a roving gang of woman asked if they could sit with me. They were co-workers spending the weekend together in an Airbnb, out to do some drinking and pizza eating. I fell into an animated conversation with one. In the meantime, my significant other had found a table inside, where the blues band was playing. I like blues music. She doesn't, but she loves me. This was the only available table inside, where the band was. She held fast to the table, but there was a window next to the table, looking out on the courtyard, where in the firelight I was engaged in animated conversation with a gang of roving women, while my significant other was chained to the table, chained to the table by her love for me. She knew how much I wanted to hear that blues band perform. Later, much later, we could laugh about it, how she was like the characters in "The Republic," chained in a cave, watching the firelight casting shadows on the cave wall, and thinking the shadows were real, that the shadows mattered.
Harold Bowes is the author of Detached Palace Garden (Ravenna Press, 2017). Harold’s poems have appeared in elimae, THRUSH Poetry Journal, alice blue, SOFTBLOW, Portland Review, and others.