Skipping Browning, for now.

It seemed a fitting time to finish
the anthology of poems that had been haunting
my night stand and lunch breaks for months.
Towards the end it finally became
what it should've been all along
but then again I'm biased
and no fan of romanticism.
People made fun of me for never
taking the clear dust jacket off;
not "people", but a person.
I've shrugged off bigger criticisms
mostly from reflections.
As if in search of one last gem
I flipped back through its contents tonight
making sure to check the first few pages
for some possible dedication in a script too perfect
to be recent. No such luck, though I found its source.
The library rental card secured
inside the front cover revealed
that it had only been borrowed nine times
in its fifteen-year term at
the Julia L. Butterfield Memorial Library in Cold Spring.
It seemed a waste, though for a reason different
from the one that led some liberal librarian
to donate it to the thrift store where I bought it
for a quarter: this was another kind of shame.
Nothing worse than waste, be it of space
or an idea. There was one particularly poignant ditty
at the end about a woman who kept the pocket-dulled
ring from her failed marriage on her keychain as a reminder
of what love is not--
it should have been the last poem
of that 524-page abortion.