Bill O’Connell is a past contributor to this blog. He is the author of the poetry collections When We Were All Still Alive and Sakonnet Point. His forthcoming book Tarifa Moon (Lost Valley Press) includes poems drawn from recent European travel along with family and neighborhood stories. He lives in central Massachusetts and is a graduate of U Mass Lowell.

Summertime Blues

by Bill O’Connell

There ain’t no cure

for the summertime blues

–Eddie Cochran

The eczema on my forearm migrates

from one arm to the other.

Stiff neck-chords shift

left to right nightly.

My body is fucking with me —

playing mind-games: guess

what will fail

next: one ear

half-deaf, sciatica

when I least expect it.

Then there’s the 24/7

news: trying to outwit

Trump with my

liberal mind — by the end of the day

I’m exhausted, put on

the Red Sox and hope on hope

a ball leaves the yard

with the crack of a bat

and soars above the light towers

and the crowd’s roar

into the dark-city nothing

between the Park

and the Mass Pike.