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Chasing Coronary Demons

by Steve Gaines

for the better part of sixty-five years
(that’s a rounded off number of course…
more like sixty-three years and six months)
I’ve been chasing the coronary demons
the ones I’ve only recently caught up with
…about ten years ago actually
(another rounded off number…
but never mind the precise number)

for many years…I suppose you could say… I “abused” it
burgers and fires and hot fudge sundaes…
that sort of abuse!
and for the last ten…
I suppose you could say…I “over worked” it
marathons bicycle rides long distant walking…
that sort of work!

however you spell it
lately…things have begun to wear out in a serious way
joints and tendons
and those invisible vessels running over my heart

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The Lackey's Lament

by Steve Gaines

I never was a leading man…
in almost fifty years of acting
in my fondest dreams of course but never on stage
it was just something I never was
always the character part
occasionally stealing a scene here and there
…a shadow in the wings hanging on the next cue
but not the glitz and glitter…just the interesting pieces
second banana types
lackeys and spear carriers

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Working the Boards in Buffalo

by Steve Gaines

In a back street…looking for seven dollars
(one of life’s little theatricals…outside the proscenium)

in December of nineteen ninety-eight I was working the boards in Buffalo

the Studio Arena … Main and West Tupper
a long gray building adorned with large gold stars on its side
anchoring the northeast corner of the theatre district
playing a Polish bartender eight shows a week
just returned to the Muse back from my old day job
fresh from retirement out of academia
without wheels and walking to and from my apartment between shows
about a half a mile eighteen times a week back and forth in that western
New York weather
where I met up with a “woman of the streets” along Virginia Place
a street too narrow to allow a casual avoidance without turning back in
a panic
knowing I was about to be “approached” hoping to avoid it

“never show fear in the face of the confrontation”…I had learned that somewhere
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45th High School Reunion

by Steve Gaines

part I – The contemplation of an event

somehow, somewhere over the distant hill of time
four and a half decades have fallen off the calendar
forty-five years!
that cute crowd of nineteen fifty-four is about to resurface
painted in all the white hair, spreading waist lines, hip replacements,
tummy tucks
you name it, all the curios of aging worn like their new uniforms
a curious crowd of sixty something
relics celebrating the passage of time
about to come together to tell lies and remember a distant past that
never was

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A Twentieth Century Rag

by Steve Gaines

my grand father was a nineteenth century man
born…
as I recall…
sometime in the late seventies…
maybe early eighties
anyway…
by the turn of the century he was a young man

as a product of that “ancient time”
he might have been a cowboy
or a mountain man
…or a rough-rider
or almost anything
from my early movie moments

he wasn’t…

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