Terry McCarty

The Ballad of Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal 

she made records he made movies  

she was an old soul when it came to business 

but young enough to still believe in love 

as something that mattered more than 

mere material for song lyrics 

but he was ten years older and steeped

in the ways of the world as he saw it 

when the breakup came,

he apparently said something about 

how the age difference made a difference 

so therefore he was okay with leaving 

she felt like a crushed pomegranate 

then turned heartbreak 

into no ordinary end of relationship song 

singing for ten minutes on SNL 

with audible grief of youth 

still present in the thirtyish woman 

telling fans not to walk down this particular path 

if you don’t yet have self awareness

especially don’t give yourself to a man 

who may regard you as no more than a mere trifle

 

Remembering a September Poem

In 1997, I wrote one of my earliest poems

There was an attempt at a conceptual metaphor

Regarding September’s continuation of summer weather

And how sobering it was to see an empty swimming pool

That was the 38-year-old me wondering if joy would return

The following spring, I phoned someone who I met online

Once I arrived at her house, there was no further need to write 

Despairing poems about pools without water in El Monte

Singing Top Forty on the School Bus

seventh graders in unison

doing a rendition of American Pie

loud and pretty much in tune

but no interpretive skills to be found

since young folks born in 1958 and 1959

weren’t aware of regret and good old days

but they knew more about those subjects

when the ten year reunion arrived in 1987