Prufrock thought that he was missing something
and made the yearning into one great drama,
a galaxy of many a shiny crumb
filling up our telescopes to sing
the music of the spheres of something wrong.
Prufrock was stalled, but how he played his theme!
He ran an orchestra on what he lacked!
Imagine! To say that every day I walked
in public with a fat ripe peach about
Brighton beach, weighing gain and hurt,
making it a thing of such import,
the question being should I eat or not,
Dantean ghosts converged for the debate
and angels hung on learning if I ate!
John Milbury-Steen's work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Beloit Poetry Journal, Blue Unicorn, The Centrifugal Eye, Chimaera, Dark Horse, Kayak, Hellas, The Listening Eye, The Deronda Review (Neovictorian/Cochlea), The Piedmont Literary Review, Scholia Satyrica, Shenandoah, Shattercolors, and Shit Creek Review. He served in the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa; earned a Master's in Creative Writing with Ruth Stone at Indiana University; worked as an artificial intelligence programmer in Computer Based Education at the University of Delaware; and currently teaches English as a Second Language at Temple University.
