I learned this week that song lyrics I submitted to the 2018 Writer's Digest Writing Competition won "Honorable Mention" in its category ("rhyming poetry"). Honorable indeed!
Funny, the piece -- entitled "Most of the Lights" -- was written as per memories of a New York City of years ago. I coincidentally am reading Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Less, which piqued similar memories of the New York of the past: “ … The string of fetish stores whose window displays of rubberized equipment gave young Less terrors, the lesbian bars Less used to frequent on the theory he would have a better chance with the men there, the seedy bar where a friend once bought what he thought was cocaine and emerged from the bathroom announcing he had just snorted Smarties, the piano bars stalked, one summer, by what the New York Post inaccurately called 'the Karaoke Killer.' Gone, replaced by prettier things … Sometimes it seems only Arthur Less remembers how downright filthy this place used to be.” (--Andrew Sean Greer)
Arthur Less, and me. We remember.
Now and then I take my life in my hands... "Most of the Lights"
© 2018 Suzanne Mattaboni
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