STILL GROWING
Poems
by
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A BIRD IN A GILDED CAGE In a shapeless housecoat Her hair an enormous tangle Teeth blacked out with wax Head to one side Grinning grotesquely Mother entertains With a lachrymose ballad of another age: "She's only a bird in a gilded cage A beautiful sight to see ..." That's the joke: Singing of beauty Feigning ugliness. I dread her disappearing into the bedroom To prepare her masquerade: Don't do it Don't let us off the hook of your beauty. 32ND W. OF BROADWAY I rush to Penn To catch the last off-peak train. Under sidewalk scaffolding A beggar Crouches Pushing a sign at us His face Monstrously deformed Like putty smeared. GEE, OFFICER I'm riding the Shuttle Grand Central to Times Square A Transit Police Officer boards, My glance runs up his veiny right arm Across his chest To his name plate On his left side Over his heart, It reads: "H-A-T-R-E-D." I raise my eyes to his face, He turns away.
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About the Book
EPIGRAPH: In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told. --Meghan Daum I chose the epigraph above because no matter how thoroughly and completely I try to communicate with my readers through my poems, inevitably the "whole story" doesn't get told. Not only would others involved in the poems have their own takes on the episodes, my own take is limited to my perceptions at the moment when I wrote the poem and then submitted it for publication. Even now as I look back on some of my early work, I see how I would write from a different perspective if I were to write about the same episode now. So, the epigraph is neither a boast nor a complaint. It's a statement of fact. The subjects of most of my poems are drawn from the incidents and episodes of my life. The poems are arranged in five sections chronologically according to the period of my life they refer to. The sections are labelled according to where I was living at the time. Thus, Pennsylvania where I grew up and went to college, Kansas where I went to graduate school, Long Island I where I moved after I'd completed my course work and got a full-time teaching position, Manhattan where I lived in the 1980s, and finally Long Island II which I moved back to in 1991 and where I reside today.
About the Author
Raised in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, FRANK KELLY was educated there at St. Rose School, at the University of Scranton (B.A., 1967) and the University of Kansas (M.A., English, 1969; Ph.D., Theater and Drama, 1978). The Department of English and Humanities at Farmingdale State College, on Long Island, was his professional home for thirty-three years. Frank’s first book was Growing Up Me: A Memoir in Poems, published by Xlibris in 2012. Still Growing, a sequel of sorts, was published in May 2016. Frank has collaborated on three stage musicals: The Texas Chainsaw Musical, Xmas! The Expose! and Pageant. The most recent New York City production of the latter ran off-Broadway in 2014 and was recorded by Jay Records. Pageant has played all over the world including London’s West End, Australia, Japan, and throughout the United States. The script is available from Samuel French, Inc.