Strange Positionings Poem by Max Reif

Years ago she broke up with me.
I wanted to be a hero and get her back,
even though she was hot
for our bearded, beatnik best friend
and I cruised by her place one night
to find the two of them getting out of her car,
and knew they were going upstairs to bed.

That was like a cup of acid on my heart.
A day or so later, I refused
to leave after a party a friend of hers had,
so that he'd call the cops
and they'd put me in jail.

The plain-clothesman who came told me,
'Look, we need to use our time
to find real criminals. You need to stop this
or I'll plant drugs on you
and send you up for 25 years! '

I stopped. Went to the country
to ease the pressure,
kept drifting West,
wound up living on the Coast.

I saw her a few times on visits back.
After a year or two, our bearded friend beat her up.
Since then she'd been mostly alone.
She kept putting on weight,
her thoughts were getting stranger
and stranger, remnants of '60s anger.
You could tell she didn't bathe much.
She lived in books, almost never went out.

Today I feel ashamed to call or be seen with her,
this person I once was willing to go to jail for.
The thought of her brings out some filth in me,
and I'd better start cleaning it,
or I may see scales tilting yet again!

I