Draft 5: Always Space

[Thunderembargo]

I didn't think the draft I posted was ready for critique, so I had that thread deleted and am now reposting this poem. Sorry for any confusion.




We will leave for boba tea as they sing
U2's "With or Without You" on karaoke,
their echoes yielding to a choir
of croaking frogs and a petrichor
that will accompany us on our walk,
mindlessly whispering beneath the street
of a past life that kept us waiting indoors.

We'll be carried, in the streetlights,
by our laughter to a plaza
overgrown today with sticker weeds and thistle.

The stores now loom in vacancy, as one edifice
diffusing a silence that estranged us; yet that moment,
crystallized in rain and laughter, will remain
in that familiar darkness between two worlds
as it always has.

The pace and rhythm of this poem, in addition to the overwhelming flood of supporting and counter-supporting images tells a story that is both resolved by satisfying and imminently realistic and identifiable

Illuding to "With or Without You" so abruptly and obviously is one of the only places that I disagree with the poem, perhaps there is a way to allude to the song and the feelings of the song (which the poem is guided by and invoked by)

Something Like:
We will leave for boba tea as they sing

the lines, 
Through the storm we reach the shore
You give it all but I want more

then use the word karaoke

"their karaoke echoes yielding to a choir"

I've never had boba tea, but I would possibly like it, given your reference to the drink.