Poetry by C.T. Holte
Most nights, I am a jukebox.
Tunes play from the stash in my head—
doo-wop to Debussy,
Bach to Beach Boys—
chosen by a mysterious mechanism
and repeated as many times
as the system specifies:
no Next button,
no Mute switch,
no Off to let me sleep.
The selection varies:
last night, the top hit
was Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus,
reprise of a piece I had sung recently
at a choral workshop;
tonight, perhaps a favorite or two
from American Bandstand
or Casey Casem’s top forty countdown.
Music and memory are amazing gifts,
even at the price of sleep interrupted
by random hours of Deck the Halls
at any time of the year.
C. T. Holte grew up without color TV and played along creeks and in cornfields. He has been a teacher and editor, and now migrates between New Mexico and a tiny New Hampshire cabin. His poetry is found in Words, California Quarterly, Months to Years, Pensive, and elsewhere.
