Top of the Line

A poem about attraction and social chaos that imagines return not as comfort but as a dangerous pull back toward everything unfinished.

The speaker cannot hold the old star grace, the men's provisional convict mentality and the waiting kids in one vision. People who left return to the same spot, while kisses go toward the nearer Moon or the explosive Sun. The handwritten swinging question has an arrow to its question mark and no insertion point; it remains an editorial note outside the poem body. The oversized correction through typed convect still needs word-level follow-up.

'Top of the Line' opens by telling 'Love' that 'I can not put it all together / Together that is at the same time', then lists the vision it cannot hold: 'The old star grace of the girls;', 'the new convict mentality of the men', kids 'waiting wide for anything', and all who left 'coming back to the same spot'. It calls this 'a dream that will / take you away' and closes on a split: 'Some kiss the Moon cause it's closer / others kiss the Sun cause it's explosive'.

The poem is a catalogue that admits it cannot cohere, and the repeated 'Together' across the line break enacts the strain of holding everything at once. It moves from a social panorama of girls, men and children to a closing couplet in which nearness and danger become two kinds of desire. The handwritten 'others' in place of a second 'Some' sharpens that final opposition.