What Rough Beast | Poem for September 26, 2019

Howard F. Stein
A Good Evening of Theater

Forget the lines—

The only thing
You need to know
About the play
Is whether to exit

Stage left
Or stage right.

Don’t wait for applause—
The audience has already
Long since left.

They wanted to make sure
They never heard you speak.

Howard F. Stein, is author most recently Light and Shadow (Doodle and Peck Publishing, 2018) and Centre and Circumference (Ori Academic Press, 2017). He is poet laureate of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology. He is professor emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, where he taught for nearly 35 years. He is a husband, and a father of one son, Zev, who is an outstanding drummer. His two cats, Luke and Leia, keep him almost constant company and are reputed to help him write poetry.

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