There’s something alluring about description. It allows you to see a scene and experience it, imbibe something of its truth. Maybe all poems should aspire to be descriptive more than anything else. I was just out at a place where there’re lots of nightspots. So here’s an attempt to capture something of the place’s atmosphere. Write about a place. Bring us there and then if you could, try and transcend by bringing us some place beyond it.
I pondered on human deficiencies.
Then all that gaiety–surely
the need to be spontaneous, to hang out
drinking cocktails. On the sidewalk
the musicians played while above the trees
a capsule swung high and low,
a body strapped within.
Girls in heels and low necked dresses.
Men smoking hookah. A tonal quality
came with smoke and a shimmering
belly-dancer. Nothing’s off the mark.
We met with Rodney who was drinking
at Crazy Elephant. The smudgy past,
always there behind the ears.
And then I thought of the Chinamen
carved on lapis lazuli. They asked for
mournful melodies, Yeats wrote.
If I could only look into your eyes,
what would I see? Look lightly,
look askance, and acute, and I’d have
something to write home about.
Red Wolf Poems 
I wrote one…
http://northernwall.blogspot.com/2016/06/waiting-for-berry-pie-prompt-157.html
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Irene, especially love the line
” the smudgy past, always there behind the ears”
so evocative–immediately, images of nightspots I’ve known and who was there with me, carrying our smudgy pasts. Maybe this is the quality that makes me love a poem, makes it stick with me for a long time–this vivid description of a specific place or time, combined with enough room for me to transform it into a place or time that’s specific to me–personal . Oh, who knows–but it’s a lovely line
Thank you 🙂